The Washington Post would not have dared kill a piece by its courageous political cartoonist Herbert Block, known to the world as Herblock—and he would not have accepted such behavior if they had. As it happens, Pulitzer Prize–winning Post cartoonist Ann Telnaes is cut from the same cloth.
Last week, editorial page editor David Shipley rejected Telnaes’ cartoon that lampooned media and tech titans for abasing themselves before President-elect Donald Trump, and she summarily quit the newspaper. It was a courageous act.
Herblock coined the term “McCarthyism” while mounting daily attacks on Senator Joe McCarthy’s abuse of power.
As she wrote in a Jan. 4 Substack post titled “Why I’m Quitting The Washington Post”: “I’ve worked for The Washington Post since 2008 as an editorial cartoonist. 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. Until now.”
Until now Telnaes had not comically blasted Amazon founder and Post owner Jeff Bezos. The first straw was Bezos’ decision in October to block publication of a planned endorsement of Vice President Harris over Trump in the waning days of the 2024 election. The last straw was post-election visits by top tech CEOs, including Bezos, to Trump’s Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, as well as the seven-figure contributions several promised to make toward his inauguration. The cartoon also features Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Los Angeles Times publisher Patrick Soon-Shiong, and the Walt Disney Company/ABC News. She submitted a sketch before Christmas.
Sketch of a rejected editorial cartoon that caused Ann Telnaes to resign from The Washington Post.
“I’m very used to being edited,” Telnaes told me in an email. As she added on Substack, “While it isn’t uncommon for editorial page editors to object to visual metaphors within a cartoon if it strikes that editor as unclear or isn’t correctly conveying the message intended by the cartoonist, such editorial criticism was not the case regarding this cartoon. To be clear, there have been instances where sketches have been rejected or revisions requested, but never because of the point of view inherent in the cartoon’s commentary. That’s a game changer … and dangerous for a free press.”
When I was art director of The New York Times Op-Ed page, although our policy was not to give columnist status to any featured editorial cartoonist, some of our freelance illustrations were changed or killed a few times a month, owing to an editor’s interpretation—sometimes it was caprice, yet often for sound rationales, challenging my ego but not my integrity.
Editorial page cartoonists—and especially Herblock at the Post—usually have the freedom to say what they want. “We are visual opinion makers,” Telnaes affirms.
In a statement shared with NPR, Shipley said he respected Telnaes’ contributions to the Post but took issue with her interpretation of events. “Not every editorial judgment is a reflection of a malign force,” he said. “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 satire—for publication. The only bias was against repetition.”
Telnaes counters, “My job is to hold powerful people and institutions accountable. For the first time, my editor prevented me from doing that critical job. So I have decided to leave the Post. I doubt my decision will cause much of a stir and that it will be dismissed because I’m just a cartoonist. But I will not stop holding truth to power through my cartooning, because as they say, ‘Democracy dies in darkness.’”
Herblock would certainly agree.
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