Dilbert removed from over seventy newspapers | Hacker News Reader

Dilbert removed from over seventy newspapers

foxnews.com

17 pointsrmason29 comments

> In recent years, Adams has poked fun at themes related to the workplace, most recently Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) issues and the introduction of a new character named "Dave," who is Black but identifies as White.

Scott Adams has become very political (perhaps he always was). With that he's managed to alienate a subset of his customers, myself included.

This may or may not have been related to the removal from the newspapers (Fox News wants to suggest it was).

His choices come with monetary consequences.

Headline makes it seem like Dilbert was the cause. Article is also misleading: Adams states "why they decided what was in and what was out, that's not known to anybody except them, I guess"

Except they already announced the reasoning. Lee Enterprises is losing money on print, transitioning to alternative digital formats, and they're reducing costs across the board, including removing all non-Andrews McMeel syndicated cartoons:

- https://www.dailycartoonist.com/index.php/2022/09/11/lee-pap...

- https://finance.yahoo.com/news/lee-enterprises-reports-third...

- https://www.bizarro.com/blog/2022/9/16/has-bizarro-been-canc...

Not a mystery, and not a Dilbert specific thing.

The headline here made me think that a particular Dilbert strip had been removed from papers due to being offensive or some such.

All comics have their day I suppose. I have enjoyed Dilbert sometimes. I think that the real story here is that newspaper comics are a dying breed as it is. I have fond memories of reading the funnies at my kitchen table before school. But I rarely dip into even webcomics anymore.

This headline is provocatively worded by Fox to imply censorship. A bunch of strips have been canned, not just dilbert.

I'd be more concerned about BC and the wizard of Id

These headlines don't imply censorship. They're consistent with it, but they're also consistent with budget cutting:

HN: Dilbert removed from over seventy newspapers

Fox: 'Dilbert' author Scott Adams says comic strip about corporate office culture removed from 77 newspapers

subhead: Scott Adams has authored 'Dilbert' since 1989 but said newspaper owner Lee Enterprises has ended the comic in dozens of its publications

It implies that it was a decision about Dilbert specifically, which is not true.

you don't know it not to be true, you prefer that explanation.

but Dilbert, being a popular and therefore an expensive strip with high name recognition, and written by someone who rejects woke ideology, fits either way.

I do know it to be true because a number of strips were affected.

It's an interesting side-effect of news being so concentrated that it's owned by a few massive for-profit corporations. Random, independent decisions still have huge effects.

I love Dilbert and never saw it as overtly political although sometimes Scott Adams can be. But apparently you cannot joke about ESG without consequences.

You don't think having a black character that "identifies as white" and according to the article makes his boss happy to have met his diversity quota is political?

I liked Dilbert a long time ago (90s-early 00s, where I saw it as kind of a window into adult work life as a teenager).

That is not why it was cancelled. A newspaper chain downsized their comics, and cancelled their serialization of other comics as well.

ESL speaker here, could you please expand that acronym?

ESG = Environmentally Sustainable Governance, AKA a certain set of standards of investment on public firms. There are many activist funds and investment managers on the world nowadays.

Another, maybe more infamous example is the Sharia-complaint stock grouping, which bans alcohol, tobacco, military industry, pork, and the sex industry.

Yes I have some investment in the latter indices.

ESG stands for Environmental, Social and Governance. It originated with Wall Street and is applied to making investments in companies that governed in a sustainable and ethical way. As corporations adopt ESG it seems a lot of the talk seems to be focused around hiring quotas.

It's not really an ESL problem, that's an acronym that seems US specific in it's usage.

FWIW, it's widely understood in Australia as well.

Is it? I lived in Australia for 80% of my life and never heard it.

That's not impossible of course, but it's not like I was uninvolved in those topics.

Either way it's still not an second language thing. It's a using acronyms without definition thing.

Well, unless that 80% has overlapped with the last 5 years, you'll have missed it.

But anyone who reads company annual reports (eg. for personal investing), or the financial bits of a newspaper (online or otherwise), or even reads their annual superannuation statement, would very likely have seen the term used (in OZ).

I've been gone for about 4 years, and admittedly don't read many company annual reports (and my super balance I get in a more digital upate).

I haven't really seen it crop up in the online stuff I read (some of it Australian financial), but I can see how it would be easy to miss as well.

FYI I was mostly trying to be funny throwing around TLAs to show OP that not everyone on HN is based in the USA.

Woosh!

Environmental, Social, and Governance

Knowing Adams he probably has a sockpuppet on HN ready to praise the virtues of Dilbert and Scott Adams.

Dilbert has not been culturally relevant for over 2 decades, and Scott Adams hasn't even stepped into an office setting in that time. Gee wonder why it got the axe.

The only thing that ever keeps Adams in the news is when he's using a mass shooting to promote his apps or when he decries being cancelled.

Contrast "Doonesbury" and its years of outright, unabashed political hate...

Regardless of what motivated these removals, taking Dilbert off the newspaper is probably looked upon favourably as improving the "S" of its ESG rating, but not as much as going digital and paperless is supposed to make the "E" look good.

All I can tell you is that Dilbert is in The Washington Post this morning.

There's probably a lead time when stuff that was contracted previously is yet to be published.

Analogous to when you hear that a TV series has been cancelled and the current series is still being screened until all the episodes in the series have been shown.

It's just business. If it's already been paid for, you will lose that money if you stop using it immediately.

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