Washington Post cartoonist resigns after rejection of Jeff Bezos satire

The cartoon depicts Mr. Bezos, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg and OpenAI’s Sam Altman kneeling and handing wallets to a statue of Trump.

Mickey Mouse is also depicted in a prostrate position in the cartoon. Disney-owned ABC News agreed last month to pay $15 million to settle Trump’s defamation lawsuit.

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

“In all that time, I’ve never killed a cartoon because of who or what I chose to point my pen at,” he said. “Until now.

“Murder cartoon criticizes billionaire tech and media executives doing everything they can to curry favor with President-elect Trump.”

He said the cartoon satirized “these guys who have lucrative government contracts and are interested in deregulation.”

But Mr Shipley told the BBC that the decision not to publish the cartoon was due to a duplication of another work that should have been published.

“I respect Ann Telnaes and everything she has contributed to The Post. But I have to disagree with her interpretation of events,” he said. “Not every editorial decision is the reflection of a malevolent force.”

He added: “My decision was guided by the fact that we published a column on the same topic as the cartoon and already assigned another column – this is satire – for publication.”

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

In 2015, the newspaper retracted one of his sketches of Texas Senator Ted Cruz, which depicted his young daughters as monkeys.

The newspaper explained its decision at that time and said that the editorial policy is to leave children “out of it”.

Last month, Mr. Bezos announced that Amazon would donate $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund and make an in-kind contribution of $1 million.

Mr. Bezos also hailed Trump’s re-election victory as an “extraordinary political comeback” and dined with him at the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida.

The newspaper faced a liberal backlash weeks before the November presidential election after Mr. Bezos blocked its editorial board from endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris.

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

The Los Angeles Times, whose owner Patrick Soon-Shiong is depicted in the now-killed cartoon, took a similar step, saying the paper would not publish an endorsement of Harris in October.