Editorial Cartoons and Free Speech

It’s been on my mind to write about my friend, cartoonist Ann Telnaes, who quit her job at the Washington Post in protest a few days ago. Here is her Substack piece about her decision to leave. It is a very sad thing, and the Post is losing a great cartoonist, when they didn’t have to.

Ann decided to resign from her job as online editorial cartoonist because the editors would not run a cartoon she drew that was critical of owner Jeff Bezos; it’s an illustration of Bezos bowing to a Trump statue, offering a sack of money. David Shipley, WaPo Editorial Page editor explained that he “nixed the cartoon because it was too similar to the theme of a previously published column, as well as a satire piece that was being drafted.”

“Yet another piece in the span of a few days struck me as overkill,” Shipley wrote.

“This is a subjective judgment, but it is a subjective judgment in sync with a longstanding approach,” he continued. “In my time here, we have focused on reducing the number of articles we publish on a given topic and from the same point of view within a given time frame — all as a way to improve the overall quality and variety of our report.”

“To that same end, I did not feel the cartoon was strong. Could it have been made better? Possibly,” Shipley went on. “In fact, we’d recently worked with Ann on a…