Democracy Dies in Darkness, indeed.
The official slogan of The Washington Post seems more ironic than anything these days. And it’s not just since Amazon billionaire (trillionaire?) Jeff Bezos bought the paper back in 2013, but more recently after Will Lewis from Rupert Murdoch’s The Wall Street Journal took over as CEO and publisher in January 2024. Cartoonist Michael DeAdder was soon let go in February, despite winning the Herblock Prize for editorial cartooning.
So, after the recent presidential non-endorsement killed by Jeff Bezos himself, we get yet another fiasco from of one of America’s premier newspapers. Or at least what used to be one of them. With ongoing antics at The New York Times and the LA Times, it could be argued there no longer is a national newspaper in the United States.
Source: BBC
A Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist has resigned from the Washington Post after the newspaper refused to publish a cartoon satirical of its billionaire owner Jeff Bezos.
Ann Telnaes, a long-time Washington Post cartoonist, created a cartoon of Mr Bezos and other tycoons kneeling before a statue of President-elect Donald Trump.
She said the paper’s refusal to run the cartoon was a “game changer” and described it as “dangerous for a free press”.
But David Shipley, the editorial page editor at the paper, said he decided not to run the cartoon in order to avoid repetition, not because it mocked the paper’s owner.
In the cartoon, Mr Bezos, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg and OpenAI’s Sam Altman are depicted on their knees giving bags of cash to a statue of Trump.
Mickey Mouse is also depicted prostrate in the cartoon. ABC News – which is owned by Disney – last month agreed to pay $15m to settle a defamation lawsuit filed by Trump.
Ms Telnaes announced her resignation in a Substack post on Friday, saying she had worked for the newspaper since 2008.
And here’s part of what she wrote on her substack:
I’ve worked for the Washington Post since 2008 as an editorial cartoonist. I have had editorial feedback and productive conversations—and some differences—about cartoons I have 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. Until now.
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. 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. The group in the cartoon included Mark Zuckerberg/Facebook & Meta founder and CEO, Sam Altman/AI CEO, Patrick Soon-Shiong/LA Times publisher, the Walt Disney Company/ABC News, and Jeff Bezos/Washington Post owner.
David Shipley asked her to reconsider, and gave his rationalization for killing the cartoon as this:
“Not every editorial judgment is a reflection of a malign force,” the Post’s opinions editor David Shipley said. “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.” Shipley added that he asked Telnaes to reconsider her resignation.
UPDATE: Lots of potential new employers. Here’s one.
UPDATE 2:
Check out DeAdder’s response to her resignation.
