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Cartoonist Ann Telnaes has resigned from the Washington Post after that paper decided not to run one of her cartoons, perhaps because it was critical of the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos. Telnaes took to Substack to explain her resignation, and she has gotten a lot of sympathy on the left.

First, here is the cartoon: several tech moguls are offering bags of money to, apparently, Donald Trump, while Mickey Mouse–Disney–isn’t offering money but is groveling:

The cartoon doesn’t seem very good to me. I guess I can recognize Bezos, simply because of the bald head. And I get Mickey Mouse. I wouldn’t have recognized the others. This is the controversy:

A Pulitzer prize-winning cartoonist has resigned from the Washington Post after it refused to publish her satirical cartoon showing the newspaper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, kneeling before Donald Trump alongside other technology and media barons.

Ann Telnaes announced her resignation in a Substack post, warning that the Post’s decision not to run the cartoon was a “game changer” and “dangerous for a free press”.

That is a classic instance of the self-importance of liberal journalists. First of all, her complaint makes no sense: the fact that we have a free press means the Post was free either to run the cartoon or not run it, at its discretion.

But let’s assume the Post declined to run the cartoon because it criticized Bezos. (The paper denies that.) So what? There are hundreds if not thousands of newspapers, any of which were free to run the cartoon. And online viewership dwarfs newspaper readership; because the Post didn’t run it, the cartoon has gotten vastly more exposure than it otherwise would have. I see nothing wrong with a newspaper deciding not to mock its owner, if that is what happened. But, in any event, the impact on a “free press” is zero.

The cartoon depicted Bezos, the owner of Amazon, alongside the Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg and the OpenAI founder Sam Altman genuflecting before a statue of Trump and offering bags of cash to the president-elect before his return to the White House. The billionaire tech moguls have contributed millions of dollars to Trump’s inauguration fund as they scramble to build ties with the incoming administration.

Oh, please. How much money have these same moguls contributed to Democrats, in various ways? What do you think is the ratio of Democratic to Republican contributions? Ten to one? Fifty to one? A hundred to one? Has Telnaes drawn any cartoons of “tech barons” offering bags of money to Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer?

The cartoon also showed Mickey Mouse prostrate before Trump, a reference to the decision by ABC News, which is owned by Disney, to pay $15 million to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by the president-elect.

Yes, because George Stephanopoulos falsely and repeatedly said on-air that Trump was “found liable for rape” in the Jean Carroll case. The jury found the opposite. In my view, ABC should have paid more. I take it that Ms. Telnaes disagrees, and wanted ABC to battle to the death to defend its lie and to continue smearing Trump.

There are legitimate threats to our free press and our rights of free speech, all of them emanating from Democrat-controlled branches of government. The puffed-up Washington Post’s decision not to run a bad cartoon is not among them.