Karen Attiah, a columnist for The Washington Post who also served as global opinions editor, wrote that she was fired by the publication over her social media posts in the aftermath of the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
Attiah posted a Substack column on Monday in which she wrote that Post bosses “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,” she wrote. “This was not only a hasty overreach, but a violation of the very standards of journalistic fairness and rigor the Post claims to uphold.”
In her Substack column, Attiah included screenshots of some of her social media posts, including one late in the afternoon on Wednesday, a couple hours after the shooting, in which she wrote, “I wish I had hope for gun control and that I could believe ‘political violence has no place in this country.’ But we live in a country that accepts white children being massacred by gun violence. Not just accepts, but worships violence.”
“Part of what keeps America so violent is the insistence that people perform care, empty goodness and absolution for white men who espouse hatred and violence…Again. I don’t care for empty rhetoric.”
She also posted one of Kirk’s quotes, that “Black women do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously. You have to go steal a white person’s slot.” Social media has been rife with claims of what Kirk has said in the past, but Snopes rated the Black women quote, from a podcast in 2023, as true.
A spokesperson for The Washington Post declined to comment on personnel matters. The Post has pointed to its policies and standards, including its social media policy.
Attiah continued to post on Bluesky in the hours and days after the shooting, defending her criticisms. “Refusing to tear my clothes and smear ashes on my face in performative mourning for a white man that espoused violence…is not the same as violence,” she wrote.
Attiah, who joined the Post in 2014, was a prominent voice speaking out on the killing of columnist Jamal Khashoggi by agents of the Saudi regime. Her Substack post included a photo of her with Post owner Jeff Bezos, taken at the 2019 Gridiron dinner. She also noted in Substack that she was the last remaining Black full-time opinion columnist at the Post, which has seen an exodus amid some of Bezos’ new editorial mandates and a buyout offer earlier this year.
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