The Washington Post Fires Felicia Sonmez Amid Week of Infighting [View all]

[AZProgressive]

The Washington Post has parted ways with national political reporter Felicia Sonmez, The Daily Beast has confirmed, capping off a week’s worth of highly public drama at the paper.

Sonmez’s apparent exit from the paper comes after a week of WaPo infighting that stoked heated conversations over newsroom inequity and social-media use, with multiple reporters taking shots at one another in public.

The seemingly unending dramatics began late last week when political reporter Dave Weigel retweeted a sexist post about bisexual women. He later apologized but not before Sonmez publicly called him out along with the paper’s management, writing: “Fantastic to work at a news outlet where retweets like this are allowed!”

Fellow Post reporter Jose A. Del Real then publicly accused Sonmez of “repeated and targeted public harassment of a colleague,” which led to several tweets worth of beefing between the pair until Del Real blocked her. The ordeal prompted Executive Editor Sally Buzbee issuing a somewhat vague memo telling staffers to play nice. But tensions remained high on Monday as WaPo video technician Breanna Muir reportedly replied-all to the memo to cheer on Sonmez and call out a different colleague for referring to her in a tweet as “Breanna Taylor.” The paper has a “toxic work environment,” Muir wrote in her staff-wide note.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/felicia-sonmez-exits-washington-post-amid-week-of-infighting/