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.)
PBS has been under attack by the Trump administration since January. By the time Disaster Is My Muse was aired in shortened form, the network was already under investigation by the Federal Communications Commission, and the White House had a plan to claw back $1.1 billion in federal funds from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which passes money on to PBS. “Their attempt at preemptively staying out of the line of fire was absurd; it wasn’t going to happen,” Spiegelman told me this week. “It seems like it would be better to go out with dignity.”
Alicia Sams, who co-produced the film, told me that she received a call from the executive producer of American Masters, Michael Kantor, at the beginning of April. It was less than a week after a contentious congressional hearing in which the network was accused of being a “radical left-wing echo chamber” that is “brainwashing and trans-ing children.” According to Sams, Kantor said that Disaster Is My Muse would need one further edit before it could be shown: The filmmakers had to remove a short sequence where Spiegelman reads aloud from the one of the few comic strips about Trump that he’s ever published, in a zine associated with the Women’s March in 2017. There was no opportunity for negotiation, Sams said. The filmmakers knew that if they refused, they would be in breach of contract and would have to repay the movie’s license fee. “It was not coming from Michael,” she told me. “It was very clear: It was coming from PBS in D.C.”
[Read: PBS pulled a film for political reasons, then changed its mind]
Kantor deferred all questions to Lindsey Horvitz, the director of content marketing at WNET, the producer of American Masters and parent company of New York’s flagship PBS station. (Sams told me that in her understanding, WNET leadership had agreed with PBS about the cut.) Horvitz provided The Atlantic with this statement: “One section of the film was edited from the theatrical version as it was no longer in context today. The change was made to maintain the integrity and appropriateness of the content for broadcast at this time.” A PBS spokesperson said, “We have not changed our long-standing editorial guidelines or practices this year.” (The Atlantic has a partnership with WETA, which receives funding from PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.)
Molly Bernstein, who co-directed Disaster Is My Muse with Philip Dolin, said this was “absurd.” She told me that the team had already been through discussions with PBS over how to make the film compliant with broadcast standards and practices. A few profanities are spoken in the film, and some images from Spiegelman’s cartoons raised concerns, but the network said that these could stand as long as the film aired after 10 p.m., when laxer FCC rules apply. “We were delighted that was an option,” Bernstein said. A bleeped-and-blurred version of the film would not have worked. “It’s about underground comics. It’s about transgressive artwork.”
The team did make one other change to the film, several months before its broadcast: Some material featuring Spiegelman’s fellow comic-book artist Neil Gaiman was removed in January after a series of sexual-assault allegations against Gaiman were detailed in a cover story for New York magazine. (Gaiman denies that he “engaged in non-consensual sexual activity with anyone.”) The filmmakers say they did this on their own, to avoid distractions from the subject of the film. But they also said that Kantor told them PBS would likely have had that inclination too.
In any case, to say the snipped-out material about Trump was “no longer in context today” is simply false. Spiegelman’s commitment to free speech is central to the film. So are his repeated warnings about incipient fascism in America. (“That’s what I see everywhere I look now,” he says at one point.) They’re also clearly relevant to the forced edit of the broadcast. Indeed, the censored clip was taken from an event involving Spiegelman in June 2022 called “Forbidden Images Now,” which was presented in association with an exhibit of Philip Guston paintings that had itself been postponed for political reasons after George Floyd’s murder, presumably on account of Guston’s having made a motif of hooded Ku Klux Klansmen.
[Read: Don’t look away from Philip Guston’s cartoonish paintings of Klansmen]
Just a few months before that lecture, Spiegelman learned that Maus had been removed from the eighth-grade curriculum in McMinn County, Tennessee, on account of its rough language and a single panel showing the naked corpse of his mother following her suicide. “The tendencies brought up by this frantic need to control children’s thoughts,” Spiegelman told MSNBC’s Art Velshi in 2023, are “an echo of the book burnings of the 1930s in Germany.”
The filmmakers told me that Spiegelman’s free-speech run-in with the county school board was instrumental in persuading WNET to back Disaster Is My Muse. “When Maus was banned, interest in Art and the relevance of his story increased,” Sams said. Only then did American Masters pledge its full support, licensing the film before it had even been completed, and supplying half its budget. In the lead-up to its broadcast, PBS also chose to highlight Spiegelman’s focus on the First Amendment in its promotional materials. The network’s webpage for Disaster Is My Muse describes him as “a pioneer of comic arts, whose thought-provoking work reflects his ardent defense of free speech.” (Neither PBS nor WNET would explain how a decision had been made to censor footage from a documentary film that is in no small part about censorship.)
A broader “context” for the edit can be found in PBS’s other recent efforts to adjust its programming in deference to political considerations. As previously reported in The Atlantic, not long before Kantor’s call with Sams, PBS quietly shelved a different documentary film, Break the Game, that was set to air on April 7, apparently because it had a trans protagonist. The film, which is not political, was abruptly placed back on the schedule within two hours of my reaching out to PBS for comment. (The network did not respond to questions about why Break the Game’s original airdate had been canceled.)
If these efforts were meant to forestall pressure from the White House, they have roundly failed. Two weeks after Disaster Is My Muse aired—with its reference to Trump removed—the president attempted to dismiss three of five board members at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. A few days after that, he issued an executive order directing the board to terminate all funding, both direct and indirect, to NPR and PBS. (Both moves are being challenged.) But just imagine how much harder the administration would be going after PBS if Trump had seen the clip about his “smug and ugly mug”!
“This seems like volunteering to pull the trigger on the firing-squad gun,” Spiegelman told me. The end of Disaster Is My Muse includes some footage from a 2017 free-speech protest on the steps of the New York Public Library, where Spiegelman read out the lyrics of a Frank Zappa song: “And I’m telling you, it can’t happen here. Oh, darling, it’s important that you believe me. Bop bop bop bop.” The political climate has only gotten worse since then, he said. “There’s no checks and balances on this. This is severe bullying and control, and it’s only going to get worse.”
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