After a 17-year career at the Washington Post, editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes announced her resignation in a Substack entry on Friday, January 3, claiming that her editor had prevented her from “hold[ing] powerful people and institutions accountable” by rejecting a satirical sketch of a group of United States billionaire executives, including Amazon founder and Post owner Jeff Bezos, offering money bags to President-elect Donald Trump.
The cartoon, which did not get past the draft stage, also depicts Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, referencing the three tech executives’ moves to donate $1 million each to Trump’s inauguration fund last month.
Telnaes also drew a bowing Mickey Mouse as a metaphor for ABC News and its parent company Disney agreeing to a $15 million settlement to resolve the defamation lawsuit with Trump last month, and Los Angeles Times owner and pharmaceutical billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong with a tube of red lipstick and kissy lips in a nod to his move to quash the periodical’s endorsement of Kamala Harris during the presidential race last October.
Like Soon-Shiong, Bezos also blocked the Washington Post from endorsing Harris, prompting over 250,000 canceled subscriptions within a week and ire from over a dozen opinions columnists. Today, January 7, the Post laid off roughly 100 employees from its business division, citing financial woes stemming from the killed endorsement.
“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. Until now,” Telnaes wrote on her Substack, Open Windows.
“As an editorial cartoonist, my job is to hold powerful people and institutions accountable,” she continued, explaining that news organizations and publication owners have a shared public responsibility to nurture a free press, and that “trying to get in the good graces of an autocrat-in-waiting will only result in undermining that free press.”
“For the first time, my editor prevented me from doing that critical job,” Telnaes wrote. “So I have decided to leave the Post.”
In a statement to CNN, Washington Post Opinions Editor David Shipley said he disagreed with Telnaes’s “interpretation of events.”
“Not every editorial judgment is a reflection of a malign force,” he said. “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.”
In November 2023, Shipley reviewed and approved conservative-leaning illustrator Michael Ramirez’s “Human Shields,” a contentious cartoon that many readers considered to considered to depict a racist caricature of Palestinians. The public outcry against Ramirez’s cartoon was so strong that Shipley removed it from the website, writing in an editor’s note that “the reaction to the image convinced me that I had missed something profound, and divisive, and I regret that,” and publishing letters from readers instead.
Of the two columns Shipley mentioned in his statement, one appears to be a December 18 opinion piece by Gene Robinson warning tech executives against both pledging allegiance to and attempting to reason with Trump.
Telnaes confirmed with Hyperallergic that her cartoon was killed on December 19, but did not comment further.
The Association of American Editorial Cartoonists (AAEC) lambasted the Post‘s decision to refrain from publishing Telnaes’s recent cartoon in a statement accusing the periodical of “craven censorship in bowing to a wannabe tyrant.”
“Editorial cartooning is the tip of the spear in opinion, and the Post’s cowering further soils their once-stellar reputation for standing up and speaking truth to power. We weep for the loss of this once great newspaper,” the AAEC said before inviting other cartoonists to finish Telnaes’s drawing in solidarity. Telnaes published a select few in a follow-up Substack entry.
