Salud to cartoonist Ann Telnaes, who quit The Washington Post after a cartoon critical of Management — and by Management, I mean Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Patrick Soon-Shiong, and Mickey Fuckin’ Mouse, who are all managing to affix their chapped lips to the Pestilence-Erect’s ass at once — got croaked by the WaPo’s editorial-page bots.
At her Substack HQ, Telnaes explains:
As an editorial cartoonist, my job is to hold powerful people and institutions accountable. 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.”
Ho, ho. “Just a cartoonist.” Telnaes knows, as I do, that a sharp pen can puncture a gasbag as thoroughly as a sword, and encourages onlookers to snicker at the well-deserved deflation.
As Boss Tweed once said after getting righteously stuck by cartoonist Thomas Nast:
“Let’s stop those damned pictures. I don’t care so much what the papers write about me — my constituents can’t read, but damn it, they can see pictures.”
I kinda wish I still had a WaPo subscription to cancel. Mebbe I’ll sign back up so I can cancel the fucker again.
See Mike Peterson at The Daily Cartoonist for more about Telnaes and her stellar work.
Mad Blog Media 
When plutocrats control editorial content, democracy is in trouble.
They don’t even bother to hide it anymore. Corruption in plain sight and most folks still don’t believe it.
Such a great line: “They call it the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.”
I miss ol’ George.
Who did more to change our collective definition of what is socially acceptable: George Carlin via a five minute skit about the 7 Words? Or a million essayists, philosophers, priests, and politicians, all pontificating until they’re blue in the face?
Cheese Tits!
From Swift to Twain to Mencken to Carlin, they’ve shown time and time again that a single sentence of comedy — or just one panel of a cartoon — can do more damage that a metric shitte-tonne of lawyers and PR folks.
George could really do the business. Here’s an old Ed Sullivan bit that includes one of my personal faves, his observations about Muhammad Ali.
He was justifiably famous for pushing the limits until no one could remember where they used to be. But, being a studious wordsmith, he was also a pro about taking his core message and dialing it in exactly to the specifications of the more mainstream platforms he was visiting. His G rated stuff was just as funny as his NC-17 offerings.
Carlin told Jon Stewart in “40 Years of Comedy” that it wasn’t all about shtick and getting laughs, it was about oratory and rhetoric, which Merriam-Webster defines as “the art of speaking or writing effectively.” He was out to make us laugh and think, playing his music to get us dancing along.
Bezos- a new chapter to profiles in courage, mayhap?
The thing I don’t get is, what the hell’s the point of getting stinkin’ rich if you still have to kiss some oinking pig’s stanky ass?
Because he can never have enough.
Nast, Oliphant, Herblock. Those cartoons had more power than a million words. Good for Telnaes for telling Management to shove it up its ass.
Jeff MacNelly was another one of the greats. He left us too soon, alas. Three Pulitzers and dead of lymphoma at 52.
Jim Morin. Plenty others.
I’ll add my wooden nickels’ worth:
I thought this country left royalty behind when it departed the old continent? Why is it though that we feel that we must bow down to an individual we elect to lead us? Isn’t that individual simply a figurehead? One who can easily be replaced with the next in line? Oh! That’s right! We are controlled by our value. As defined to us by how much we have. And that which we have is that which we work, steal, connive, backstab, kill, and pleasure for. We are a well-marketed species. We do what we are told so that we are accepted. Because that is what we are told. Those like Ann Telnaes simply remind us of how it actually is, and of course, those that lead us can’t have too much of that. We might get it in our minds that we don’t need it anymore.
O, our fellow Americans can’t get enough of royalty. They follow the Brit trouser stains as though they were some extended-play version of the Beatles.
The Kennedys were as close as we’ve come to a homegrown version of the Windsors, I think.
And hell, it goes largely unremarked upon when some family member replaces a defunct congresscritter, as though the gig were a hereditary title.
Thank Dog for the funny people who remind us of the jokes being played on all of us more or less constantly.
