The Washington Post’s cartoon team has taken a measure of revenge on the newspaper’s decision to avoid making a formal presidential endorsement with a dark formless image clearly designed to skewer the “Democracy Dies in Darkness” slogan that the outlet adopted during billionaire Jeff Bezos’s ownership.
The image was published hours after it was revealed that Bezos, who has owned the paper since 2012, had pulled the plug on a prepared endorsement of Kamala Harris over Donald Trump in the 5 November election.
The cartoon commentary was created by Pulitzer prize-winning illustrator Ann Telnaes, who is known for her incisive political representations.
Related: ‘Anticipatory obedience’: newspapers’ refusal to endorse shines light on billionaire owners’ motives
In 2000, she contributed an image of the two presidential candidates at the time, Al Gore and George W Bush, as choice between two boring brands of breakfast cereal.
“We’ve got Gore Bran, … and then we have Bush, who, at the time, was thought to be quite a lightweight. I had him as a Frosted Flake,” she later recalled.
The decision by the Post to forego a political endorsement comes days after the Los Angeles Times made a similar decision. In both cases, the decision has caused newsroom uproar, resignations and canceled subscriptions.
Former Washington Post editor Marty Baron criticized Bezos’s decision as “cowardice, a moment of darkness that will leave democracy as a casualty”. Baron said it was an invitation for Trump to “further intimidate” the media after threatening to exact retribution against all who opposed him if he returns to power.
Baron later noted that the paper’s editorial board had expressed opinions of US House and Senate races “but if they think readers can make up their own minds, then sure … maybe they should decide just not to run editorials at all”.
“If their philosophy is that readers can make up their own minds on big issues they face in this democracy, then don’t run any editorials,” Baron said on CNN. “But the fact is they decided not to run editorials in this one instance, 11 days before an election.”
The Associated Press reported that Trump briefly met with executives of Bezos’s space exploration company Blue Origin on Friday after his newspaper had spiked its endorsement of Harris.
The Columbia Journalism Review said the Post’s decision not to make an endorsement amounted to what Yale University history professor Timothy Snyder termed “anticipatory obedience”.
Bezos’s Post adopted the “Democracy Dies in Darkness” slogan in 2017. According to the newspaper, Bezos heard it from the Post’s renowned investigative journalist Bob Woodward, who in turn said he had read it in a judicial opinion involving a case centering on the US constitutional amendment calling for a free press.
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