A cartoonist has decided to quit her job at the Washington Post after an editor rejected her sketch of the newspaper's owner and other media executives bowing before President-elect Donald Trump.

What You Need To Know

  • William Lewis, the publisher and CEO of The Washington Post, announced that the paper will not endorse a presidential candidate this year or in any future presidential election

  • The third-largest newspaper in the country, the Washington Post has endorsed presidential candidates every election year since 1976 when it supported Jimmy Carter; in 2020, it endorsed Democrats Joe Biden and Kamala Harris

  • The decision comes three days after the Los Angeles Times also decided against endorsing a presidential candidate this year, prompting the paper’s editorials editor to resign

  • The Washington Post's announcement comes the same day that the Philadelphia Inquirer endorsed Harris for president; The New York Times has also endorsed Harris

Ann Telnaes posted a message Friday on the online platform Substack saying that she drew a cartoon showing a group of media executives bowing before Trump while offering him bags of money, including Post owner and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

Telnaes wrote that the cartoon was intended to criticize “billionaire tech and media chief executives who have been doing their best to curry favor with incoming President-elect Trump." Several executives, Bezos among them, have been spotted at Trump’s Florida club Mar-a-Lago. She accused them of having lucrative government contracts and working to eliminate regulations.

Telnaes said that she's never before had a cartoon rejected because of its inherent messaging and that such a move is dangerous for a free press.

“As an editorial cartoonist, my job is to hold powerful people and institutions accountable," Telnaes wrote. "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.’”

The Association of American Editorial Cartoonists issued a statement Saturday accusing the Post of “political cowardice" and asking other cartoonists to post Telnaes' sketch with the hashtag #StandWithAnn in a show of solidarity.

“Tyranny ends at pen point,” the association said. “It thrives in the dark, and the Washington Post simply closed its eyes and gave in like a punch-drunk boxer.”

The Post's communications director, Liza Pluto, provided The Associated Press on Saturday with a statement from David Shipley, the newspaper's editorial page editor. Shipley said in the statement that he disagrees with Telnaes' “interpretation of events.”

He said he decided to nix the cartoon because the paper had just published a column on the same topic as the cartoon and was set to publish another.

“Not every editorial judgement is a reflection of a malign force. ... The only bias was against repetition," Shipley said.