Washington Post Ordered To Reinstate Left-Wing Columnist Who Protested Her Firing by Posting a Picture of Herself Burning the Paper

A private arbitrator is ordering the Washington Post to reinstate a left-wing and anti-Israel columnist, Karen Attiah, after she was fired last year over posts about the shooting of Charlie Kirk. Ms. Attiah said last fall that she was fired over a series of posts she made on the social media platform Bluesky after the killing of Kirk. In one of the posts, she wrote, “America is sick and there is no cure,” as she lamented a lack of action on gun control. In another post, she said that she refused to “tear my clothes and smear ashes on my face in performative mourning for a white man that espoused violence.” Ms. Attiah wrote on Substack that the Post said those messages were “unacceptable” and an example of “misconduct,” as the paper said they disparaged white men and endangered her co-workers. The Substack column featured a picture of herself burning a copy of the Washington Post outside the paper’s headquarters. On Monday morning, the columnist posted on X, “The Washington Post fired me last year for speaking the truth after Charlie Kirk’s killing. I fought back. I’m happy to announce: I won my case against the Washington Post. They have been ordered to reinstate me immediately,” she wrote, followed by a raised fist emoji. The private arbitrator, Sarah Miller Espinosa, found that Post “failed to establish (Ms. Attiah) engaged in gross misconduct.”“As such, the Washington Post did not have good and sufficient cause to terminate the employment of (Ms. Attiah),” the decision states.Ms. Espinosa noted that Ms. Attiah “had never been disciplined” before her termination. She also wrote that the columnist did not disparage white men with her posts and that she is not “culpable” for threats made against the Post. “The Arbitrator wonders about the Post’s logic in that it fails to recognize it is the people making the threats who are responsible for their own behavior, not the Grievant,” Ms. Espinosa wrote. Ms. Espinosa ordered the Post to reinstate Ms. Attiah immediately and to pay her “full backpay and lost benefits.”The general counsel for the Washington-Baltimore News Guild, Amos Laor, said in a statement, “This ruling isn’t just a win for one columnist. It’s a win for every member who depends on our contracts to protect them from repression of speech dressed up as discipline.”Ms. Attiah has a history of provocative social media posts. After Hamas’s October 7 massacre, she shared posts on X that celebrated the attack. One of the posts she re-posted on October 7 read, “Liberation, self-determination, and peace for all oppressed + colonized people.” In 2022, she denounced America’s “hyper-capitalistic society,” and bemoaned working in an office, writing that it “leaves us too tired to fight oppressive systems and unjust conditions.”The order to reinstate the former columnist comes more than a year after the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, directed the paper to publish opinion pieces “in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.” A former Washington Post columnist, Margaret Sullivan, accused Mr. Bezos of “muzzling” the opinion, claiming it would mean that the paper would only publish opinion articles that align with his views. It also comes months after the Post laid off roughly 300 employees as the paper has suffered a drop-off in online traffic. A spokeswoman for the Post said the paper respects the arbitration process.

Washington Post Ordered To Reinstate Left-Wing Columnist Who Protested Her Firing by Posting a Picture of Herself Burning the Paper

Washington Post Ordered To Reinstate Left-Wing Columnist Who Protested Her Firing by Posting a Picture of Herself Burning the Paper

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