Colleagues
Vanity Fair on ructions at the Washington Post:
On Tuesday afternoon, Washington Post reporter Josh Dawsey tweeted that he was “proud” to work at the paper, a place “filled with many terrific people who are smart and collegial.”
And a lot of other familiar names followed suit.
The public outpouring of Post pride—which I’m told political reporters were urging one another to take part in—followed executive editor Sally Buzbee’s memo reiterating workplace policies and promoting collegiality among staff. The memo dropped following a few days at the Post that have been, as one reporter described it, a “clusterfuck.” Dave Weigel, a national political correspondent, is, as of Monday, suspended without pay for the next month after retweeting a sexist tweet last week, which he then promptly unshared and apologized for after a colleague called him out both on the company Slack and publicly. Hours after news of Weigel’s suspension broke Monday, that colleague, political reporter Felicia Sonmez, was urging the paper to take action against a different colleague, Jose Del Real, who on Saturday took aim at Sonmez for “the cruelty you regularly unleash against colleagues.” (He made this point after commending Sonmez for “your bravery in sharing your story,” adding, “I support your fight against retribution for doing so.”)
Let’s everybody work from home forever, ok?
Nobody in this story comes out looking good.
Weigel — who I generally like — was an idiot for retweeting that dumb sexist joke. I don’t think it merited a month’s suspension, but still.
Sonmez — who I think was treated poorly by WaPo in the past, notably when they told her she couldn’t write about sexual assault stories because as a survivor she was biased — can’t seem to resist airing her grievances with co-workers in public.
Ditto for Del Real.
WaPo management seems completely ineffectual. They charge in with a rather heavy-handed suspension of Weigel, but now people are violating their social media policy left and right, and all they do is keep sending out memos saying please don’t do that. They’ve put themselves in a real jam by having a policy that they don’t enforce — now if they start to enforce it, it’s going to look like differential treatment, which is especially dicey for them given the history with Sonmez.
What they ought to do is start handing out suspensions left and right and getting everyone to shut the fuck up on Twitter. The one good thing about suspending Weigel for a month is that it gives them room to suspend Sonmez and Del Real (among others) for a week each and still be able to say it’s less serious that Weigel’s punishment.
I think things like this become inevitable if management doesn’t handle difficult things. The article said they had problems with how reporters were conducting themselves on social media, and apparently they haven’t been able to solve it. That seems to be a problem many (perhaps most) businesses have. Bringing company infighting into the public has never been good for business, but so many places are trying to balance First Amendment right with the need for their employees not to show themselves to be assholes in public while off work.
Thing is, social media has a lot of moving parts. It’s hard to keep up because things move so fast. And social media has allowed us to find out how obnoxious our friends, neighbors, and colleagues really are. That’s why I avoid it. I don’t want to now how obnoxious the people around me really are, nor do I want them to know how obnoxious I really am. It’s a cesspool.
Yes, I know, good can come from social media. But I begin to suspect the good is so small compared to the bad…it seems to turn everyone into foaming at the mouth crazed narcissists (present company excluded, of course).
There’s no way in hell my workplace would ever let employees air grievances on Twitter to themselves and the public at large. That it’s happening at the Washington Post and other news sources just shows how much Twitter is entwined with journalism, and I suppose academia too.
CNN is reporting Sonmez has been fired from the Washington Post.
Well, that’s an interesting development.
Sonmez is already suing WaPo; the complaint was dismissed by the trial court and is on appeal. Presumably this is going to lead to lawsuit #2. Which WaPo surely had to know was a possibility, but they’ve been so hamhanded that who knows what they’re thinking.
Goodness, how can one even keep up?