Ann Telnaes, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist for The Washington Post, said Friday that she was resigning after the newspaper’s opinions section rejected a cartoon depicting Post owner and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos genuflecting toward a statue of President-elect Trump.
In a brief statement posted to Substack, Telnaes – who has worked at the Post since 2008 – called the newspaper’s decision to kill her cartoon a “game changer” that was “dangerous for a free press.”
“In all that time I’ve never had a cartoon killed because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at,” she wrote. “Until now.”
Telnaes included a draft of her cartoon in her Substack post. In addition to Bezos, the cartoon depicted Meta’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg; Patrick Soon-Shiong, the owner of the Los Angeles Times; and Mickey Mouse, the corporate mascot of The Walt Disney.
David Shipley, the Post’s opinions editor, said in a statement that he respected Telnaes and all she had given to the Post “but must disagree with her interpretation of events.”
“Not every editorial judgment is a reflection of a malign force,” Shipley said in the statement. “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 a satire – for publication. The only bias was against repetition.” nyt