The Pulitzer-prize winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes has resigned from the Washington Post after the paper refused to publish a cartoon in which its owner, Jeff Bezos, is seen beside three other famous billionaire bigwigs kneeling in subservience to a statue of Donald Trump. Telnaes said the incident was “dangerous for the free press,” in a post published on Substack on Saturday.

Telnaes, who noted that she is on the advisory board for the Geneva-based Freedom Cartoonists Foundation, said, “my job is to hold powerful people and institutions accountable. For the first time, my editor prevented me from doing that critical job.”

She insisted that press organizations and their owners must take responsibility for protecting the free press, and that “trying to get in the good graces of an autocrat-in-waiting will only result in undermining that free press.”

In the cartoon, Bezos, founder and ex-CEO of Amazon, is joined by three other influential corporate titans: Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Meta, Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, and investor Patrick Soon-Shiong, owner of the LA Times. The group hold up bags of money to a larger-than-life Trump statue standing on a decorated pedestal with its head just out of view. The figure of Mickey Mouse, representing the Walt Disney Company, which owns ABC News, lies prostrate at the foot of the Trump’s grand platform.

Ann Telnaes’s rough version of a cartoon she drew for The Washington Post, which was rejected. Image courtesy of Ann Telnaes.

Telnaes has worked for the Washington Post since 2008, having won a Pulitzer in 2001. The D.C.-based cartoonist said that the image featuring Bezos “criticizes the billionaire tech and media chief executives who have been doing their best to curry favor with incoming President-elect Trump.” She suggested that they were motivated by “lucrative government contracts and an interest in eliminating regulations,” and referenced a recent news report that Bezos and Elon Musk visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago, the beach resort that he owns.

Bezos has also joined Altman and Apple’s CEO Tim Cook in pledging $1 million donations towards Trump’s inauguration on January 20. Bezos has fallen in line with other tech chiefs like Altman, Cook, and Musk in voicing his support of Trump. He said that he is “very optimistic” about Trump’s intention to reduce government regulation, adding, “I’m going to help him.”

Jeff Bezos in 2017. Photo: Paul Morigi/Getty Images.

Telnaes stated that she did not believe the Washington Post had made a legitimate editorial criticism of the cartoon. She said in the past she has had preliminary sketches “rejected or revisions requested” for other reasons, “but never because of the point of view inherent in the cartoon’s commentary.”

The Washington Post‘s editorial page editor, David Shipley, said in a statement that he disagreed with Telnaes’s interpretation of what happened. “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,” he said. He asked her to reconsider her resignation.

Last October, in the run up to the U.S. presidential election, Bezos decided to block the publication of an endorsement of Democratic candidate Kamala Harris that the Washington Post had planned to run. The decision caused 300,000 people to cancel their digital subscriptions to the paper, according to NPR. Similarly, 200,000 subscriptions to the LA Times were canceled after Soon-Shiong prevented an endorsement of Harris.

“[Telnaes’s] principled resignation illustrates that while the pen is mightier than the sword, political cowardice once again eclipses journalistic integrity at The Washington Post,” said the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists in a statement published online. “We weep for the loss of this once great newspaper.”