The Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist has resigned from The Washington Post after the paper refused to publish a satirical cartoon of the newspaper's billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos.
Anne Telnis, a longtime Washington Post cartoonist, created a cartoon of Bezos and other businessmen kneeling before a statue of President-elect Donald Trump.
Ms Telnaes announced her resignation in a Substack post on Friday: “In all that time I have never been so murdered by who or what I chose to point my pen at. Until now.”
David Shipley, the newspaper's editorial page editor, said he decided not to publish the cartoon to avoid repetition, and not because it mocked the newspaper's owner.
The cartoon shows Bezos, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg and OpenAI's Sam Altman kneeling as they offer bags of cash to a Trump statue.
Mickey Mouse has also been depicted prostrate in the cartoon. ABC News – owned by Disney – agreed last month to pay $15 million to settle Trump's defamation lawsuit.
“The cartoon that was killed was critical of billionaire tech and media CEOs who were doing everything they could to curry favor with President-elect Trump,” Telnis wrote in announcing her resignation.
She said the cartoon mocked “those men who have lucrative government contracts and are interested in eliminating regulations.”
Ms. Telnes said the Washington Post's refusal to publish the cartoons was a “game changer” and called it “dangerous to the free press.”
But Shipley told the BBC that his decision not to publish the cartoon was due to the repetition of another piece due to be published.
“I respect Anne Tilnis and everything she has done for The Washington Post,” he said in a statement. “But I must disagree with her interpretation of events.” “Not every editorial judgment is a reflection of a malevolent force.”
He added: “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 satirical one – for publication.”
Last month, Bezos announced that Amazon would donate $1 million to Trump's inauguration fund and make an in-kind contribution of $1 million.
Bezos also described Trump's re-election victory as an “extraordinary political comeback” and had dinner with him at the president-elect's Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida.
The newspaper faced liberal backlash weeks before the November presidential election, after Bezos intervened to prevent the editorial board from endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris.
Bezos defended the move, but the newspaper reported that it lost more than 250,000 subscribers after the decision.
The Los Angeles Times, whose owner Patrick Soon-Shiong also appeared in the now-slain cartoon, took a similar step and said the newspaper would not publish its endorsement of Harris in October.
