Washington Post cartoonist quits after Jeff Bezos satire rejected

A Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist has resigned from The Washington Post after the paper refused to publish a cartoon satirizing its billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos.

Anne Telnes, a longtime Washington Post cartoonist, created a cartoon of Mr. Bezos and other tycoons kneeling before a statue of President-elect Donald Trump.

She said the newspaper’s refusal to run the cartoon was a “game changer” and described it as “a threat to the free press”.

But David Shipley, the paper’s editorial page editor, said he decided not to run the cartoon to avoid a repeat, not because it was mocking the paper’s owner.

In the cartoon, Mr Bezos, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg and OpenAI’s Sam Altman are depicted on their knees handing bags of money to a statue of Trump.

Mickey Mouse is also depicted lying down in the cartoon. ABC News — which is owned by Disney — last month agreed to pay $15 million to settle a defamation lawsuit filed by Trump.

Ms Telnaes announced her resignation in a post on Substack on Friday, saying she had worked for the newspaper since 2008.

“In all that time I have never killed a caricature because of who or what I chose to point my pen at,” she wrote. “Until now.

“The cartoon that was killed criticized billionaire tech and media CEOs who are doing everything they can to curry favor with President-elect Trump.”

She said the cartoon satirized “these men with lucrative government contracts and an interest in deregulation.”

But Mr Shipley told the BBC his decision not to publish the cartoon was because it was a repeat of another piece due to be published.

“I respect Anne Telnes and all she has given 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 malicious power.”

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 planned another column – this satire – for publication.”

This is not the first time one of Ms. Telnaes’ cartoons has been targeted by the Washington Post.

In 2015 the newspaper retracted one of her sketches that depicted Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s young daughters as monkeys.

Explaining its decision at the time, the paper said its editorial policy was to leave children “outside”.

Last month, Mr. Bezos announced that Amazon would donate $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund and make $1 million in kind.

Mr Bezos also described Mr Trump’s re-election victory as an “extraordinary political comeback” and dined with him at the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida.

The paper faced a liberal backlash weeks before November’s presidential election after Mr. Bezos stepped in to prevent the editorial board from endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris.

Mr Bezos defended the move, but the paper said it had lost more than 250,000 subscribers since the decision.

The Los Angeles Times, whose owner Patrick Soon-Shiong was also depicted in the now-killed cartoon, made a similar move and said the paper would not publish its endorsement of Harris in October.