[Images (from left): Barry Blitt, Jack Ohman, Jen Sorensen]
Zachary Petit interviews three political cartoonists about their work and the current climate for political parody in this Fast Company piece.
"Editorial cartoons and illustration are fairly niche topics—or so I once thought. On Jan. 3, cartoonist Ann Telnaes published Why I’m quitting the Washington Post on her Substack. It detailed how the paper—owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, who attended Donald Trump’s second inauguration—rejected her cartoon of Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Los Angeles Times publisher Patrick Soon-Shiong and Mickey Mouse worshipping at the president-elect’s feet with bags of money. The next day, the story was international news.
"Paradoxically, in the year 2025, editorial cartooning was back on the front page. Washington Post Opinion editor David Shipley released a statement that the paper had killed Telnaes’s cartoon to avoid redundancy because they had just published a column on the same topic and had another in the hopper. But ultimately, in rejecting the piece, the Post seemingly underscored the point at the heart of it—and brought it to more eyes than the paper ever could have reached on its own. It immediately became a stand-in for much bigger conversations around media ownership, American oligarchs, objectivity and myriad subjects beyond—including, of course, the role of the editorial cartoon in 2025.
"To probe just that, we arranged a Zoom roundtable with a trio of some of the best political artists and illustrators working today: Pulitzer Prize winner Barry Blitt, Pulitzer Prize winner Jack Ohman, and Pulitzer finalist and Herblock Prize winner Jen Sorensen.
"Our conversation proved to be insightful, stirring and at times depressing, but ultimately honest. Collectively, not unlike the best editorial cartoons."
"Paradoxically, in the year 2025, editorial cartooning was back on the front page. Washington Post Opinion editor David Shipley released a statement that the paper had killed Telnaes’s cartoon to avoid redundancy because they had just published a column on the same topic and had another in the hopper. But ultimately, in rejecting the piece, the Post seemingly underscored the point at the heart of it—and brought it to more eyes than the paper ever could have reached on its own. It immediately became a stand-in for much bigger conversations around media ownership, American oligarchs, objectivity and myriad subjects beyond—including, of course, the role of the editorial cartoon in 2025.
"To probe just that, we arranged a Zoom roundtable with a trio of some of the best political artists and illustrators working today: Pulitzer Prize winner Barry Blitt, Pulitzer Prize winner Jack Ohman, and Pulitzer finalist and Herblock Prize winner Jen Sorensen.
"Our conversation proved to be insightful, stirring and at times depressing, but ultimately honest. Collectively, not unlike the best editorial cartoons."
The rest is here.
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