A Washington Post cartoonist has quit her role at the paper, saying that her bosses blocked publication of a satirical cartoon that depicted billionaires, including one resembling Post owner Jeff Bezos, kneeling before President-elect Donald Trump.
Ann Telnaes, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, said in a blog post Friday that she quit the paper after a drawing was rejected. This was the first time at the Post that a cartoon was “killed because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at,” Telnaes wrote.
A rough sketch of the cartoon, published on Telnaes’ Substack blog, shows several men kneeling before a larger man wearing a suit and a long tie, representing Trump. Telnaes wrote that the likenesses are of Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Los Angeles Times Publisher Patrick Soon-Shiong, and Bezos. Three of the men are holding bags of money. Also included is a drawing of cartoon character Mickey Mouse, representing Walt Disney’s ABC News.
The drawing was rejected by the paper outright, with no suggestions for potential changes, Telnaes told CNBC in an email.
David Shipley, Washington Post editorial page editor, said in a statement that the cartoon was rejected because of its similarity to columns at the paper, not because of who it targeted.
“I respect Ann Telnaes and all she has given to The Post. But I must disagree with her interpretation of events. 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. The only bias was against repetition,” Shipley’s statement said.
The cartoonist’s departure comes amid controversy about how media and corporate executives have been treating Trump, both before and after the November election.
The Washington Post reported that Bezos spiked a planned endorsement of Trump opponent Kamala Harris by the paper ahead of the presidential election. At the Los Angeles Times, Soon-Shiong also decided that the paper should withhold any endorsement in the presidential race, spurring the resignation of several editorial board members.
ABC News, meanwhile, settled a defamation lawsuit with Trump for $15 million, which drew criticism from some media law experts who thought the news organization had a strong case.
Bezos and Zuckerberg, through Meta, planned to donate $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund, the Wall Street Journal reported last month, and have been among several billionaires to meet with Trump at his home in Mar-a-Lago since his election win. Multiple outlets have reported that OpenAI’s Altman is also donating $1 million to the inauguration fund.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., weighed in on Telnaes’ resignation on X, saying the cartoon was “worth a share”: “Big Tech executives are bending the knee to Donald Trump and it’s no surprise why: Billionaires like Jeff Bezos like paying a lower tax rate than a public school teacher.”
Telnaes’ departure is the latest of several internal shakeups at the Post. Publisher and CEO Will Lewis took over the paper last year and has clashed with the newsroom, as reported by NPR. Several top editors at the paper have left since Lewis took over.
Telnaes won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning in 2001. She wrote in her blog that she had worked for the Post since 2008.
