Washington
The Washington Post fires reporter Felicia Sonmez
Sonmez didn’t instantly reply to requests for remark. A spokesperson for The Put up declined to remark.
Sonmez has been on the heart of an intra-Put up battle that began final Friday when reporter David Weigel retweeted a sexist joke.
By Monday, the Put up had suspended Weigel for one month with out pay and admonished him in each private and non-private statements.
However the retweet, which Sonmez was the primary to highlight each on Twitter and inside the Put up, has thrown the paper’s newsroom into disarray.
Sonmez, who in 2021 sued the paper for discrimination (the go well with was just lately dismissed; she plans to enchantment), has been outspoken over the previous week about points associated to inequity within the newsroom.
In her public feedback Sonmez had been extremely essential of The Put up’s management, together with Govt Editor Sally Buzbee, together with a lot of her colleagues.
At occasions, a few of her colleagues went on Twitter to plead with Sonmez to cease attacking The Put up on social media.
Jose A. Del Actual, a reporter at The Put up, responded on Twitter Saturday to Sonmez’s preliminary tweet. Del Actual mentioned Weigel’s tweet was “horrible and unacceptable.”
“However,” he added, “rallying the web to assault him for a mistake he made would not truly remedy something. All of us mess up not directly or one other. There may be such a factor as difficult with compassion.”
Sonmez responded, saying that “calling out sexism is not ‘cruelty,’” however one thing that’s “completely crucial.”
Buzbee tried twice to quell the general public infighting via statements, together with a stern memo issued to staff on Tuesday. In that memo, Buzbee, “within the strongest of phrases,” outlined guidelines that each one staffers are anticipated to observe.
“We don’t tolerate colleagues attacking colleagues both nose to nose or on-line,” Buzbee wrote. “Respect for others is essential to any civil society, together with our newsroom.”
However that memo did not put an finish to the affair.
Simply hours after Buzbee issued her memo, Sonmez tweeted a display seize displaying she was nonetheless blocked on Twitter by Del Actual. And she or he retweeted one other consumer mocking a few of her colleagues who had joined collectively to ship tweets expressing pleasure about working at The Put up.
Reporter Lisa Rein tweeted at Sonmez that evening, writing, “Please cease.”
Sonmez replied and requested, “Do you could have any concept of the torrent of abuse I am going through proper now?”
As current as Thursday, Sonmez was nonetheless tweeting prolonged threads essential of The Put up.
In her Thursday thread, Sonmez instructed that The Put up was solely a superb office for individuals who are white and extremely paid.