EGN NEWS DESK
Ann Telnaes, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist for The Washington Post, mentioned on Friday night that she was resigning after the newspaper’s opinions part rejected a cartoon depicting The Post’s proprietor, Jeff Bezos, genuflecting towards a statue of President-elect Donald J. Trump.
In a short assertion posted to Substack, Ms. Telnaes — who has labored at The Post since 2008 — known as the newspaper’s choice to kill her cartoon a “recreation changer” that was “harmful for a free press.”
“In all that point I’ve by no means had a cartoon killed due to who or what I selected to purpose my pen at,” she wrote. “Until now.”
Ms. Telnaes included a draft of her cartoon in her Substack submit. In addition to Mr. Bezos, the founding father of Amazon, the cartoon depicted Meta’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg; Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief government; Patrick Soon-Shiong, the proprietor of The Los Angeles Times; and Mickey Mouse, the company mascot of the Walt Disney Company.
David Shipley, The Post’s opinions editor, mentioned in a press release that he revered Ms. Telnaes and all she had given to The Post “however should disagree along with her interpretation of occasions.”
“Not each editorial judgment is a mirrored image of a malign drive,” Mr. Shipley mentioned within the assertion. “My choice was guided by the truth that we had simply revealed a column on the identical matter because the cartoon and had already scheduled one other column — this one a satire — for publication. The solely bias was towards repetition.”
Mr. Shipley added that he had spoken with Ms. Telnaes by telephone on Friday and had requested her to rethink resigning. During the decision, Mr. Shipley mentioned he needed to talk with Ms. Telnaes on Monday, after they’d taken the weekend to assume issues over. He later inspired her to carry off on quitting to see if they may work out the state of affairs in accordance along with her ideas.
Ms. Telnaes didn’t reply to requests for remark.
Matt Wuerker, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist for Politico, known as the choice to kill Ms. Telnaes’s cartoon “spineless,” including that the storied Post cartoonist Herbert Block, generally known as Herblock, and Ben Bradlee, a former editor of The Post, had been “spinning, kicking and screaming of their graves.”