I’m not one to leave comments all over the internet, but Ann Telnaes’s resignation leaves me doing a slow burn. I didn’t cancel my WaPost subscription when Bezos refused to allow the Post to endorse Harris, and I didn’t cancel it after his lame explanation that followed. I came close, but after some thought I decided that a mass exodus of subscribers from the Post would only result in the loss of a lot of jobs occupied by some pretty good journalists.
Now this — for which there is no explanation other than bending the knee before the Orange Disaster even takes office. On top of that, I scanned through the Post at about 8:30 PM last night and there was no mention anywhere about the resignation.
So much for transparency. As I read somewhere, “Democracy dies in darkness.” And the ultimate hypocrisy is Bezos was given credit for that phrase by a former editor.
As Timothy Snyder said back in the fall: “Don’t obey in advance.” Bezos, the owner of the LA Times, ABC, and who knows how many others have already done that.
I’ll look elsewhere for news. It won’t be long before the good people who are left leave the Post. I’ll start looking for news elsewhere.
As an addition to John’s previous comment: We need to do all that we can to assist others around us to consider their news sources to insure they are getting true and accurate reporting. It’s so very clear how easy it is for any of us to fall into the trap of only wanting to hear what we want to hear, and to miss the hard truth that exists in the real world.
Vetting a news source is a bitch. In the Before-Time, when I was a sprout learning my trade and dashing round from Maine to Spokane and San Diego to Seattle, it was no trouble at all to find a solid local/regional newspaper to devour with your eggs and sausage. Sometimes more than one, and in the same city, too.
But consolidation and vulture capital have thinned that venerable herd. And now it’s tough to find a paper that isn’t a zombie, held in thrall by Gannett or some other chop shop that decimates the staff, sells off the real estate and equipment, and fills the shrinking page count with whatever.
Have a look at the websites of the Coloradoan, Des Moines Register, Burlington Free Press, and Arizona Republic, for instance. A little local news and a lot of “shared content.” Centralized editing and design “studios.” Outsourced printing. The Albuquerque Journal prints in Santa Fe. The Pueblo Chieftain and Colorado Springs Gazette print in Denver. The Chieftain was once a regional hub that printed dozens of smaller papers; its takeover by Gannett, which shut down its printing operation, left a lot of them twisting in the wind.
Not a big deal, you might think. But printing out of town means earlier deadlines for anyone who still works in any given newsroom, so what may land on your doorstop in the morning may be full of what we used to deride as “Yesterday’s News Tomorrow.”
Have a squint at the “newsroom directory” of the Chieftain. Seven people, one of them a “planner/producer,” whatever the hell that is. When I worked there in the Eighties we had four or five editors on the copy desk alone; there were three more on the city desk. And those were just the editors — we had local reporters, sports, features, and business departments, a man at the Statehouse, and so on and so forth.
So you have to look very, very closely at your “local” newspaper to see if (a) it is in fact, local (both the Journal and The New Mexican are locally owned), and (2) an actual newspaper and not some walking-dead sham that’s designed to serve shareholders instead of readers.
For now, despite being owned by Gannett, the Detroit Free Press is still a news source I read. And this blog of course. The Freep has actual reporters and editors who are unafraid to either look behind the one-line news feed curtain, or dig deep enough to raise a ruckus. Most times the articles have the reporters name and email so’s you can “enlighten” them should you feel the need. And if you do and are civil, they often respond. I know it’s a matter of time before the Freep will get perverted as well but in the meantime they get my subscription and support.
It may help that the Freep is still a union shop. Isn’t their contract up for negotiation? I think the most recent deal was for 2022-24.
Well, we’re keeping the WaPo subscription, but I gotta ask at what point it will cross the line from news with a side helping of toadying, to toadying with a side helping of news, where Fox, OAN etc are.
A smart feller could make his pile selling mink kneepads and single-malt mouthwash to these rich folks.