Washington Post cartoonist resigns after deleting depiction of Bezos kneeling before Trump

Washington Post cartoonist Ann Telnaes, who had worked there since 2008, resigned Friday over her work showing Jeff Bezos kneeling before President-elect Donald Trump dropped out.

Ms. Telnaes’s cartoon draft depicted Mr. Bezos, owner of the Post and Amazon, with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong and Mickey Mouse kneeling, bowing and offering Mr. Trump bags of money.

“I have never seen a cartoon killed off because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at. Until now,” Ms. Telnaes wrote on her Substack blog, Open Windows.

She added that “my job is to hold powerful people and institutions accountable. For the first time, my editor stopped me from doing this crucial work. …I will not stop keeping truth to power through my cartoons, because as they say, ‘Democracy dies in darkness,'” referring to the slogan adopted by the Post in 2017 after Mr. Trump.

Post editor David Shipley said in a statement that “not all editorial judgments are a reflection of a malicious 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 prejudice was against repeating a year.

The Post and the Los Angeles Times filed resignations last year after both newspapers refused to support either presidential candidate in the election.