A cartoonist has decided to quit her job at the Washington Post after an editor rejected her sketch of the newspaper’s owner and other media executives bowing before President-elect Donald Trump.

Ann Telnaes posted a message Friday on the online platform Substack saying that she drew a cartoon showing a group of media executives bowing before Trump while offering him bags of money, including Post owner and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

Telnaes wrote that the cartoon was intended to criticize �billionaire tech and media chief executives who have been doing their best to curry favor with incoming President-elect Trump.” Several executives, Bezos among them, have been spotted at Trump�s Florida club Mar-a-Lago. She accused them of having lucrative government contracts and working to eliminate regulations.

Telnaes said that she’s never before had a cartoon rejected because of its inherent messaging and that such a move is dangerous for a free press.

�As an editorial cartoonist, my job is to hold powerful people and institutions accountable,” Telnaes wrote. “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.��

The Association of American Editorial Cartoonists issued a statement Saturday accusing the Post of �political cowardice” and asking other cartoonists to post Telnaes’ sketch with the hashtag #StandWithAnn in a show of solidarity.

�Tyranny ends at pen point,� the association said. �It thrives in the dark, and the Washington Post simply closed its eyes and gave in like a punch-drunk boxer.�

The Post’s communications director, Liza Pluto, provided The Associated Press on Saturday with a statement from David Shipley, the newspaper’s editorial page editor. Shipley said in the statement that he disagrees with Telnaes’ �interpretation of events.�

He said he decided to nix the cartoon because the paper had just published a column on the same topic as the cartoon and was set to publish another.

�Not every editorial judgement is a reflection of a malign force. … The only bias was against repetition,” Shipley said.

(AP)