A Cartoonist Just Exposed Everything Wrong With Billionaire-Owned Media

A Pulitzer-winning cartoonist quit after the paper killed her cartoon about billionaire media owners courting Trump. That tells us everything we need to know about who really controls the news.

Editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes has worked at the Washington Post since 2008. During that time, she's had plenty of conversations with editors about her cartoons, and even had some sketches rejected. But as she wrote this week on her

Open Windows

Substack, there was one line that had never been crossed: killing a cartoon "because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at."

Until now.

Why I'm quitting the Washington Post

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The cartoon that finally crossed that line? One criticizing billionaire tech and media executives, including Post owner Jeff Bezos, for their efforts to cozy up to President-elect Donald Trump. The cartoon depicted these titans of industry making their way to Mar-a-Lago, with Meta's Mark Zuckerberg and OpenAI's Sam Altman bringing cash, LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong bearing lipstick, and even Mickey Mouse lying prostrate (a reference to Disney recently paying Trump $16 million to settle a defamation suit).

Here’s a rough draft of the cartoon Telnaes’s editor killed:

A rough draft of Telnaes’s rejected cartoon.

The Post's editorial page editor, David Shipley, claims this was simply about avoiding repetition, telling NPR’s David Folkenflik that they "had just published a column on the same topic as the cartoon and had already scheduled another column—this one a satire—for publication." But this rings hollow given the context of what's been happening at the Post lately.

Remember, this is the same paper that just saw Bezos personally intervene to block an endorsement of Kamala Harris over Trump. That decision led to 300,000 canceled digital subscriptions (about 12% of their total), according to NPR's reporting. Three editorial board staffers quit in protest. For a paper whose motto is literally "Democracy Dies in Darkness," there sure seems to be a lot of self-imposed darkness lately.