Washington Post cartoonist quits after satire of Jeff Bezos is rejected

The Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist has resigned from The Washington Post after the newspaper refused to publish a satirical cartoon of its billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos.

Anne Telnis, a longtime Washington Post cartoonist, created a cartoon of Bezos and other business leaders kneeling before a statue of President-elect Donald Trump.

She said the newspaper’s refusal to publish the cartoon was a “game changer” and described it as “dangerous to the free press.”

But David Shipley, the newspaper’s editorial page editor, said he decided not to publish the cartoon to avoid repetition, not because it mocked the newspaper’s owner.

In the cartoon, Mr. Bezos, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg and OpenAI’s Sam Altman are depicted kneeling as they offer bags of cash to a Trump statue.

Mickey Mouse has also been depicted prostrate in the cartoon. ABC News – which is owned by Disney – agreed last month to pay $15 million to settle the defamation lawsuit filed by Trump.

Ms. Telnes announced her resignation in a Substack post on Friday, saying she had worked at the paper since 2008.

“In all that time, I have never been caricatured to death because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at,” she wrote. “yet.

“The cartoon that was killed criticizes the billionaire tech and media CEOs who are doing everything they can to curry favor with President-elect Trump.”

She said the cartoon mocked “those men who have lucrative government contracts and are interested in eliminating regulations.”

But Shipley told the BBC that his decision not to publish the cartoon was due to the repetition of another piece due to be published.

“I respect Anne Tilnis and everything she has done for The Washington Post,” he said in a statement. “But I must disagree with her interpretation of events.” “Not every editorial judgment is a reflection of a malevolent force.”

He added: “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 satirical one – for publication.”

This is not the first time the Washington Post has published one of Ms. Tilnis’s cartoons.

In 2015, the newspaper retracted one of its drawings that depicted the young daughters of Texas Senator Ted Cruz as monkeys.

Explaining its decision at the time, the newspaper said that its editorial policy was to leave children “out of it.”

Last month, Bezos announced that Amazon would donate $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund and make an in-kind contribution of $1 million.

Bezos also described Trump’s re-election victory as an “extraordinary political comeback” and had dinner with him at the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida.

The newspaper faced liberal backlash weeks before the November presidential election, after Bezos intervened to prevent the editorial board from endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris.

Bezos defended the move, but the newspaper reported that it lost more than 250,000 subscribers after the decision.

The Los Angeles Times, whose owner Patrick Soon-Shiong also appeared in the now-slain cartoon, took a similar step and said the newspaper would not publish its endorsement of Harris in October.