Award-winning editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes has left her position at the Washington Post after the paper rejected an editorial cartoon idea she submitted featuring several tech and media executives bowing down to President-elect Donald Trump.
Telnaes shared the news in her Substack newsletter today.
The cartoon in question features Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, LA Times publisher Patrick Soon-Shiong, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Mickey Mouse and, perhaps most notably, Amazon CEO and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos.
“The cartoon that was killed criticizes the billionaire tech and media chief executives who have been doing their best to curry favor with incoming President-elect Trump,” she said in her post. “There have been multiple articles recently about these men with lucrative government contracts and an interest in eliminating regulations making their way to Mar-a-lago.”
Telnaes has had cartoons rejected before, she said, for various reasons, but never because of the point of view of the cartoon. One of her cartoons featuring Ted Cruz was pulled down from the site in 2015 after being published, as it featured Cruz as an organ grinder and his two children, who he had started using in political ads, as monkeys.
“While it isn’t uncommon for editorial page editors to object to visual metaphors within a cartoon if it strikes that editor as unclear or isn’t correctly conveying the message intended by the cartoonist, such editorial criticism was not the case regarding this cartoon. To be clear, there have been instances where sketches have been rejected or revisions requested, but never because of the point of view inherent in the cartoon’s commentary. That’s a game changer…and dangerous for a free press,” she said.
Telnaes has worked for the Post since 2008 and has won numerous awards during her tenure there, including a Pulitzer and the Reuben Award. Her final cartoon for them appeared on Dec. 27.
“As an editorial cartoonist, my job is to hold powerful people and institutions accountable. For the first time, my editor prevented me from doing that critical job. So I have decided to leave the Post. I doubt my decision will cause much of a stir and that it will be dismissed because I’m just a cartoonist. But I will not stop holding truth to power through my cartooning, because as they say, ‘Democracy dies in darkness.’”