What makes a cartoon controversial? The question arose again this week when commemorating the attack on the editorial office of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdoten years ago. Whether the drawings were tasty or tasteless, the freedom of the image is evident. That was already the case ten years ago, and it is still the case in 2025. Of course, this does not mean that everything that can be posted must also be published. For example, there was discussion about a cartoon of former D66 leader Sigrid Kaag on a broomstick or in a cooking pot, and about stigmatizing cartoons of Moroccans or Mohammed with a bomb on his head. The point is that cartoons are there to put comments or stereotypes in a different light.
That was also what a cartoon by Ann Telnaes was for The Washington Post did. In her cartoon, billionaires gave bags of money to Donald Trump, while Mickey Mouse threw himself at the feet of the future American president to keep the man who has repeatedly declared the press the enemy of the people friendly. It was a sharp and painful drawing with Mickey Mouse, who had already reached a settlement with Trump on behalf of the Disney group, parent company of TV channel ABC, to avert a defamation lawsuit. And with Jeff Bezos (also owner of The Washington Post), Sam Altman (OpenAI) and Mark Zuckerberg (Meta) who do not want to get in the way of the new leader. That the fourth supplicant had to represent the censor issuing a statement of support and voting advice for Kamala Harris respectively The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times managed to keep out, makes the blocking of the cartoon by The Post’s opinion editors even more painful.
Cartoons do not always accurately reflect reality, and that is not possible. Sometimes there is criticism when the powerless in society are insulted, but in the case of Telnaes it was the most powerful who were ridiculed. That does not make the cartoon controversial, the decision not to publish the cartoon even more so. The response from the opinion editors of The Washington Post (that an article and a column had already been published about the role of billionaires in the Trump era) sounds like a farce that already makes self-censorship in the future Trump era painfully clear.
It is the duty of democracy and therefore of newspapers to protect cartoons. Political cartoons are about power, and the best cartoonists are the lice that society needs. Telnaes’ cartoon not only warns about billionaires who want to ingratiate themselves with Trump, but also about the consequences. And this was the day before Mark Zuckerberg appointed prominent Republican politician Joel Kaplan as director of Meta and indicated that, like X, he would from now on refrain from fact checks by experts. For example, messages containing fake news on Facebook or Instagram now have more of a chance to spread unchecked.
Freedom of image – and expression – is now driven by a perverse combination of political and financial power, we see The Washington Post which Jeff Bezos has owned since 2013. In such a world, money and misuse of algorithms determine what can and cannot be said and signed. It doesn’t take a cartoon to know that a story where billionaires control the media landscape ends badly.