Now PBS Is Censoring a Film About Free Speech

American Masters, an award-winning documentary series in its 39th season on PBS, promises to tell “compelling, unvarnished stories” about the nation’s most important cultural figures. The program’s most recent story, though—Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse, about the cartoonist-author of Maus, the Pulitzer Prize–winning graphic novel depicting the Holocaust, and a self-described “poster boy for books being censored”—seemed to need a bit more varnish on its approach to Donald Trump. In April, two weeks before it aired on PBS stations, a 90-second segment of the film in which Spiegelman referred to the president’s “smug and ugly mug” was cut from the film at the behest of public-media executives. (The details of this incident were first reported by Anthony Kaufman for Documentary magazine.)