Ann Telnaes is a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist who drew stylish and irreverent cartoons for The Washington Post for over 15 years. But she quit her job on Friday after the Post rejected one of her cartoons. The sketch depicted Jeff Bezos, who owns the Post and founded Amazon, alongside other billionaire executives, genuflecting before President-elect Donald Trump.
The cartoon was a reference to how those executives have been donating money to Trump’s inauguration fund and making the pilgrimage to glad-hand the new boss at Mar-a-Lago. “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,” Telnaes wrote in a post on Substack announcing her resignation. “Until now.”
We don’t know what happened behind closed doors, but the damage to the Post’s reputation for independence is already done.
The Post’s opinions editor, David Shipley, said in a statement that he disagreed with “her interpretation of events” and that his 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.”
We don’t know what happened behind closed doors, but the damage to the Post’s reputation for independence is already done. And the origin of its crisis isn’t Telnaes’ resignation. It’s Bezos’ decision to quash an editorial endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris just weeks before the election.
In October, the Post, citing interviews with people briefed on the decision, reported that Bezos refused to publish the editorial board’s endorsement of Harris, which had already been written. In response to widespread backlash, Bezos didn’t apologize for his eleventh-hour intervention but instead wrote an essay justifying it, and he attempted to frame his action as purely about bolstering the paper’s reputation for objectivity.
As I wrote at the time, the way Bezos intervened — at the last second, in the heat of a close election, toward an editorial posture that could help enrich him and at odds with his own editorial staff — made his decision appear more expedient than principled: There is no way to disentangle his endorsement maneuvering from his potential concern about Trump’s reputation for favoritism and vindictiveness. And unless Bezos makes some kind of serious effort to create a firewall between him and the paper’s editorial policy, then he has set a precedent for meddling that nobody at the Post — or any of its readers — will forget.
We’re now seeing the implications of that trust crisis borne out by Telnaes’ resignation, which has gone viral, sparked a new round of criticism of Bezos’ stewardship of the Post and inspired cartoonists across the country to use their art to express solidarity with her. Bezos has encumbered the Post with a credibility problem that’s going to be hard to get rid of. He set this all in motion by a failure to understand — or indifference to — common-sense principles that organizations use to preserve their independence. It’s possible that Bezos’ ham-fisted quashing of the pre-election editorial was a one-off action. But even if the Post continues to publish quality reporting that sometimes doesn’t portray Amazon in the most positive of lights, Bezos’ intervention has raised a permanent question about the true source of any decision or coverage at the paper that might serve his business interests. The Post is a storied journalistic institution, and with good reason. Its newsroom still teems with excellent, hard-nosed reporters — who will need the support of their bosses more than ever as we enter Trump’s second term. They should have the resources and confidence to cover Washington as aggressively as possible. They deserve an ownership structure or institutional safeguards that will allow them to reclaim their independence from Bezos.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. Previously, he worked at Vox, HuffPost and Politico, and he has also been published in, among other places, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Nation, and The Intercept. You can sign up for his free politics newsletter by clicking the link at the top of this bio. 
