The War on Cartoonists
In January 2025, Ann Telnaes, the Pulitzer-winning cartoonist for the Washington Post, announced that she was quitting the paper where she’d worked since 2008. She did so after her editor killed her (now famous) cartoon depicting WaPo owner Jeff Bezos and other craven billionaires debasing themselves before Donald J. Trump—an act of censorship intended, she wrote, “to get in the good graces of an autocrat-in-waiting.”
Since then, the indomitable Telnaes has gone on to roaring success on Substack, attracting an enormous audience and picking up her second Pulitzer. But for other cartoonists, prospects have never seemed more dire.
Censorship has undermined the opinion pages of newspapers across the US during Trump’s second term. Two weeks after Telnaes resigned, a small newspaper in Pennsylvania outdid the Post in gutlessness. When an anti-Trump cartoon in the Latrobe Bulletin drew the ire of pro-Trump readers, the publisher, Dave Cuddihy, announced that he was banning all political cartoons forever.
“While political cartoons have run in newspapers, including the Latrobe Bulletin, for many years; this is a final example of how we feel they have run their course,” he wrote, showing a brazen disregard for both the First Amendment and how to use a semicolon.
In 2026, the news for cartoonists has, improbably, gotten even worse. Last month, Air Mail, a newsletter that had published cartoons for seven years, suddenly stopped buying them. And last week, Nieman Lab revealed that OpenAI’s ChatGPT has been producing counterfeit New Yorker-style cartoons—complete with the unauthorized signatures of real New Yorker cartoonists.
It’s worth noting that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, one of the toadying oligarchs immortalized in Telnaes’s banned cartoon, donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund. To my knowledge, he hasn’t offered a nickel to the cartoonists whose work he’s plundered. And the fake New Yorker cartoons are part of a malign trend: newspapers that have eliminated controversial cartoons by pesky humans are replacing them with AI slop.
This existential threat to cartoonists should alarm any fan of that quaint constitutional right called freedom of expression. Here’s what Ann Telnaes said when I interviewed her shortly after her departure from the Post: “[S]upport your local or your favorite editorial cartoonist… I just want people to realize that you have to support and protect other people’s right to say what they want to say and how they want to say it in order for you to keep yours.”
Ann’s advice stayed with me. And so, when I learned that Air Mail was depriving cartoonists of one of their last remaining markets, I decided to start buying cartoons for publication on TBR.
This shouldn’t be mistaken for some grand altruistic gesture. It’s good business. Contrary to what that bonehead at the Latrobe Bulletin says, people love cartoons. Since TBR started publishing them, the response from readers has been spectacular. What’s more, I’ve started receiving submissions from some of the most acclaimed cartoonists in America. I’m awed by their talent, and I can’t wait to share their work with you.
One final thing. Adding cartoons to TBR would never have been possible without the generous support of my subscribers—and for that you have my deepest gratitude and love. As I’ve said many times, you’re the reason I do what I do.
