Cartoon on Bezos and Trump rejected, Washington Post cartoonist resigns

Cartoonist Ann Telnaes resigned from the Washington Post due to the management’s refusal to publish a drawing in which she criticized the newspaper’s owner, the tycoon Jeff Bezos, for attempting to “gain favor” with Donald Trump . “So far I have never seen a drawing rejected” because of the topic I had chosen, Telnaes, a cartoonist for the Washington Post since 2008 and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, wrote in a post on his blog, “the censored cartoon criticizes the masters of technology and of the media and the billionaires who do everything they can to curry favor with the president-elect.” Published on the blog it shows Bezos, founder of the online commerce giant Amazon, on his knees as he hands a bag with a dollar sign to a statue representing the next Republican president.

In the drawing Bezos appears next to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg; to the head of the artificial intelligence company OpenAI, Sam Altman; and the owner of the Los Angeles Times newspaper, Patrick Soon-Shiong. Also seen is a prostrate Mickey Mouse representing the Disney group, owner of the ABC News network which agreed to pay $15 million to end a defamation lawsuit brought by Trump.

According to the cartoonist, the newspaper’s decision “changes the rules of the game and is dangerous for the free press”. For its part, the newspaper underlined that Telnaes’ work was rejected “because an article on the same topic as the cartoon had just been published and we had already planned another one, this time a satire”, it declared in a communicated editorial page editor David Shipley, “The only prejudice was against repetition,” he noted.