Has again The Washington Post the suspicion that the newspaper’s journalistic independence is subordinate to the business interests of its owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. The Post’s political cartoonist resigned this Saturday after her cartoon about Bezos and other tech billionaires was blocked.
Ann Telnaes, who has been making cartoons for the newspaper since 2008, sees the refusal to publish the drawing as a “danger to press freedom,” she writes in an explanation of the Substack platform. She has included a first sketch of the drawing.
The picture shows Bezos and two other men (Sam Altman of OpenAI and Mark Zuckerberg of Meta) offering large bags of money to a fat, but only half-depicted figure with a very long tie, who stands on a pedestal or podium and which is clearly supposed to depict Donald Trump. A fourth supplicant, with a censor’s red pencil in hand, is on his knees (this identifies the owner of The Los Angeles Times intended, who withheld a voting recommendation for Kamala Harris from the newspaper).
In the drawing, Mickey Mouse has even thrown himself into the dust before the mighty figure. Mickey is the logo of the Disney group, parent company of TV channel ABC, which recently reached a $15 million settlement with Trump to avert a defamation lawsuit filed by the incoming president.
Telnaes, who was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2001, writes that it is not unusual for the editors to discuss with her about drawings she provides. “But never before has a cartoon been shot off of me based on the person or thing I pointed my pen at.”
Extra painful
For The Washington Post Telnaes’ indignant departure is extra painful, because the journalistic independence of the newspaper was also questioned shortly before the presidential elections – by readers and also by its own editors. Bezos, who is heavily dependent on government contracts for, among other things, his space company Blue Origin and Amazon’s cloud services, turned out (as with the Los Angeles Times) to have blocked a commentary that expressed support for Kamala Harris – arguing that the newspaper would never again endorse presidential candidates. Critics saw it as a bow to Trump. More than 250,000 outraged readers subsequently canceled their subscriptionsome prominent journalists ended their cooperation with the newspaper.
The head of the opinion editorial staff of The Washington PostDavid Shipley, disputes in a statement that the drawing was stopped because it mocks Bezos. “Not every editorial judgment reflects a malevolent force,” he wrote in a statement. He is said to have rejected the drawing because the opinion page had just published a column on the same subject and another column was coming. If there was also a cartoon, the newspaper would be repeating itself. He allegedly tried to dissuade Telnaes from her decision to leave.