A Washington Post cartoonist has resigned from her job at the paper, saying her bosses blocked the publication of a satirical cartoon depicting 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 left the newspaper after a cartoon was rejected. It was the first time at the Post that a drawing was “killed because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at,” Telnaes wrote.
A sketch of the drawing, posted on Telnaes’ Substack blog, shows several men kneeling in front of a taller man wearing a suit and long tie, depicting Trump. Telnaes wrote that the likenesses are those 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. A drawing of the cartoon character Mickey Mouse, representing Walt Disney’s ABC News, is also included.
The design was flatly rejected by the newspaper, with no suggestions of potential changes, Telnaes told CNBC in an email.
David Shipley, the Washington Post’s editorial page editor, said in a statement that the cartoon was rejected because of its similarity to the newspaper’s articles, not because of the person in question.
“I respect Ann Telnaes and everything she gave to the Post. But I have to disagree with his interpretation of events. Not all editorial judgments are a reflection of a malevolent force. My decision was guided by the fact that we had just published a column on the same subject as the cartoon and that we had already scheduled the publication of another column – this one being a satire. The only bias was against repetition,” Shipley’s statement said.
The cartoonist’s departure comes amid controversy over how media and business leaders treated Trump, before and after the November election.
The Washington Post reported that Bezos boosted the newspaper’s planned support for Trump opponent Kamala Harris ahead of the presidential election. At the Los Angeles Times, Soon-Shiong also ruled that the paper should deny support for the presidential race, leading to the resignation of several editorial board members.
ABC News, meanwhile, settled a defamation lawsuit with Trump for $15 million, drawing criticism from some media law experts who believed 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 were among several billionaires to meet with Trump at his home in Mar-a- Lago since his electoral victory. Several media outlets reported that OpenAI’s Altman was also donating $1 million to the inauguration fund.
Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Mass., spoke out on Telnaes’ resignation on It’s no surprise why: billionaires like Jeff Bezos. it’s like paying a lower tax rate than a public school teacher.
Telnaes’ departure is the latest in a series of internal reshuffles at the Post. Publisher and CEO Will Lewis took over the paper last year and clashed with the newsroom, as NPR reports. Several of the paper’s editors have left since Lewis took over.
Telnaes won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning in 2001. She wrote on her blog that she had worked for the Post since 2008.
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