Another high-ranking member of the Washington Post's editorial board appears to have left the paper: Cartoonist Anne Telness, who has been at the outlet for 16 years, announced via Substack Friday that she resigned after Copper killed her latest cartoon featuring President-elect Donald Trump.
“The cartoon that was killed slams the billionaire tech and media CEOs who were doing everything they could to curry favor with President-elect Trump,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist wrote on Substack under the headline “Why I Left The Washington Post.” “.
“There have been multiple articles recently about these men with lucrative government contracts and interested in eliminating regulations making their way to Mar-a-Lago,” she wrote. “The group shown in the cartoon included Mark Zuckerberg/Facebook & Meta Founder & CEO Sam Altman/AI CEO Patrick Soon-Shiong/Los Angeles Times Publisher: The Walt Disney Company/ABC News and Jeff Bezos/The Washington Post What is with you.”
She first joined The Washington Post in 2008 as an editorial cartoonist, and got “editorial feedback and productive conversations — and some disagreements — about the cartoons I submitted to the publication, but in all that time I never killed a cartoon over it,” Telnis wrote. Who or what I choose to direct my pen at. yet.”
“Although it is not uncommon for editorial page editors to object to visual metaphors within cartoons if they appear to the editor to be unclear or do not properly convey the cartoonist's intended message, such editorial criticism was not the case with regard to this cartoon.” She continued, “To be clear, there have been instances where drawings have been rejected or edits requested, but not because of the point of view inherent in the cartoon’s caption. This is a game changer…and dangerous for a free press.
She included “a rough cut of the murdered cartoon” in her subcolumn. You can read her full column here.
Telnaes is the latest journalist to leave the Bezos-owned newspaper. Before the election, three journalists resigned from the editorial board in protest over the newspaper's controversial decision not to endorse a presidential candidate, with concerns that it was a way for Bezos to appease Trump. More than 200,000 readers also canceled their digital subscriptions.
Several staff members have since departed, including managing editor Mattia Gould, who is set to become the second-highest-ranking leader in the New York Times' Washington bureau.
At the New York Times' DealBook Summit in New York City last month, Bezos said he may not be the best owner of the newspaper from the perspective of the “appearance” of a conflict of interest, but he defended the decision not to endorse a candidate in the paper's editorial. Pages.
“The pros of doing this were very small and [endorsements] Bezos said the media “increases perceptions of bias if the news media tries to be objective and independent,” adding that the media is “suffering from a crisis of trust.”
It should act like a “voting machine”. “They have to count the votes accurately, and people have to believe that they are counting the votes accurately.”
“It's not all the media's fault,” he continued. “But where we can do something we should do it…we made that decision. “I am proud of this decision.”
Bezos then went on to admit that I am a “terrible newspaper owner from the standpoint of the appearance of conflict… Probably not a day goes by where there isn't an Amazon executive or a Blue Origin executive or some leader of the Bezos Earth Fund.” Meeting with a government official somewhere. Therefore, there will always be manifestations of conflict.”
