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"His views are his choice, our choice is to not associate with him" is a lie from both directions.
If newspapers really, really cared what their cartoonists think, they'd have their on-staff investigative reporters do PI work on 'em. They don't, because what they actually care about from revealed preferences is their cartoonist's public-facing, loudly broadcasted views. If it's not gonna cause them PR problems, they don't care, and if it's not a broadcasted view, it's not gonna cause them PR problems. No-one cares if you don't really think General Secretary Andropov is a good leader, so long as you keep your opinions to your fucking self, comrade.
The other direction in which this is a lie is that it's not the newspaper's choice either. They're being coerced, extorted, by (their expectations of) their own readership. That's what a "PR problem" is - a problem that wouldn't matter unless the public's reaction mattered. If it were 1950 and Dilbert was being published mostly in the South, Adams' comments wouldn't be a PR problem, they'd be a PR boon, and no-one would get cancelled; which serves to prove that the newspaper is similarly constrained by the political milieu in which it operates.
Admittedly, this sort of analysis is mildly comolicated by the recent dynamic of entryism into newspapers by actual ideological zealots who would like to use investigative reporters as Stasi thoughtpolice on their own colleagues and don't care if the newspaper goes bankrupt so long as Brown Scare enemies get cancelled, but I don't think those people are making the command decisions. Yet.
Well, yes, that was the case before the epoch of wokeness and every company having VP DIE. Now, the whole thing is short-circuited and the twitter doesn't even crow three times before the wrongthinker is already cancelled by the in-house DIE team.
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