James Carville Blasts WaPo Editor Over Cartoon Controversy: ‘Disgrace to Journalism’

One of the Democratic Party’s top strategists ripped into the Washington Post and called one of its editors a “disgrace to journalism” after a recent scandal that erupted, of all things, over a cartoon.

MSNBC host Jen Psaki initially asked James Carville on Sunday what his view of Rep. Mike Johnson’s renewed tenure as House Speaker might bring in the coming weeks.

However, after a quick aside describing Johnson as a “bald-faced liar,” Carville quickly veered off on something of a tangent to lambast the Post after Ann Telnaes, an award-winning cartoonist who’d been with the daily for 16 years, abruptly quit her job this week.

Her departure is reported to have followed editor David Shipley spiking the artist’s rendering of Jeff Bezos, who owns the newspaper, “genuflecting toward a statue of President-elect Donald Trump,” as per The New York Times.

While Shipley has since maintained the sketch was dropped because the same topic was already scheduled to appear elsewhere in the paper’s opinion section, the furor nevertheless comes hot on the heels of Bezos reportedly nixing an endorsement of Kamala Harris ahead of the presidential election in November.

Carville, however, was not buying the paper’s version of events during his recent MSNBC appearance. “Let’s be very forceful and let’s be very upfront here,” he said. “The billionaire class in this country has exercised such power that they got rid of the cartoonists at the Washington Post, okay?”

He then went on, “What David Shipley… what happened under his watch is a disgrace to journalism in America, I don’t know how that guy could possibly get up in the morning.”

Psaki then clarified to viewers that Telnaes had departed the publication of her own volition, but Carville was nevertheless still having none of it.

He said, “She quit because they let her quit, because they wouldn’t run the cartoon. I don’t blame her for quitting, alright? If you’re a journalist, if they sat here at MSNBC and told you, you can’t say anything bad about the Trump tax cuts because executives might get ‘em, you’re gonna walk out the door!”

In a post on her Substack, Telnaes explained that her decision was over the newspaper’s failure “to nurture a free press in a democracy.”

“Owners of such press organizations are responsible for safeguarding that free press—and trying to get in the good graces of an autocrat-in-waiting will only result in undermining that free press,” she said.

Shipley, however, said in a statement to the New York Times that while he respects Telnaes, he “must disagree with her interpretation of events.”

“Not every editorial judgment is a reflection of a malign force,” he said. “My decision was guided by the fact that we had just published a column on the same topic as the cartoon and had already scheduled another column—this one a satire—for publication. The only bias was against repetition.”