Washington Post fires Felicia Sonmez
The Washington Post has fired national political reporter Felicia Sonmez days after suspending another reporter for retweeting a sexist joke, according to multiple reports.
When reached for comment on reports of Sonmez’s firing, Kris Coratti Kelly, chief communications officer at the newspaper said, “We do not discuss personnel matters.”
The reporter’s firing comes just days after executive editor Sally Buzzbee sent a memo to staffers urging them not to attack one another online.
Campaign reporter Dave Weigel was suspended without pay earlier this week after he retweeted a post containing a sexist joke. Weigel’s retweet and suspension had become a point of contention among staffers, many of whom posted their opinions online about the controversy.
Buzzbee sent the memo out following Weigel’s suspension.
For the last several days, Sonmez has criticized Post leadership publicly for how it handled the social media postings of another reporter at the newspaper.
“Of course the Washington Post is a great workplace. It is a great workplace *for them.* The system is working *for them.* What about for everyone else?” she wrote in a quoted tweet that showed other Post employees saying that while the paper isn’t “perfect,” they are proud to work there.
“Many, *many* Post employees want the long-standing problems at the company to be addressed, not ignored,” she continued.
“The frustration has manifested itself not just on Twitter, but also in the Post’s employee retention problems, laid out here in painstaking detail by @PostGuild.”
After Buzzbee’s weekend memo to staff, a Post spokesperson told CNN earlier this week “while we have not commented publicly, make no mistake, this is being addressed directly with the individuals involved.”
Sonmez did not immediately respond to a request for comment on her departure from the Post.
It’s not the first time she has had complaints with the Post’s management.
In March of last year, she detailed in a 16-tweet thread how she’d been taken off multiple stories relating to sexual assault or misconduct over her past experience as an assault survivor.
“I faced no ban my first three months on the job,” she tweeted at the time. “I wrote #MeToo-related stories with no problem. It was only once the Kavanaugh story broke in Sept. 2018 that the editors enacted one. It was lifted several months later, then reinstated in late 2019 when I was being attacked online after the publication of a story about the man who assaulted me. The ban has been in place ever since, for more than a year now.”
Updated at 6:20 p.m.
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