A Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist has resigned from the Washington Post after the company refused to publish cartoons satirizing its billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos.
Ann Telnaes, a longtime Washington Post cartoonist, created a cartoon of Bezos and other tycoons kneeling before a statue of President-elect Donald Trump.
She described the newspaper’s refusal to run the cartoon as a “game changer” and “dangerous to a free press”.
But David Shipley, the paper’s editorial page editor, said he decided not to run the cartoon not because it ridiculed the paper’s owners but to avoid repetition.
The cartoon shows Mr Bezos, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg and OpenAI’s Sam Altman kneeling and giving a bag of cash to a Trump statue.
In the cartoon, Mickey Mouse is also depicted lying down. Disney-owned ABC News agreed last month to pay $15 million to settle a defamation lawsuit filed by Trump.
Mr. Telnaes announced his resignation in a Substack post on Friday, saying he had worked at the newspaper since 2008.
“In all my years, I have never had a comic ruined by who or what I chose to aim my pen at,” she wrote. “until now.
“The slain cartoon criticizes billionaire tech and media CEOs who have been doing their best to curry favor with President-elect Trump.”
She said the cartoon satirizes “those who have lucrative government contracts and are interested in deregulation.”
But Mr Shipley told the BBC the decision not to publish the cartoon was because it was a repetition of other works scheduled for publication.
“I respect Ann Telnaes and everything she has provided to the Post, but I disagree with her interpretation of events,” he said in a statement. “Not all editorial judgments reflect malevolent forces.”
He added, “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, satire) to be published.”
This is not the first time one of Mr. Telnaes’ cartoons has been published by the Washington Post.
In 2015, the newspaper retracted one of her sketches depicting Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s young daughters as monkeys.
Explaining its decision at the time, the newspaper said its editorial policy was to keep children “out of it”.
Last month, Mr. Bezos announced that Amazon would donate $1 million to President Trump’s inauguration fund and $1 million in kind.
Mr. Bezos also described Mr. Trump’s re-election victory as an “extraordinary political comeback” and dined with him at the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida.
The paper faced a liberal backlash in the weeks leading up to the November presidential election after Mr. Bezos intervened to block its editorial board from endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris.
Bezos defended the move, but the newspaper reported that it lost more than 250,000 subscribers following the decision.
The Los Angeles Times, whose now-slain cartoon features owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, is taking similar action, saying it will no longer run articles supporting Harris in October.
