Washington Post cartoonist resigns after Jeff Bezos satire rejected

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

Longtime Washington Post cartoonist Ann Telnaes created a caricature of Mr. Bezos and other tycoons kneeling in front of a statue of President-elect Donald Trump.

She 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 paper's editorial page editor, said he decided not to publish the cartoon to avoid repetition, not because he was mocking the paper's owner.

In the cartoon, Mr. Bezos, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg, and OpenAI's Sam Altman are shown on their knees giving bags of money to a statue of Trump.

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

Ms. Telnaes announced her resignation in a Substack article on Friday, saying she had worked for the newspaper since 2008.

“In all this time, I have never seen a cartoon killed because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at,” she wrote. “Until now.

“The cartoon that was killed criticizes billionaire tech and media executives who have done their best to curry favor with new President-elect Trump.”

She said the cartoon satirizes “those men with lucrative government contracts who are interested in eliminating regulations.”

But Mr Shipley told the BBC his decision not to publish the drawing was due to a repetition of another article about to be published.

“I respect Ann Telnaes and everything 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 a malevolent force.”

He added: “My decision was guided by the fact that we had just published a column on the same subject as the cartoon and that we had already scheduled the publication of another column, this one being a satire.”

This is not the first time that one of Ms. Telnaes' caricatures has been relayed by the Washington Post.

In 2015, the newspaper retracted one of its sketches depicting 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 it”.

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

Mr. Bezos also described Trump's victory as “an extraordinary political comeback” and had dinner with him at the president-elect's Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida.

The paper faced backlash from liberals weeks before the November presidential election, after Mr. Bezos intervened to block the editorial board from endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris.

Mr. Bezos defended the decision, but the newspaper reported losing more than 250,000 subscribers following the decision.

The Los Angeles Times, whose owner Patrick Soon-Shiong is also depicted in the now-killed cartoon, made a similar decision and said the paper would not publish its support for Harris in October.

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