Washington Post cartoonist Anne Telnes has resigned after a satirical cartoon mocking newspaper owner Jeff Bezos and other media and tech giants kneeling with President-elect Donald Trump was killed.
The Pulitzer Prize winner shared her decision in Substack After Friday.
“I’ve received editorial comments and productive conversations — and some disagreements — about the cartoons I’ve submitted for publication, but in all that time I’ve never had a cartoon killed because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at,” she said, “until now.”
Tilnis has worked at The Washington Post since 2008. She described the unpublished political cartoon as “critical of billionaire tech and media CEOs who are doing everything they can to curry favor with incoming President-elect Trump.”
The Washington Post did not immediately respond to TheWrap’s request for comment.
The cartoon included Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Los Angeles Times publisher Patrick Soon-Shiong, Walt Disney/ABC News depicted as Mickey Mouse and Washington Post owner Bezos. A rough draft of the scrapped animation can be seen below.
Rough draft of Ann Telnaes’ canceled cartoon (Credit: Ann Telnaes/Substack)
Telnis criticized Bezos for his dealings with The Washington Post in the months before Trump’s election and those that followed. The newspaper did not endorse a presidential candidate in 2024 for the first time in decades, which led to… Three members of the editorial board resigned And canceled subscriptions are widespread.
“The owners of such journalistic organizations have a responsibility to protect that free press — and trying to get into the good graces of a dictator-in-waiting will only undermine that free press,” the cartoonist said of her former boss.
“As an editorial cartoonist, my job is to hold powerful people and institutions accountable. For the first time, my editor has prevented me from doing this crucial job. So I decided to leave the newspaper,” she said. “I doubt that my decision will cause a huge uproar and that it will be rejected because I am just a cartoonist. But I won’t stop holding truth to power with my cartoons, because as they say: “Democracy dies in darkness.”
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