[Editor’s note: The day after he returned home from this year’s joint AAEC/ACC Convention in Quebec, cartoonist Michael de Adder found out he’d been fired from his long-time newspaper after it was recently purchased by hedgefund-owned Postmedia. The Daily Cartoonist has been been covering the news, and the AAEC has now released a statement in support of de Adder.]

The AAEC strongly condemns the inexplicably shortsighted firing of Michael de Adder from the Halifax Chronicle Herald where he had worked for 30 years.

De Adder was recently honored with the Order of Canada, the 2024 Reuben Award for Editorial Cartooning, and, in 2020, the Herblock Prize. These awards should be a cause for celebration by newspaper owners, not a pretext for silencing his work.

Once again, corporate vulture, hedge fund journalism has removed an influential editorial cartoonist, which will only result in local readers — this time in Nova Scotia — being more poorly served by their local newspaper. Opinion journalism should be a forum, not an amen choir, and de Adder’s firing brings into sharper focus the peril of such poor decisions.

Editorial cartoonists, along with other opinion journalists, are under fire not just by budget cuts, but by bullying and intimidation. This atmosphere serves no newspaper reader, conservative or liberal, and only hastens the crisis of misinformation that threatens freedom around the world. Newspaper owners concerned about their bottom line would be much better served by widening the scope of commentary, not shrinking it into an echo chamber.

If hedge-fund media companies like the one that just fired de Adder get their way, there won’t be opinion journalism, nor will there be objective reporting. Silence only serves authoritarians and the extremely wealthy; it never serves the reader.

— The AAEC Board of Directors