Washington Post cartoonist quits after satire of Jeff Bezos is rejected

A Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist has resigned from the Washington Post after the newspaper refused to publish a cartoon mocking billionaire owner Jeff Bezos.

Ann Telnaes, a long-time photographer for the Washington Post, created a painting of Mr Bezos and other tycoons kneeling before a statue of President-elect Donald Trump.

He said the paper’s refusal to run the cartoon was a “game changer” and described it as “a threat to free publishers”.

But David Shipley, the paper’s editorial page editor, said he decided to run the cartoons to avoid repetition, not because they were insulting to the paper’s owner.

In the footage, Bezos, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg and OpenAI’s Sam Altman are shown kneeling down handing bags of money to a statue of Trump.

Mickey Mouse is also shown kneeling in the pictures. ABC News – which is owned by Disney – last month agreed to pay $15m to settle a defamation suit brought by Mr Trump.

Ms Telnaes announced her resignation on Friday, saying she had worked at the newspaper since 2008.

“In all that time I have never had a painting killed because of who or what I chose to point my pen at,” he wrote. “Until now.

“The butchered cartoon criticizes the billionaire tech and media magnates who have been doing everything they can to please President-elect Trump.”

He said the cartoon mocked “these men who have lucrative government contracts and a passion for deregulation”.

But Mr Shipley told the BBC that his decision not to publish the cartoon was because he had to revise another piece for publication.

“I respect Ann Telnaes and everything she has contributed to The Post. But I have to disagree with her interpretation of events,” he said in a statement. “Not every editorial decision reflects negative influence.”

He added: “My decision was guided by the fact that we had just published a section on the same theme of the cartoon and had already prepared another section – this one satirical – for publication.”

This is not the first time one of Ms Telnaes’s cartoons has been suspended by the Washington Post.

In 2015, the newspaper removed one of its cartoons that depicted the young daughters of Texas Senator Ted Cruz as monkeys.

Commenting on its decision at the time, the newspaper said its editorial policy was to leave children “away”.

Last month, Mr. Bezos announced that Amazon will donate $1m to Trump’s inaugural fund and make a $1m donation.

Mr Bezos also called Trump’s election victory a “political comeback” and dined with the president-elect at Mar-a-Lago in Florida.

The newspaper faced controversy in the weeks before November’s presidential election after Bezos intervened to block the editorial board from endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris.

Mr Bezos defended the move, but the newspaper said it had lost more than 250,000 subscribers following the decision.

The Los Angeles Times, whose owner Patrick Soon-Shiong is also featured in the now-deceased photo, did the same and said the newspaper would not publish its endorsement of Harris in October.