A Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist has resigned from the Washington Post after the newspaper refused to publish a cartoon mocking the paper’s billionaire owner Jeff Bezos.
Ann Telnaes, a longtime Washington Post cartoonist, created a cartoon of Mr. Bezos and other professionals kneeling in front of a statue of President-elect Donald Trump.
Ms Telnaes announced her resignation on the Substack website on Friday: “In all that time I have never been killed by a cartoon because of who or what I chose to focus my pen on. Until now.”
David Shipley, who is the editor of the editorial page of this paper, said that he decided not to run the cartoon to avoid repetition, not because he was mocking the owner of the paper.
In the cartoon, Mr Bezos, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg and OpenAI’s Sam Altman kneel and hand over bags of money to a statue of Trump.
Mickey Mouse is also shown bowing in the cartoon. ABC News – which is owned by Disney – last month agreed to pay $15m to settle a defamation lawsuit filed by Trump.
“The cartoon that was killed criticizes the big tech and media executives who have done everything in their power to curry favor with President-elect Trump,” Ms. Telnaes wrote in her resignation announcement.
He said the cartoon satirized “these men who have lucrative government contracts and an interest in abolishing laws”.
Ms Telnaes said the Washington Post’s refusal to run the cartoon was a “game changer” and described it as “a threat to the free press”.
But Mr Shipley has told several US outlets that his decision not to publish the cartoon was due to the duplication of another section that had been earmarked for publication.
“I respect Ann Telnaes and everything she has done for The Post. But I have to disagree with her interpretation of events,” he said in a statement obtained by the media. “Not all planning decisions reflect negative energy.”
He added: “My decision was guided by the fact that we had recently published a column on the same topic as the cartoon and had planned another column – this one satirical – to be published.”
Last month, Mr Bezos announced that Amazon would donate $1m to Trump’s foundation and make a cash donation of $1m.
Mr Bezos also described Trump’s re-election victory as an “amazing political comeback” and dined with him at the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida.
The newspaper faced controversy in the weeks before November’s presidential election after Mr Bezos intervened to prevent the editorial board from endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris.
Mr Bezos defended the move, but the newspaper reported it had lost more than 250,000 subscribers following the decision.
The Los Angeles Times, whose owner Patrick Soon-Shiong was also featured in the now-murdered cartoon, did the same and said the newspaper would not publish its endorsement of Harris in October.
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