Being a newspaper cartoonist can be controversial. In January, Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post cartoonist Ann Telnaes resigned from the paper after her cartoon was blocked.
Cartoons and the power of billionaires’
She wrote a 4 January Substack piece, ‘Why I am quitting The Washington Post’, in which she described the cartoon’s content:
“The cartoon that was killed criticizes the billionaire tech and media chief executives who have been doing their best to curry favor with incoming President-elect Trump. There have been multiple articles recently about these men with lucrative government contracts and an interest in eliminating regulations making their way to Mar-a-Lago. The group in the cartoon included Mark Zuckerberg/Facebook & Meta founder and CEO, Sam Altman/AI CEO, Patrick Soon-Shiong/LA Times publisher, the Walt Disney Company/ABC News, and Jeff Bezos/Washington Post owner.”
She concludes:
“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’”.
Causing a stir, anticipatory obedience
Well, she was wrong about her resignation not causing ‘much of a stir’. In the context of The Washington Post’s decision in October 2024 not to make a presidential endorsement for the first time in 36 years, her action and the blocked cartoon prompted a wide-ranging discussion.
The Telnaes cartoon also stimulated discussion more broadly about what impact the Trump administration is having on the media. Yale Historian Timothy Snyder describes the process as “anticipatory obedience”. In On Tyranny, Snyder writes: “Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want and then offer themselves without being asked.” Telnaes’ cartoon captures exactly that process of anticipatory obedience by the tech oligarchs.
And the same applies to the Disney decision to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by Trump for $15mn. And now Jeff Bezos, The Washington Post’s billionaire owner, has announced that his newspaper will only publish opinion pieces that reflect his personal ideology of “personal liberties and free markets”.
As Democratic Party lawyer Marc E Elias commented: “Knee bent. Ring kissed. Another legacy news outlet chooses obedience.”
Trump and media control
Trump is disrupting how the US media functions in other ways. Take that notorious confrontation in the White House between Zelensky, Trump and Vance, which went live on television.
Zelensky was asked, “Why don’t you wear a suit? You’re at the highest level in this country’s office, and you refuse to wear a suit. Just want to see if – do you own a suit?”
The questions came from Brian Glenn, a correspondent for Real America’s Voice, a right-wing cable channel that has spread conspiracy theories about non-citizen voting.
His access was granted, while the White House continued to block reporters from the Associated Press from attending, as they still refer to it as the Gulf of Mexico instead of the Trump decree that names it the Gulf of America.
Controlling the press pool
When White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced the change to the press pool she claimed it’s about “giving the power back to the people”. Leavitt said that outlets “that have long been denied” access to the pool will be allowed in.
This was too much even for Jacqui Heinrich, Fox News’s senior White House correspondent, who condemned the Trump administration for its decision to seize control of the press pool. “This move does not give the power back to the people – it gives power to the White House. The WHCA is democratically elected by the full-time White House press corps”, she wrote on X.
Previously, an independent group of journalists known as the White House Correspondents’ Association was responsible for choosing the press pool. Now, Trump’s White House press team will choose which reporters are in the press pool – meaning that they will choose friendly reporters willing to amplify Trump’s disinformation.
For the New York Times’ White House bureau chief Peter Baker, the new system “amounts to a signal to news outlets to follow the White House line or risk being kicked out as well”.
FCC and free speech
Worse still, Trump appointee Federal Communication Commission (FCC) Chair Brendan Carr, who wrote a chapter on the FCC in Project 2025, is a fawning supporter of Trump. He wants to defund National Public Radio (NPR) and Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). He said he did not “see a reason why Congress should continue sending taxpayer dollars” to PBS and NPR.
But he is also going after other media groups, using veiled threats and coercion. Craig Aaron, of Free Press, an organisation that promotes media democracy, said the US was “facing a true free-speech emergency”.
“The First Amendment exists to stop the government from shutting down speech it doesn’t like. A weaponized FCC is trying to do exactly that. The FCC chairman is weaponizing the power of the agency President Trump appointed him to lead, in order to go after the president’s perceived enemies and chill critical coverage”, Aaron said.
“The government should never interfere with such editorial decisions or news content. Yet the FCC has sent threatening letters and launched investigations over editorial decision-making, reporting on law-enforcement activities, and basic factchecking. This is chilling and dangerous.”
CBS as an example
Paramount Global, the owner of CBS News, is reportedly discussing settling a lawsuit brought by Trump over a CBS News interview with Kamala Harris. Trump alleges the interview was selectively edited and is suing for $10bn. Earlier this month, Carr launched an investigation into CBS. There is no evidence the interview was edited beyond normal practices, and CBS denies the accusation, but a complicating factor is that Paramount is hoping to merge with Skydance Media – a move which would have to be approved by Carr’s FCC.
In a letter to Comcast, which owns NBC News, Carr said he had asked the FCC’s enforcement bureau to “open an investigation” into the corporation, stating: “I am concerned that Comcast and NBCUniversal may be promoting invidious forms of DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) in a manner that does not comply with FCC regulations.”
One danger of this investigation is that a news channel-owning corporation like Comcast – a $100bn company – may not be inclined to go to war with the Trump administration over freedom of the press.
Dealing with the Yemen strike
We also see how the Trump administration responded to the scandal of top government officials discussing details of an impending strike in Yemen in a group chat on Signal, which included the journalist from The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg. First, they denied there was any specific information in the Signal chat about the impending strike, and the next day, Goldberg revealed what the specific information was. No heads have rolled for this security breach. Instead, Goldberg became the target for covering the story.
He has treated the attacks with admirable equanimity. “Sometimes people get intimidated”, he said, but “we at The Atlantic are not intimidated by this nonsense. We’re going to keep reporting the truth as we see it. And I just think it’s a kind of silly deflection”.
Trump’s attack on freedom
Matthew Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters, is spot on about the playbook that Trump has used to bring some of America’s most powerful media institutions to heel: “What we’re seeing is really an attack on freedom of speech and freedom of the press from all aspects of the Trump administration right now.
“This is the path that Viktor Orbán took in Hungary, where you use the power of the state to ensure that the media is compliant, that outlets are either curbed and become much less willing to be critical, or they are sold to owners who will make that happen,” Gertz said.
“Obviously, this is the early stages of anything like that, but the signs that we’re seeing right now are really quite disturbing.”
A version of this article was first published in Media North: Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom (North). For more from Media North, and to subscribe to their newsletter, visit their website.
