Longtime Washington Post cartoonist Ann Telnaes announced her resignation from the paper on Friday, January 3, after a cartoon she had drafted criticizing the Post‘s owner, Jeff Bezos, and other prominent figures for trying to gain favor with President-elect Donald Trump, was rejected. On her Substack, Telnaes, 64, stated, “in all [the] time [I’ve worked for the Post] I’ve never had a cartoon killed because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at. Until now.”
The unfinished cartoon mocks Bezos, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, and ABC News owner Disney (represented by Mickey Mouse), for various supportive decisions they’ve made for Trump, from donating to his second inauguration, to settling the lawsuit over ABC journalist George Stephanopoulos‘s characterization of the verdict in E. Jean Carroll‘s own suit against the creep. (Something that will help him cover the cost of the damages awarded to Carroll.)
Prior to this, Bezos had reportedly blocked the Post‘s intended endorsement of Trump’s opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, before the election on November 5, a decision widely condemned by many critics as being cowardly, and that spurred editor-at-large Robert Kagan to resign from the staff. Telnaes had worked for the Post since 2008 (five years before Bezos acquired it in 2013), and garnered much acclaim and respect for her satire, earning a Reuben Award from the National Cartoonists Society in 2016, and the Herblock Prize in 2023. Her departure comes amid reports the paper is expected to lay off dozens of employees this week, continuing a troubling series of developments for the paper, which has already seen two rounds of lay offs since October 2023.
In her resignation post, Telnaes says “there have been instances where sketches have been rejected or revisions requested, but never because of the point of view inherent in the cartoon’s commentary. That’s a game changer… and dangerous for a free press.” She concludes by referencing the slogan the paper adopted at the start of the first Trump administration, saying, “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. 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.’”
David Shipley, the Post’s opinions editor, responded in a statement to The New York Times that he disagreed with Telnaes’s interpretation of events, saying “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.” He adds he asked her to reconsider resigning, and expressed hope that they would speak again this week to reach a compromise in-line with her principles.
At the time of writing, that does not appear to be the case. Telnaes has expressed gratitude towards those praising her decision, with cartoonist Steve Brodner encouraging others to create their own work with the same theme. She has shared some of these on her Substack, including a significantly less-flattering cartoon of Bezos by New Yorker veteran Barry Blitt, which depicts her former employer puckering up to kiss a statue of Trump’s ass.
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