A Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist has resigned from the Washington Post after the company refused to publish cartoons satirizing its billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos.
Ann Telnaes, a longtime Washington Post cartoonist, created a cartoon of Bezos and other tycoons kneeling before a statue of President-elect Donald Trump.
Telnaes announced his resignation in a Substack post on Friday. “In all my years, I have never seen a comic die because of who or what they chose to aim their pen at. Until now.”
The paper’s editor-in-chief, David Shipley, said he decided not to run the cartoon not because it ridiculed the paper’s owners but to avoid repetition.
The cartoon shows Mr Bezos, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg and OpenAI’s Sam Altman kneeling and giving a bag of cash to a Trump statue.
In the cartoon, Mickey Mouse is also depicted lying down. Disney-owned ABC News agreed last month to pay $15 million to settle a defamation lawsuit filed by Trump.
“The slain cartoon criticizes billionaire technology and media CEOs who have done their best to curry favor with President-elect Trump,” Ms. Telnaes wrote in her resignation announcement.
She said the cartoon satirizes “those who have lucrative government contracts and are interested in deregulation.”
Mr. Telnaes described the Washington Post’s refusal to publish the cartoons as a “game changer” and “dangerous to free speech.”
But Mr Shipley told the BBC the decision not to publish the cartoon was because it was a repetition of other works scheduled for publication.
“I respect Ann Telnaes and everything she has provided to the Post, but I disagree with her interpretation of events,” he said in a statement. “Not all editorial judgments reflect malevolent forces.”
He added, “My decision was guided by the fact that we had just published a column on the same topic as the cartoon and had already scheduled another column (this one, satire) to be published.”
Last month, Mr. Bezos announced that Amazon would donate $1 million to President Trump’s inauguration fund and $1 million in kind.
Mr. Bezos also described Mr. Trump’s re-election victory as an “extraordinary political comeback” and dined with him at the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida.
The paper faced a liberal backlash in the weeks leading up to the November presidential election after Mr. Bezos intervened to block its editorial board from endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris.
Bezos defended the move, but the newspaper reported that it lost more than 250,000 subscribers following the decision.
The Los Angeles Times, whose now-slain cartoon features owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, is taking similar action, saying it will no longer run articles supporting Harris in October.
