Washington Post editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes quit the paper on Friday after the newspaper removed a story depicting its billionaire owner, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, kneeling for President-elect Donald Trump. He said he quit.
“I had editor feedback, productive conversations, and some differences on the comics I submitted for publication. But in all that time, I’ve never once had a comic get ruined because of who or what I chose to target. So far,” the Pulitzer Prize winner wrote on his Substack page.
Telnaes, who started at the Post in 2008, shared a draft of a cartoon featuring Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg, Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Mickey Mouse (representing The Walt Disney Company). , ABC News parent company) is kissing Trump’s ring.
The figures appear to give Trump a bag of money, offer to kiss him or, in Mickey’s case, bow to him as he sits at the top of the stairs.
Telnaes wrote that the cartoon criticizes those who did their best to curry favor with Trump.
“Let me be clear: there have been instances where sketches have been rejected or requests for revisions have been made, but never because of the viewpoint inherent in the comic commentary. This is a game changer… It is dangerous for a free press,” Telnaes wrote.
David Shipley, the Post’s editorial page editor, said in a statement to The New York Times that he respects Telnas and her contributions to the paper but “would not agree with her interpretation of events.”
“Not all editorial judgments reflect malevolent forces,” he said. “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 the publication of another column (this one was satire). The only bias was against repetition.”
The cartoonist’s decision comes after the newspaper received backlash for its decision not to endorse candidates in last year’s presidential election.
The Post’s editorial board reportedly scrapped Vice President Kamala Harris’s draft endorsement after Bezos “reviewed” it.
The newspaper regularly endorsed candidates for nearly half a century before the decision was made, which led to a decline in subscribers and many staff resignations.
In remarks last month, Bezos said the Post made the “right decision” not to endorse the candidate.
Telnaes, who recently reshared a 2019 visual essay that described editorial cartoonists as democracy’s “canaries in the coal mine,” wrote that the job of editorial cartoonists is “to hold people and institutions in power accountable.”
The countdown to Trump has begun
Support HuffPost
Already participated? Please log in to hide this message.
“For the first time, my editor stopped me from doing that important work,” she wrote.
She continued, “I wonder if my decision will cause a big stir or if I will be dismissed for being just a cartoonist. But I will never stop holding truth to power through my comics. Because, as they say, ‘democracy dies in the dark.’”
