Washington Post Cartoonist Reveals She Quit After Paper Killed Sketch With Bezos, Trump

LOADING ERROR LOADING Washington Post editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes on Friday revealed that she was quitting the newspaper after it rejected a sketch depicting its billionaire owner, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, on bended knee for Republican President-elect Donald Trump. Telnaes — who began working at the Post in 2008 — shared a rough draft of the cartoon, which also depicts Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and the character Mickey Mouse — a stand-in for The Walt Disney Co., which owns ABC News. “That’s a game changer…and dangerous for a free press.” David Shipley, the Post’s editorial page editor, said in a statement to The New York Times that he respects Telnaes and her contributions to the newspaper “but must disagree with her interpretation of events.” “Not every editorial judgment is a reflection of a malign force,” he said. But Bezos, in remarks last month, said the paper had made the “right decision.” Telnaes, who recently reshared a 2019 visual essay in which she described editorial cartoonists as “democracy’s canary in a coal mine,” wrote that her job as an editorial cartoonist is to “hold powerful people and institutions accountable.” “For the first time, my editor prevented me from doing that critical job,” she wrote.