Ann Telnaes, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist for The Washington Post, said Friday evening that she was resigning after the paper's opinion section rejected a cartoon showing The Post's owner Jeff Bezos kneeling before a statue of newly elected President Donald J. .Trump. .
In a brief statement to Substack, Ms. Telnaes — who has worked at The Post since 2008 — called the newspaper's decision to end her cartoon a “game changer” that was “dangerous to a free press.”
“In all that time, no cartoon has ever been killed because of who or what I pointed my pen at,” she wrote. “Until now.”
Ms. Telnaes included a draft of her cartoon in her Substack post. In addition to Mr. Bezos, the founder of Amazon, the cartoon depicted Meta's founder, Mark Zuckerberg; Patrick Soon-Shiong, owner of The Los Angeles Times; and Mickey Mouse, the corporate mascot of the Walt Disney Company.
David Shipley, The Post's opinion editor, said in a statement that he respected Ms. Telnaes and all she had given to The Post “but had to disagree with her interpretation of events.”
“Not every editorial judgment is a reflection of a malevolent force,” Mr. Shipley said in the statement. “My decision was guided by the fact that we had just published a column on the same subject as the cartoon and had already planned another column – this one a satire – for publication. The only prejudice was against repetition.”
Mr Shipley added that he had spoken to Ms Telnaes by telephone on Friday and asked her to reconsider her resignation. During the phone call, Mr Shipley said he wanted to speak to Ms Telnaes on Monday after they had taken the weekend to think it over. He later encouraged her to wait to quit to see if they could resolve the situation in accordance with her principles.
Ms. Telnaes did not respond to requests for comment.
Matt Wuerker, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist for Politico, called the decision to kill Ms. Telnaes' cartoon “spineless,” adding that legendary Post cartoonist Herbert Block, better known as Herblock, and Ben Bradlee, a former editor of The Post, “twisting, kicking and screaming in their graves.”
