As best as I can determine, in the 11 months since The Washington Post’s opinion section descended into Jeff Bezos-imposed turmoil, no one had been fired — until now. Some people quit in protest, such as Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes, or because they disagreed with Bezos’ mandate to focus exclusively on “personal liberties and free markets,” such as opinion editor David Shipley. But Karen Attiah is the first to lose her job.
Attiah, who had been a columnist for the Post, took to her Substack newsletter on Monday to announce that she had been sacked for a series of posts on Bluesky in which she condemned gun violence following the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk last Wednesday. By her own account, her only post even mentioning Kirk was this one, quoting Kirk’s own words:
“Black women do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously. You have to go steal a white person’s slot”. -Charlie Kirk
— Karen Attiah (@karenattiah.bsky.social) 2025-09-11T01:40:48.549Z
Some have argued that Kirk’s quote had been taken out of context because he was referring to specific Black women and was characterizing what others were saying, as David Gilmour writes at Mediaite. To which I would observe that Kirk’s quotes and what he meant are sometimes difficult to parse. Attiah is hardly the only journalist who may have misconstrued something that he said.
Attiah, noting that she was the Post’s last remaining full-time Black columnist, wrote:
My commentary received thoughtful engagement across platforms, support, and virtually no public backlash.
And yet, the Post accused my measured Bluesky posts of being “unacceptable”, “gross misconduct” and of endangering the physical safety of colleagues — charges without evidence, which I reject completely as false. They rushed to fire me without even a conversation — claiming disparagement on race. This was not only a hasty overreach, but a violation of the very standards of journalistic fairness and rigor the Post claims to uphold.
Media reporter Oliver Darcy obtained (sub. req.) a copy of the letter in which Attiah was fired, from human resources head Wayne Connell, who claimed that she had disparaged white men. Connell’s letter begins with this:
I am writing to inform you that The Post is terminating your employment effective immediately for gross misconduct. Your public comments on social media regarding the death of Charlie Kirk violate The Post’s social media policies, harm the integrity of our organization, and potentially endanger the physical safety of our staff.
Of course, taking to social media in the immediate aftermath of a tragic event such as the Kirk assassination is fraught with danger. Opinion journalists, though, should be able to post freely as long as they maintain the same tone they would be expected to adhere to in their day job. Attiah’s posts on Bluesky were certainly provocative, but they strike me as being well within the bounds of what is acceptable.
Then again, this may have amounted to a convenient excuse to get rid of a troublesome internal critic. Darcy reported last month (sub. req.) that Attiah had a tense meeting with the new opinion editor, Adam O’Neal, and declined to take a buyout that was being offered even though O’Neal was trying to push out anyone whose work “work didn’t align with his vision for the section.”
Poynter Online media columnist Tom Jones reports that the Post’s union issued a statement condemning Attiah’s firing “and will continue to support her and defend her rights.” What form that support may take is not specified.
Meanwhile, CNN media reporter Brian Stelter writes that Attiah’s newsletter, The Golden Hour, gained 10,000 new subscribers in the immediate aftermath of her post about having been fired. Then, too, Matthew Dowd, fired by MSNBC last week after he said “hateful words lead to hateful thoughts lead to hateful actions” while commenting on Kirk’s murder, is also promoting his Substack newsletter, Lighthouse Sentinel.
We are in the midst of a right-wing backlash, led by Donald Trump and JD Vance, who are using Kirk’s tragic death as an opportunity to punish their critics. As the BBC notes, “Pilots, medical professionals, teachers and one Secret Service employee are among those who have been suspended or sacked for social media posts that were deemed inappropriate about Kirk’s death.”
Of course, no one should be celebrating Kirk’s death, which was a tragedy for his family and friends. But for the MAGA movement to use it as an opportunity to unleash a witch hunt against their opponents is as sickening as it is predictable. I don’t think this is going to blow over any time soon.
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As a native Washingtonian, I grew up reading Karen Attiah’s insightful and well-written columns. I didn’t always agree with her stances, but her columns were a strong voice for the majority of the City’s population.
