By Charles C. W. Cooke
Monday, August 24, 2026
Per the New York Times:
A private arbitrator has ordered
The Washington Post to rehire the opinion columnist Karen Attiah, who was fired
in September over her social media posts about the assassination of the
conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
Attiah was fired over “her social media posts about the
assassination of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk”? That sounds pretty
bad! Let’s keep reading, to see what it was that Attiah said.
Ah, here’s a reference to those posts. Perhaps the
details are in here:
The decision is the result of a
yearlong fight between The Post and Ms. Attiah, who last year accused the company of violating its labor agreement and
social media policy when it fired her for posts she said were within her
purview as an opinion columnist. A clause in the agreement allows employees to
submit disputes for arbitration.
Nope. That doesn’t specify anything. I’ll keep going:
The Washington Post said in its
termination letter that Ms. Attiah’s posts about Mr. Kirk had harmed “the
integrity” of the organization and violated standards requiring employees to
use social media with civility and respect.
Huh. Oddly, that also doesn’t reveal what Attiah wrote.
Ooh, here’s something:
Ms. Attiah’s remarks about Mr.
Kirk’s assassination, which she posted to the social network Bluesky on Sept.
10, the day he was shot, responded to the outpouring of grief after the
shooting. “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,”
Ms. Attiah wrote in one of the posts.
That is “one of the posts,” yes. But it’s not the one for
which she was fired. Maybe that one will be related here?:
Soon after, Mr. O’Neal and Mr.
Connell met with Will Lewis, then the chief executive of The Washington Post,
to discuss the posts, according to the transcript. They ultimately decided to
fire Ms. Attiah.
During her testimony, Ms. Attiah
defended her social media posts, saying that they were part of her work for The
Post, “commenting on our discourse on political violence,” Ms. Attiah said,
according to the transcript.
Alas, no.
Then the story ends. Which means that, unless they look
elsewhere, Times readers will never know that, in the only post
in which Attiah named Charlie Kirk, she made up a quotation. In that
post, Attiah wrote:
“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
But that, of course, was not what Kirk had said. What
Kirk had said was this:
If we would have said that Joy
Reid and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson were
affirmative action picks, we would have been called racists. Now they’re coming
out and they’re saying it for us. You do not have the brain processing power to
otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot
to go be taken somewhat seriously.
Like it or not, this was a pretty standard criticism of
affirmative action, and of the tendency of those who favor it to insist
simultaneously that it is urgently necessary and that nobody has ever
benefited from it. Objectively, what Kirk actually said was a long, long way
from the sentiment in Attiah’s made-up quote.
The Times story is 702 words long, and it was
published online, where column inches are infinite. There was no good reason
for this key fact to have been left out of its piece, other than that it was
inconvenient to the tale that the Times wished to tell. Announcing the
news that she had been reinstated at the Washington Post, Attiah claimed
that she had been fired “for speaking the truth after Charlie Kirk’s killing.”
But that is a lie. Attiah was not fired for speaking the truth. She was fired
for rank dishonesty. The Times’ shameful write-up aids her in that
ignoble cause.
No comments:
Post a Comment