• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, January 5, 2025

The Washington Post is receiving new negative publicity from its decision to reject a cartoon showing tech giants, including Post owner Jeff Bezos, bending the knee to Donald Trump. 

Ann Telnaes, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, has resigned over the rejection of her sketch, which is now being widely circulated on the internet. 

"I've worked for the Washington Post since 2008 as an editorial cartoonist," Talnaes writes in a post. "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."

In addition to Bezos, who is also the founder of Amazon.com, the group in the cartoon includes "Mark Zuckerberg/Facebook & Meta founder and CEO, Sam Altman/AI CEO, Patrick Soon-Shiong/LA Times publisher" and the Walt Disney Company/ABC News, Talnaes continues.

Several tech leaders, including Bezos, have showed up at Mar-A-Lago, presumably to curry favor with Trump and protect their business interests. 

Surely, editors have a right to spike cartoons or illustrations that are in bad taste. And it might be argued that ridiculing the author of a publication is also off limits (or not very bright). 

"There will be people who say, 'Hey, you work for a company and that company has the right to expect employees to adhere to what's good for the company,' Talnaes concedes. "That's true except we're talking about news organizations that have public obligations and who are obliged to nurture a free press in a democracy. Owners of such press organizations are responsible for safeguarding that free press -- and trying to get in the good graces of an autocrat-in-waiting will only result in undermining that free press."

But the Post disagrees.

"Not every editorial judgment is a reflection of a malign force," David Shipley, editorial page editor, told NPR. "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. The only bias was against repetition."

But let's give the last word to Telnaes.

"As a member of the Advisory board for the Geneva based Freedom Cartoonists Foundation and a former board member of Cartoonists Rights, I believe that editorial cartoonists are vital for civic debate and have an essential role in journalism," she writes.