DOWNTOWN PITTSBURGH — The Post-Gazette’s Editorial Board completed its latest piece urging “compassion and understanding” in only four minutes last week after simply replacing every instance of Antwon Rose II’s name in an article from March 2019 with George Floyd, sources now saving the template as black_man_police_healing.docx confirm.
“I’ve told [owner] John [Block], nobody maintains the status quo quicker than ol’ Keith,” said executive editor Keith Burris. “Sure, you have to change some vital details, like calling him a ‘man’ instead of ‘teen’ and referencing the neck instead of the back, but having your prior sterile calls for token change and ineffective policy discussion still takes out a lot of the grunt work. If I had had the originals for Leon Ford or Jordan Miles on file, I could have probably done it even faster.”
Burris warned, however, that the document still requires an editor’s careful touch before making it to print.
“Every editorial needs a distinctive charm,” he said, pulling up a thesaurus on his web browser. “Not everything can be ‘heartbreaking,’ after all. Sometimes you really have to dig deep, past those first few synonyms, to realize this death or grave injury was ‘tragic’…yeah, that’s it. And it didn’t invoke ‘grief,’ goodness no, but — let’s have a look here — ‘despair’ — perfect! — that we all have to work together in centrist harmony to overcome.”
As of press time, Burris had reportedly pulled up a previous editorial showing “unilateral, unquestioned support” for Sen. Pat Toomey, whose name he planned to swap out for whatever conservative candidates won their primary.
