Ann Telnaes, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist for The Washington Post, said Friday evening that she was resigning after the newspaper’s opinions section rejected a cartoon depicting Post owner Jeff Bezos genuflecting toward a statue of President-elect Donald Trump.
In a brief statement posted to Substack, Telnaes — who has worked at the Post since 2008 — called the newspaper’s decision to kill her cartoon a “game changer” that was “dangerous for a free press.”
“In all that time I’ve never had a cartoon killed because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at,” she wrote. “Until now.”
Telnaes included a draft of her cartoon in her Substack post. In addition to Bezos, the founder of Amazon, the cartoon depicted Meta’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg; Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO; Patrick Soon-Shiong, owner of the Los Angeles Times; and Mickey Mouse, the corporate mascot of The Walt Disney Co.
David Shipley, the Post’s opinions editor, said in a statement that he respected Telnaes and all she had given to the Post “but must disagree with her interpretation of events.”
“Not every editorial judgment is a reflection of a malign force,” Shipley said in the statement. “My decision was guided by the fact that we had just published a column on the same topic as the cartoon and had already scheduled another column — this one a satire — for publication. The only bias was against repetition.”
Shipley added that he had spoken with Telnaes by phone Friday and had asked her to reconsider resigning. During the call, Shipley said he wanted to speak with Telnaes on Monday, after they had taken the weekend to think things over. He later encouraged her to hold off on quitting to see if they could work out the situation in accordance with her principles.
Telnaes did not respond to requests for comment.
Matt Wuerker, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist for Politico, called the decision to kill Telnaes’ cartoon “spineless,” adding that the storied Post cartoonist Herbert Block, known as Herblock, and Ben Bradlee, a former editor of the Post, were “spinning, kicking and screaming in their graves.”