It appears that another high-profile member of The Washington Post‘s editorial staff has left the paper: Cartoonist Ann Telnaes, who’s been with the paper 16 years, announced via Substack Friday that she was quitting after the brass killed her latest illustration featuring president-elect Donald Trump.
“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,” Telnaes wrote on Substack in a column titled “Why I Quit The Washington 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. 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.”
Telnaes wrote that she first joined the Post in 2008 as an editorial cartoonist and has 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.”
“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,” she continued. “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 included a “rough of the cartoon killed” in her Substack column. You can read her full column here.
Telnaes is the latest journo to depart the Bezos-owned newspaper. Before the election, three Post journalists stepped down from the editorial board in protest over the publication’s controversial decision not to endorse a presidential candidate, with concerns that it was a way for Bezos to placate Trump. More than 200,000 readers also canceled their digital subscriptions.
Several more staffers have since departed, including managing editor Matea Gold, who’s set to become second-highest ranking leader of the New York Times Washington bureau.
At the New York Times DealBook Summit in NYC last month, Bezos said he may not be the best owner for the paper from the perspective of “the appearance” of conflict of interest, but defended the decision not to support a candidate in the Post’s editorial pages.
“The pluses of doing this were very small and [endorsements] added to the perceptions of bias if news media are going to try to be objective and independent,” Bezos said, adding that media “is suffering from a crisis of trust.”
It should behave like a “voting machine. They have to count the votes accurately and people have to believe that they count the votes accurately.”
“Not all of it is the media’s fault,” he continued. “But where we can do something we should … We made this decision. I am proud of this decision.”
Bezos then went on to acknowledge that “I am a terrible owner for the Post from the point of view of the appearance of conflict … Probably not a single day goes by where some Amazon executive or Blue Origin executive or some Bezos Earth Fund leader isn’t meeting with a government official somewhere. And so there are always going to be appearances of conflict.”
