A longtime cartoonist at The Washington Publish resigned after management reportedly killed a cartoon depicting newspaper proprietor and billionaire Jeff Bezos bending his knee to President-elect Trump.
“I have had editorial feedback and productive conversations—and some differences—about cartoons I have submitted for publication, but in all that time I’ve never had a cartoon killed because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at,” Ann Telnaes wrote Friday in a put up on Substack titled, “Why I’m quitting the Washington Post.”
“Until now,” she added.
Telnaes’s resignation comes as tech and enterprise leaders have made their strategy to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida for conferences, seemingly constructing a bridge with the incoming president in latest weeks — a shift from his first time period in workplace.
The cartoonist, who joined the Publish in 2008, stated an editorial editor axed her artwork, which depicted Trump alongside a handful of tech and media titans, together with Bezos, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Los Angeles Instances proprietor Patrick Quickly-Shiong and Mickey Mouse, representing the Walt Disney Firm and ABC Information.
“The cartoon that was killed criticizes the billionaire tech and media chief executives who have been doing their best to curry favor with incoming President-elect Trump,” she wrote.
David Shipley, the editorial web page editor at The Publish, rebuffed the allegation, stating the one “bias” in his resolution to not run the cartoon was “repetition.”
“I respect Ann Telnaes and all she has given to The Post. But I must disagree with her interpretation of events,” he stated in an announcement to The Hill. “Not every editorial judgment is a reflection of a malign force.”
“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,” he added.
In early December, Amazon, which Bezos based, introduced it might donate $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund and in addition make a $1 million in-kind contribution. Bezos personally congratulated the incoming president on his election victory as properly, labeling it “an extraordinary political comeback.”
“EVERYBODY WANTS TO BE MY FRIEND!!!” Trump wrote Thursday on Reality Social, after having dinner with Bezos in Florida final month.
The Hill reached out to Trump’s transition workforce for remark.
Telnaes’s cartoon additionally spotlighted latest media strikes which have prompted backlash, together with ABC Information’s $15 million defamation swimsuit settlement with Trump in addition to the Los Angeles Instances proprietor’s resolution to scrap a presidential endorsement of Vice President Harris.
Bezos, who additionally killed a chunk from The Publish supporting Trump’s opponent this fall, has been extensively criticized by readers and staffers alike. The billionaire tech and media entrepreneur defended the transfer, stating that newspaper presidential endorsements create “a perception of bias.”
“Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one,” Bezos wrote in October. “I would also like to be clear that no quid pro quo of any kind is at work here. Neither campaign nor candidate was consulted or informed at any level or in any way about this decision. It was made entirely internally.”
Telnaes joins an exodus of journalists which have left Bezos’s paper, as reported by Puck, in latest months.
“As an editorial cartoonist, my job is to hold powerful people and institutions accountable. For the first time, my editor prevented me from doing that critical job,” Telnaes wrote. “So I have decided to leave the Post. I doubt my decision will cause much of a stir and that it will be dismissed because I’m just a cartoonist.”
“But I will not stop holding truth to power through my cartooning, because as they say, ‘Democracy dies in darkness],’” she added.