I greatly agree racism needs to be countered, and Black Americans and Canadians (though the latter nation likely somewhat less so) have suffered most of the ugliness. Nonetheless, especially over the last half-decade, I’ve noticed there are injustices and victimizations that get mis-reported or ignored as though those injustices/victimizations are ideologically and therefore socially/politically acceptable.
The media (i.e. news, literary, social and entertainment), though especially the mainstream news outlets, can be largely credited for the creation and maintenance of current societal/institutional racial standards and even hypocrisies in Western society.
Anti-Caucasian racism or violence, as a timely example, can be expected to not receive objective coverage, if any at all, by the neo-liberal news media, quite unlike when the racial makeup is reversed. Their justification? I find it likely they deem such occurrences, however newsworthy, as not being a social/societal problem and therefore un-worthy of proper coverage. Over my decades of news consumption, I’ve heard this lame justification more than once, although it’s not even their professional/objective prerogative to do so in the first place.
Such reporters/editors appear to feel they can be both journalistically activistic AND truly objective/professional. They, however, cannot. On the contrary, they’re placing the profession and themselves in disrepute, to put it mildly.
According to my journalism instructor approximately three decades ago, the probable rarity of such an assault (in this case, anti-Caucasian racism or violence) would make it newsworthy; and the opposite would apply to the common or usual occurrence, such as that resulting from a recurring social/societal problem.
And, all the more disturbing and concerning about that news media’s failure to condemn or even properly cover such racist assaults is that it encourages the justice system to not objectively/fully charge and prosecute those responsible.
Not only can the racists (of color) not be held properly criminally accountable, they may also notice the news outlets downplaying or omitting the racial motivation behind such serious crimes, perhaps leaving the impression that the inexcusably vicious acts were somehow morally justified. It’s in our flawed, if not corrupted, human nature (especially as children) to observe such societal cues and take advantage of them.
… On such matters, the media are far beyond just being biased.
Due to the risks involved, I’ve always respected foreign correspondents and especially admired those covering active war zones. Nevertheless, I find that too much of contemporary ‘journalism’ seems motivated more by a paycheck and publication (‘a buck and a byline’) than a genuine strive to expose thus challenge the corrupt powerful who abuse/exploit those with the least in this increasingly unjust global existence.
Particularly with Israel’s systematic mass slaughter and starvation of Gazan non-combatants young and old, too many mainstream news outlets have been, to put it mildly, editorially emasculated.
I also strongly feel it’s the ethical/moral duty of Western journalists and editors to publicly expose the compromised news-media product and therefor its facilitator(s). By doing so, such brave journalists can at least then also proclaim they will no longer participate in its creation and/or dissemination.
Over decades, I’ve heard of too many cases of employees not standing up and doing what is necessary for the public and/or human(e) good, instead excusing themselves with something like: ‘I need this job — I have a family to support’. … I have to say that — unless, of course, they were actually forced into coupling, copulating and procreating however many years before — such familial obligation status does not actually ethically or morally justify their willing involvement.
Quite frankly, journalists/editors with genuine integrity should and would tender their resignations and even publicly proclaim they can no longer help propagate their employer’s media product, whether it involves self-censored/missing coverage of a brutally lopsided foreign war or that of domestic corporate corruption that will harm the populace.
I don’t think Attiah misconstrued Kirk’s remarks at all. It’s true, in the remarks she paraphrased, he was talking about a handful of specific Black women, but in the context of his other disparaging remarks about Black people — saying he fears all Black airline pilots are unqualified DEI hires who put passenger safety at risk, calling Martin Luther King a bad person, saying Black people were better off under Jim Crow, suggesting that it’s common for gangs of Black thugs to hunt for white people to attack, echoing the Trump campaign’s slanders about Haitian immigrants — the usual plausible deniability that Kirk cultivated starts to wear mighty thin. Besides, Kirk’s remarks had a tendency to land differently among the traditionally marginalized groups who were his frequent targets. It’s obtuse of the Post not to recognize that, or to dismiss the lived experience of Attiah and other columnists like her… oh, wait, it didn’t have any other columnists like her. Her own firing makes bitterly clear that the various points she was making about media blind spots and confirmation bias were entirely correct.