The Washington Post’s global opinions editor Karen Attiah said on Monday she was fired from the Jeff Bezos-owned paper over multiple social media posts commenting on political and gun violence, which she claimed the paper unfairly labeled as “gross misconduct.”
“Last week, the Washington Post fired me,” she wrote in a Substack post. “The reason? Speaking out against political violence, racial double standards and America’s apathy toward guns.”
Attiah worked at the paper for 11 years and previously edited columnist Jamal Khashoggi, who was killed in 2018 in an operation ordered by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, according to a 2021 U.S. intelligence assessment. She said she was “the last remaining Black full-time opinion columnist at the Post, in one of the nation’s most diverse regions.”
“Washington, D.C., no longer has a paper that reflects the people it serves,” she wrote.
Attiah did not immediately respond to TheWrap’s request for comment. A Washington Post spokesperson declined to comment. The Washington Post Guild said in a statement it “condemns the unjust firing” of Attiah and would work to defend her.
“The Post not only flagrantly disregarded standard disciplinary processes, it also undermined its own mandate to be a champion of free speech,” it wrote. “The right to speak freely is the ultimate personal liberty and the foundation of Karen’s 11-year career at The Post. We’re proud to call Karen a colleague and a longtime union sibling. The Post Guild stands with her and will continue to support her and defend her rights.”
The Post’s social media policy prohibits employees from curating their feeds to express a certain point of view, though it explicitly notes that the guidance “does not apply to columnists, critics and other practitioners of opinion journalism posting as part of their work.”
Attiah wrote that, after last week’s assassination of Charlie Kirk in Utah and the shooting of two students in Colorado, she condemned in a Bluesky post how the U.S. “accepts white children being massacred by gun violence.”
“Political violence has no place in this country,” she wrote in a subsequent post. “But we will also do nothing to curb the availability of the guns used to carry out said violence. The denial and empty rhetoric is learned helplessness — because the truth is … America is sick and there is no cure.”
Attiah also said she focused most of her posts on what she viewed as the lack of action on gun and political violence, pointing to the killings of two Democratic state lawmakers in Minnesota and media portrayals of suspects in that case and Kirk’s killing, who are both white men. The FBI apprehended 22-year-old Tyler Robinson last week, accusing him of killing Kirk.
Her only post directly referencing Kirk, she said, was in relation to his comments on Black women. She said that she wouldn’t publicly grieve for a man whose views she condemned, pointing to his comments saying the Civil Rights Act was a mistake and that Black people did better in the Jim Crow era.
“In a since-deleted post, a user accused me of supporting violence and fascism,” she wrote. “I made clear that not performing over-the-top grief for white men who espouse violence was not the same as endorsing violence against them.”
“My commentary received thoughtful engagement across platforms, support and virtually no public backlash,” she added. “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. This was not only a hasty overreach, but a violation of the very standards of journalistic fairness and rigor the Post claims to uphold.”
The Post’s social media policy does urge its journalists to “be civil on social media and treat people with respect,” though it was unclear how Attiah’s posts affected her colleagues.
Attiah’s exit comes as the Post has launched a broad makeover of its opinion secton throughout the last year. Bezos said in February they would reorient the opinion page around the traditionally conservative values of “personal liberties and free markets,” prompting the exit of then-editor David Shipley and the loss of thousands of subscribers. The paper proceeded this summer to offer buyouts to all of their opinion journalists.
WaPo has since seen storied columnists and cartoonists such as Eugene Robinson, Ruth Marcus, Joe Davidson, Ann Telneas, Jonathan Capehart and Catherine Rampell leave, along with a plethora of top journalists in its newsroom.
Still, the paper has attempted to soldier on. Bezos hired the Economist’s Washington correspondent Adam O’Neal to run the opinion desk, who promised in June to be “unapologetically patriotic” and optimistic about the country’s direction.
Attiah appeared to disagree, however, saying the paper retaliated against her for speaking out on the values she expressed through her work. “As a columnist, I used my voice to defend freedom and democracy, challenge power and reflect on culture and politics with honesty and conviction,” she wrote. “Now, I am the one being silenced — for doing my job.”
