DEMOCRACY DIES?

Cartoon of Jeff Bezos That His Paper Axed Goes Viral

An editorial cartoonist quit her job at The Washington Post after her manager killed a cartoon that criticized Bezos.

A Pulitzer-winning editorial cartoonist revealed that she quit her job at The Washington Post after management axed her drawing of billionaires—including Jeff Bezos, the paper’s owner—bending the knee to Donald Trump.

Last month, Bezos, the immensely wealthy founder of Amazon, dined at Mar-a-Lago and his company donated $1 million to Trump’s upcoming inauguration. But ahead of the election, Bezos drew fire after the Post‘s management shut down the editorial board’s plan to endorse Kamala Harris.

In a post on her Substack, Ann Telnaes said that she drew a cartoon that criticized corporate titans—including Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, and Patrick Soon-Shiong, in addition to Bezos—for their efforts to curry favor with the president-elect. (Like Amazon, tech giants Apple and Facebook also ponied up $1 million for Trump’s inauguration, reported Axios.)

However, for the first time in her career, Telnaes said the paper killed the cartoon because of whom it targeted.

She wrote, “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.”

According to Telnaes, the decision represented a failure of the newspaper’s obligation “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,” she added.

In a statement to The New York Times, the Post’s Opinions editor, David Shipley, said that he respects Telnaes “but must disagree with her interpretation of events.”

“Not every editorial judgment is a reflection of a malign force,” he said. “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.”

Nevertheless, Telnaes’ story and the cartoon itself—a draft of which showed the businessmen kneeling as they raised bags of money up to a large figure above them—went viral on social media, sparking a wave of criticism against Bezos and his newspaper.

“Democracy dies at The Washington Post,” wrote Norman Ornstein, a contributing editor at The Atlantic, in an X post—an allusion to the paper’s slogan, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

Meanwhile, Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren shared the cartoon on X and wrote, “Big Tech executives are bending the knee to Donald Trump and it’s no surprise why: Billionaires like Jeff Bezos like paying a lower tax rate than a public school teacher.”

The situation is just the latest crisis over the paper’s independence from its owner. Bezos’ blocking of the paper’s Harris endorsement in October prompted two columnists to leave, two editorial board members to resign, and more than 200,000 readers to cancel their subscriptions.

However, the billionaire defended the decision despite the uproar.

“Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, ‘I’m going with Newspaper A‘s endorsement,’” he wrote in a late October op-ed in the Post. “None. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one.”

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Liam ArchackiNews Reporter

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