After the rejection of one of her caricatures in which she criticized the newspaper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, press cartoonist Ann Telnaes said on Saturday, January 4, that she had resigned from the Washington Post. In her drawing, published Friday on the designer’s blog, she believed that Mr. Bezos had sought to “curry the favors of Donald Trump”.
The caricature shows the founder of Amazon, on his knees, handing a bag bearing the dollar sign to a statue representing the American president-elect. In mid-December, Amazon donated $1 million to the organization fund for Donald Trump’s inauguration on January 20. And Jeff Bezos recently made a trip to Mar-a-Lago, the Florida residence of the president-elect who promised to ” to sort out ” the media through legal proceedings.
Designer for the Washington Post since 2008 and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for press cartoons, Ann Telnaes explains in an article on her blog that she did not “never had a design rejected” because of the subject she had chosen to depict, “until now”. “The drawing that was suppressed criticizes the tech and media bosses and billionaires who are doing everything to curry favor with the president-elect”she explains.
In the drawing, Jeff Bezos is alongside the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, the boss of the artificial intelligence company OpenAI, Sam Altman, and the owner of Los Angeles TimesPatrick Soon-Shiong. A little further away, Mickey Mouse, prostrate, represents the Walt Disney Company, itself owner of ABC News. The channel had agreed to pay $15 million to end a defamation proceeding brought by Donald Trump.
“Oppose repetition”
Even before beginning his second term, the Republican signaled his intention to launch an avalanche of complaints against the media, which he calls “enemies of the people”. Many lawyers believe that many procedures will not succeed, but that they risk creating an effect of intimidation and potential self-censorship.
Requested by Agence France-Presse (AFP), the Washington Post contested Ann Telnaes’ version. Saying that he respected the designer and all her contribution to daily life, the head of the editorial pages, David Shipley, affirmed that his decision to reject the drawing had been “guided by the fact that we had just published an editorial on the same subject” and that another, satirical, was already planned. “The only bias was to oppose the repetition”he said.
Jeff Bezos, who during Donald Trump’s first term opposed the Republican on defense contracts, had prevented the Washington Post, before the November election, to call for a vote for Kamala Harris, while voting recommendations by editorial boards are a tradition in the United States. His space company Blue Origin is also engaged in a race with Elon Musk’s SpaceX company to win public contracts.