Longtime Washington Post author Karen Attiah says she has been fired from the publication’s Opinions division for “speaking out against political violence, racial double standards, and America’s apathy toward guns.”
The Post, which has been overhauling your entire division, declined to touch upon personnel issues. But Attiah’s Post biography has been revised to say she “was” a columnist, indicating she is not employed.
“The Washington Post wrongly fired Opinions columnist Karen Attiah over her social media posts,” the paper’s employees guild wrote in an announcement Monday afternoon. “The Post not only flagrantly disregarded standard disciplinary processes, it also undermined its own mandate to be a champion of free speech.”
Attiah posted a string of messages about political violence within the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination final week. She criticized what she known as “empty rhetoric” denouncing violence that hasn’t been matched by actions.
One of her posts asserted that “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.”
Attiah didn’t reference Kirk by title, however she additionally mentioned to a commenter that “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.”
Attiah wrote in a Monday blog post that “my commentary received thoughtful engagement across platforms, support, and virtually no public backlash.”
But her assertion that Kirk “espoused violence” could have been flagged by Post administration.
Two Post staffers informed NCS that administration additionally took problem with Attiah misquoting a Kirk remark on affirmative action from 2023.
Attiah wrote that “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.”
The Post declined to say who made these accusations. The Opinion division has been in turmoil for months, pushed by Post proprietor Jeff Bezos and his want to alter the course of the editorial board.
Bezos mentioned in February that “we are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.” Over the summer time the Post employed a brand new Opinion editor, Adam O’Neal, who mentioned he would reorient the division accordingly.
Many of the Post’s opinion columnists have departed because of Bezos’s strikes.
“I was the last remaining Black full-time opinion columnist at the Post, in one of the nation’s most diverse regions,” Attiah wrote in her weblog publish.
Attiah’s exit comes amid a growing effort from conservative activists to get individuals who’ve bashed Kirk following his homicide — with feedback starting from outright celebration at his loss of life to indifference or criticism of his legacy — fired from their jobs.
The free expression group PEN America mentioned Monday that “the firing and suspension of multiple journalists after the fatal shooting of Charlie Kirk should alarm anyone who cares about free speech and a free press. Taken together, these measures risk creating a chilling effect that extends beyond those directly targeted, weakening public discourse at a moment when open debate is urgently needed.”