Ann Telnaes, who quit Washington Post in protest, wins Pulitzer for 'fearlessness' in commentary

NEW YORK (AP) — A longtime editorial cartoonist for The Washington Post who quit in protest early this year after editors killed her sketch criticizing the Post owner and other media chief executives working to curry favor with Trump has won the Pulitzer Prize for illustrated reporting and commentary.

Ann Telnaes won for “delivering piercing commentary on powerful people and institutions with deftness, creativity – and a fearlessness that led to her departure from the news organization after 17 years,” according to the Pulitzer announcement on Monday.

Her cartoon showed a group of media executives bowing before then President-elect Donald Trump while offering him bags of money, including Post owner and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

Several executives, Bezos among them, had been spotted around that time at Trump’s Florida club Mar-a-Lago. Telnaes accused them of having lucrative government contracts and working to eliminate regulations. Amazon also donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund.

When she quit the newspaper earlier this year, Telnaes that she'd never before had a sketch killed because of the point of view inherent in the cartoon’s commentary. She called that a game-changer and dangerous for a free press.

“As an editorial cartoonist, my job is to hold powerful people and institutions accountable,” Telnaes wrote on the online platform Substack in early January. “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.’”

David Shipley, the newspaper’s editorial page editor at the time, said in a statement after Telnaes quit that he decided to nix the cartoon because the paper had just published a column on the same topic. Shipley then resigned in late February after Bezos, in a major shift, directed that the Post narrow the topics covered by its opinion section to personal liberties and the free market.

The fallout continued in March when a longtime columnist, Ruth Marcus, quit after she said the newspaper’s management decided not to run her commentary critical of Bezos’ policy.

The Post, which made money during the first Trump administration, has been losing money in recent years, Its internal strife largely began last June when Sally Buzbee resigned as executive editor rather than accept a newsroom reorganization. Several prominent Post journalists have since left for other jobs.

Bezos’ decision last fall that the Post would not endorse a presidential candidate — after the editorial staff had prepared to support Democrat Kamala Harris — led to an exodus of subscribers.