Reply to Washington Post fires reporter Felicia Somnez who objected to misogynistic tweets

Forum Index » Off-Topic

Reply to "Washington Post fires reporter Felicia Somnez who objected to misogynistic tweets"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The Post has a history of treating this woman badly.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/29/opinion/sonmez-kobe-washington-post.html
[quote]
The culture war will come for us all.

On Sunday, it came for a Washington Post reporter, Felicia Sonmez.

Nine people were killed in a helicopter crash in Calabasas, Calif., that morning, including the basketball legend Kobe Bryant and his 13-year-old daughter, Gianna. The news rocketed around social media, where mourners shared their heartbreak at the news. As is common with major breaking news, some reports were inaccurate or false, layering anxiety on top of grief.

Into the mix, Ms. Sonmez tweeted the link to a 2016 article from The Daily Beast about a young woman’s accusation that Mr. Bryant had raped her in Colorado. Criminal charges against him were dropped in 2004 and a civil suit was settled out of court.

The tweet highlighted the fact that Mr. Bryant’s legacy is fraught and complicated, and attracted the attention of fans as well as trolls who bombarded her inbox with abuse and posted her home address online. Ms. Sonmez then posted a selection of the threats she received, without obscuring the names of the people who had sent her hate mail. She slept in a hotel on Sunday night, fearing for her safety at home, she said.

We don’t know all the details, but it seems that The Post’s managing and executive editors were not pleased. They chastised her over email and placed her on administrative leave while the organization reviewed whether she had violated the company’s social media guidelines. Their reasoning on Monday: “The tweets displayed poor judgment that undermined the work of her colleagues.” The Post reversed her suspension on Tuesday, roughly 36 hours after the initial tweets, stating that senior managers had concluded that Ms. Sonmez’s tweets didn’t violate company policy.

This, of course, was obvious to almost everyone but The Post’s higher-ups. It was impossible to imagine how posting a link to a story by a different publication on Twitter could undermine the work of colleagues. Just as it was impossible to imagine which colleagues would have felt undermined (more than 300 of Ms. Sonmez’s colleagues expressed solidarity with her in a letter from The Post’s union to management).

There remain glaring questions. Did the executive editor, Marty Baron, inquire about Ms. Sonmez’s safety when he emailed her to criticize her tweets? What, beyond a reflex for online civility, led The Post to determine the reporter was “hurting this institution” by discussing a part of Mr. Bryant’s legacy that appeared in The Post’s own news pages? Why, after years of watching journalists, women and vulnerable individuals being trolled and abused by viral outrage online, are newsrooms still falling for the same Gamergate-style tactics? The Post’s official statement (it doesn’t quite rise to the level of an apology), which included the caveat “we consistently urge restraint” for reporters online, doesn’t begin to answer these questions.

Mr. Baron released a memo to Post staff on Thursday admitting “It is not always easy to know where to draw the line” on many of these issues. Notably, the memo did not include an apology.
[/quote][/quote]

Personally, as someone who has been attacked on social media by reporters who cover the issue that I research, I'm glad that the Post tries to avoid having reporters who have strongly formed personal views on various issue cover those same issues for the Post. I recognize that no one is truly objective, but if you are on the record with strong feelings on a particular issue (pro or con) and if you are interacting with random readers in highly opinionated ways, you should not be tasked with news coverage of those same issues. Sorry Felicia (and the NYT reporter who covers the issue that I know best, whom I've called out on Twitter for harassing those who disagree with her.)[/quote]

By that logic, Dave Wiegel shouldn't be reporting on women.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics