Newspapers (Credit: PublicDomainPictures.net)

Now more than 40 newspapers have dropped the cartoon “Non Sequitur” because of its anti-Pres. Donald Trump message that included the f*** word.

Wiley Miller’s “Non Sequitur” cartoon had a hidden message that read go “f*** yourself” to Pres. Donald Trump. Miller said in a statement sent to iMediaEthics he “scribbled” that months earlier and didn’t mean to have the cartoon face “public consumption.” Immediately after it appeared, several newspapers, including the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Columbus Dispatch, the Dallas Morning News, the Tulsa World, the Syracuse Post-Standard and Pennsylvania’s Butler Eagle,dropped the cartoon.

“At least 40 newspapers — first was the family-owned Butler Eagle, followed by the Atlanta Constitution, Boston Globe, Hartford Courant, Orlando Sentinel, Dallas Morning News and others — have canceled “Non Sequitur,'” the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported.

iMediaEthics has written to Andrews McMeel Universal syndication to ask its total for how many papers have canceled the cartoon.

The Arizona Daily Star‘s editor Jill Jorden Spitz wrote, “The offending words are tiny and barely legible, which struck me at first as a mitigating factor, but on reflection makes it all the worse. Although Miller says he meant to erase the coarse language and that he never intended it for public consumption, the end result is that he slipped in language he knew editors would never allow without giving us the chance to object.”

Spitz argued it was worse because children read the comic section and it was an intentional act — “this was a case of someone deliberately sneaking in language he well knew no legitimate newspaper would print,” she wrote.

The Cincinnati Enquirer editor Beryl Love called the cartoon’s profanity “a subversive and unprofessional act that violated the Enquirer‘s standards” when announcing the paper also dropped the cartoon.

The South Bend Tribune explained it decided against running the cartoon in the future because it didn’t meet “our most basic standards of decency” and because the Tribune bans commenters using the f- word. “We would drop his strip no matter whom Mr. Miller directed that language at,” the Tribune wrote.

The State newspaper in Columbia, S.C. tweeted it was dropping the cartoon as well.

Disclosure: In 2007 as an intern, the author of this report worked on the copy editing desk of The State.