Washington Post Cartoonist Resigns After Jeff Bezos Satire Rejected

A Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist has resigned from the Washington Post after the newspaper refused to publish a satirical cartoon of its billionaire owner Jeff Bezos.

Longtime Washington Post cartoonist Ann Telnaes created a cartoon of Bezos and other tycoons kneeling before a statue of President-elect Donald Trump.

He said the newspaper’s refusal to publish the cartoon was a “game changer” and described it as “dangerous for a free press.”

But David Shipley, the newspaper’s editorial page editor, said he decided not to publish the cartoon to avoid repetition, not because it mocked the newspaper’s owner.

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

Mickey Mouse also appears prostrate in the cartoon. Disney-owned ABC News agreed last month to pay $15 million to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by Trump.

Telnaes announced his resignation from a Substack position on Friday, saying he had worked for the newspaper since 2008.

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

“The cartoon that was removed criticizes billionaire tech and media CEOs who have been doing everything they can to curry favor with incoming President-elect Trump.”

He said the cartoon satirized “these men with lucrative government contracts and an interest in eliminating regulations.”

But Shipley told the BBC that his decision not to publish the cartoon was due to repetition of another piece that was due to be published.

“I respect Ann Telnaes and all she has given to the Post. But I must disagree with her interpretation of events,” he said in a statement. “Not all editorial judgments are a reflection of an evil force.”

He added: “My decision was due to the fact that we had just published a column on the same topic as the cartoon and had already scheduled the publication of another column, this time a satire.”

This is not the first time the Washington Post has published one of Telnaes’ cartoons.

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

Explaining its decision at the time, the newspaper said its editorial policy was to leave children “out of this.”

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

Bezos also described 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 newspaper faced a liberal backlash weeks before the November presidential election, after Bezos interceded to prevent the editorial board from endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris.

Bezos defended the move, but the newspaper reported that it lost more than 250,000 subscribers following the decision.

The Los Angeles Times, whose owner Patrick Soon-Shiong also appears in the now-murdered cartoon, took a similar step and said the newspaper would not publish its endorsement of Harris in October.