Washington Post cartoonist quits after paper rejects sketch of Bezos bowing to Trump
A cartoonist has decided to quit her job at the Washington Post after an editor rejected her sketch of the newspaper’s owner and other media executives bowing to President-elect Donald Trump.
Ann Telnaes posted a message On Friday, the online platform Substack said she had drawn a cartoon showing a group of media executives bowing to Trump while offering him bags of money, including Post owner and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
Telnaes wrote that the cartoon was intended to criticize “the top executives of technology and media billionaires who have done their best to curry favor with incoming President-elect Trump.” Several executives, including Bezos, are spotted at Trump’s club in Florida Mar-a-Lago. She accused them of having lucrative government contracts and working to eliminate regulations.
Telnaes said that never before has a cartoon of hers been rejected because of its inherent message and that such a move is dangerous for a free press.
“As an editorial cartoonist, it is my job to hold powerful people and institutions accountable,” Telnaes wrote. “For the first time, my editor stopped me from doing that crucial work. That is why I have decided to leave the post. I doubt my decision will cause much of a stir and be rejected because I’m just a cartoonist. But I will not stop holding truth in power through my cartoons, because as they say, ‘Democracy dies in darkness.’”
The Association of American Editorial Cartoonists issued a statement Saturday accusing the Post of “political cowardice” and asking other cartoonists to post Telnaes’ sketch with the hashtag #StandWithAnn in solidarity.
“Tyranny ends at the nib,” the association said. “It thrives in the dark, and the Washington Post simply closed its eyes and gave in like a drunken boxer.”
The Post’s communications director, Liza Pluto, provided The Associated Press with a statement Saturday from David Shipley, the newspaper’s editor-in-chief. Shipley said in the statement that he disagrees with Telnaes’ “interpretation of events.”
He said he decided to remove the cartoon because the newspaper had just published a column on the same subject as the cartoon and was about to publish a new one.
“Not every editorial judgment is a reflection of a malevolent force. … The only bias was against repetition,” Shipley said.