A cartoonist has decided to quit her job at The Washington Post after an editor rejected her sketch of the newspaper’s owner and other media executives bowing before president-elect Donald Trump.
Advertisement
On Friday, Ann Telnaes posted a message on the online platform Substack saying that she drew a cartoon showing a group of media executives bowing before Trump while offering him bags of money, including Post owner and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
Telnaes wrote that the cartoon was intended to criticise “billionaire tech and media chief executives who have been doing their best to curry favour with incoming US president-elect Trump.” Several executives, Bezos among them, have been spotted at Trump’s Florida club Mar-a-Lago. She accused them of having lucrative government contracts and working to eliminate regulations.
Telnaes said that she has never had a cartoon rejected because of its inherent messaging and that such a move is dangerous for a free press.
“As an editorial cartoonist, my job is to hold powerful people and institutions accountable,” Telnaes wrote.
Advertisement
“For the first time, my editor prevented me from doing that critical job. So I have decided to leave the Post. I doubt my decision will cause much of a stir and that it will be dismissed because I’m just a cartoonist. But I will not stop holding truth to power through my cartooning, because, as they say, ‘Democracy dies in darkness.’”