A Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist has resigned from the Washington Post after the newspaper refused to publish a satirical cartoon of the paper’s owner, billionaire Jeff Bezos.
Ann Telnaes, a longtime Washington Post cartoonist, created a cartoon of Mr. Bezos and other tycoons kneeling before a statue of President-elect Donald Trump.
Ms Telnaes announced her resignation in a Substack post on Friday: “In all that time I have never killed a cartoon because of who or what I chose to point my pencil at. Until now.”
David Shipley, the newspaper’s editorial page editor, said he chose not to publish the cartoon to avoid repeating it, not because it was making fun of the newspaper’s owner.
In the cartoon, Mr. Bezos, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg and OpenAI’s Sam Altman are shown on their knees handing bags of money to a statue of Trump.
Mickey Mouse is also shown stretched out in the cartoon. ABC News — which is owned by Disney — agreed last month to pay $15 million to settle a defamation lawsuit filed by Trump.
“The slain cartoon criticizes billionaire tech and media executives who have gone out of their way to ingratiate themselves with incoming President-elect Trump,” Ms. Telnaes wrote in her resignation announcement.
She said the cartoon satirized “these people with lucrative government contracts and an interest in deregulation.”
Ms Telnaes said the Washington Post’s refusal to publish the cartoon was a “game changer” and described it as “dangerous to the free press”.
But Mr Shipley told the BBC that he had made his decision not to publish the cartoon because it was a repeat of another piece that was due to be published.
“I respect Ann Telnaes and all she has contributed to The Post. But I have to disagree with her interpretation of events,” he said in a statement. “Not every editorial judgment is a reflection of a malign force.”
He added: “My decision was driven by the fact that we had just published a column on the same subject as the cartoon and had already scheduled another column – this satirical one – for publication.”
Last month, Mr. Bezos announced that Amazon would donate $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund and make a $1 million in-kind contribution.
Mr. Bezos also described Trump’s re-election victory as a “remarkable political comeback” and dined with him at the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida.
The paper faced a liberal backlash in the weeks before the November presidential election after Mr. Bezos intervened to prevent the editorial board from endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris.
Mr. Bezos defended the move, but the newspaper reported that he lost more than 250,000 subscribers after the decision.
The Los Angeles Times, whose owner Patrick Soon-Shiong was also featured in the now-removed comic, made a similar move and said the paper would not announce its endorsement of Harris in October.
