A longtime cartoonist for The Washington Post has resigned in protest after the paper refused to publish her cartoon depicting multiple billionaires, including the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, bowing down before president-elect Donald Trump.
Ann Telnaes, a Pulitzer Prize-winner who has drawn political cartoons for the Post since 2008, crafted a cartoon that included Bezos, Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI founder Sam Altman and Mickey Mouse (representing the broader Disney brand). Each of the human participants in the cartoon was shown handing large bags of cash to a statue of Trump, representing recent donations to his inauguration committee.
After the publication refused to publish Telnaes’s cartoon, she posted a resignation announcement on Substack.
“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,” Telnaes explained in her post.
“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,” Telnaes added. “Until now.”
Telnaes elaborated that the rare decision by the Post to silence her voice was a “game-changer” and a “dangerous” action for “a free press.”
Telnaes’s resignation comes months after the Post, for the first time in many years — and at the behest of Bezos — opted against endorsing a candidate in a presidential election, despite its editorial board repeatedly warning about the dangers of another Trump presidency over the past year.
In an op-ed from Bezos himself in late October, the billionaire attempted to justify the decision not to endorse a presidential candidate, claiming the paper was “failing” at “being believed to be accurate” in its regular reporting by some readers due to the editorial section’s statements.
Bezos — whose executives from his aerospace company Blue Origin had met with Trump the same day the Post’s decision not to issue a presidential endorsement was announced — maintained that his other economic ventures played no role in his decision.
“You can see my wealth and business interests as a bulwark against intimidation, or you can see them as a web of conflicting interests,” Bezos wrote. “Only my own principles can tip the balance from one to the other. I assure you that my views here are, in fact, principled.”
Several commentators, however, rejected Bezos’s “principled” stand.
“Reader confusion between a paper’s news coverage and its editorial opinionating is indeed a problem in the digital age, but not one that killing endorsements alone will come anywhere close to solving,” wrote Jon Allsop, who publishes “The Media Today” newsletter for The Columbia Journalism Review. “America’s bitter present divisions can be seen as an argument against weighing in on one side or another, but also an argument for doing so, as a signpost in confusing and noisy times.”
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