Cartoonist quits The Washington Post over rejected sketch mocking owner, Trump

WASHINGTON, United States (AFP) — An award-winning political cartoonist for The Washington Post has announced her resignation after a cartoon depicting the newspaper’s billionaire owner groveling before Donald Trump was rejected.

Ann Telnaes posted on Substack late Friday that this was the first time she “had a cartoon killed because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at.”

The cartoon — which she included in her post — depicts Amazon founder and The Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, as well as Facebook and Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg and other media and tech moguls, kneeling and holding up bags of money before a massive Trump.

Also shown is a prostrated Mickey Mouse, the symbol of the Disney Company, which owns ABC News. The television network recently reached a $15 million settlement with Trump after he sued for defamation over reporting on his sexual abuse trial in New York.

Telnaes wrote that while previous sketches of hers had been rejected, this was the first time that had happened because of her “point of view.”

“That’s a game changer... and dangerous for a free press,” she said.

The Washington Post, whose slogan is “democracy dies in darkness,” said Telnaes’s work had not been rejected due to any “malign force.”

“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,” editorial page editor David Shipley said in a statement. “The only bias was against repetition.”

The US media aggressively covered Trump’s chaotic first term, which included two impeachments and ended with his refusal to recognize defeat in the 2020 election — culminating with a mob of his supporters storming Congress.