Misconduct including
Felicia Sonmez, a reporter for The Washington Post who in recent days has been at the center of a debate over the organization’s social media policies and the culture of the newsroom, was fired on Thursday…
In an emailed termination letter, which was viewed by The New York Times, Ms. Sonmez was told that The Post was ending her employment, effective immediately, “for misconduct that includes insubordination, maligning your co-workers online, and violating The Post’s standards on workplace collegiality and inclusivity.”
I added that comma after “your co-workers online” – the Oxford comma, the one the NYT style guide forbids. That comma is often needed, and that sentence is one such place. It’s three items, not two, and you need the comma to make that unambiguous. I hate style guides and I hate “rules” that ignore style and readers.
Back to the excellent gossip.
The email also said Ms. Sonmez’s “public attempts to question the motives of your co-journalists” undermined The Post’s reputation
Yes it’s not actually the best idea ever to attack people you work with on Twitter. Who knew?
“We cannot allow you to continue to work as a journalist representing The Washington Post,” the letter said.
Plus, we don’t want to.
Her name is actually Felicia. The “Bye Felicias” are going to inundate us.
In the past week, she has been at the center of a public firestorm over the newsroom’s culture.
Dave Weigel etc etc.
In the following days, Ms. Sonmez wrote a series of posts on Twitter about the newsroom culture at The Post and what she said was the uneven way its social media policy was applied to different reporters. At times she jousted with fellow journalists at The Post on Twitter.
I can see wanting to do that. Boy can I see it. But actually doing it? Well, you’d better be prepared to lose that job.
Sally Buzbee, the executive editor of The Post, subsequently wrote two memos to the newsroom asking for colleagues not to attack each other on social media.
Do it behind the scenes, peeps, not on Twitter where everybody can see you and laugh.
But Bye Felicia didn’t listen so Bye Felicia is out.
This story’s too big and unwieldy; I can’t quite get the shape of the whole of it, but the gist of someone getting fired for publicly accusing their colleagues of this and that and whatever (was transphobia in there at some point? I don’t even know but it usually is!)… I do like the sound of that. All I think about is Owen Jones and how extremely overdue he is for the boot. If this signals a shift in the industry, bring it on. Just a couple months ago, the Guardian, in the face of more than one complaint from female staff of extreme harassment after Jones sicced his Twitter army on them, took the kid-gloves route and concluded their investigation with a slap on the wrist and a commission for some turtlenecked consultants who’ll let you play with toys and act out your feelings or some shit. Fuck that. Jones is far overdue for the termination-without-severance treatment. Here’s hoping senior editors at all the papers are looking up and taking notice. In fact, while they’re at it, I hope the board kicks Graun editor-in-chief Kath Viner to the curb too.
I have some sympathy for news organizations, because it’s not entirely clear that the simplistic approach of “don’t badmouth employers or colleagues in public” that you might take if you were a widget factory can be adapted to their industry.
Having writers interact and disagree with each other publicly can be a good thing. They want writers tweeting and driving traffic to their stories and creating buzz, and some interaction can promote that. The NY Times I believe has a policy that its writers aren’t allowed to argue publicly with each other, and what ends up happening is that (e.g.) Paul Krugman and David Brooks engage in weird subtweets about each other’s columns because they’re not allowed to specifically say “hey, Krugman/Brooks wrote X, and I think he’s wrong because ….”
But the NYT policy is looking pretty good these days. Actually, I guess the problem isn’t necessarily with WaPo’s policy, it’s with their sporadic and possibly biased way of enforcing it.
Which is something you see with a lot of employers. They get their lawyers to draft them a nice Employee Handbook with carefully written policies, and then they completely ignore those policies or enforce them in ways that are at best arbitrary and random and at worst discriminatory, then are surprised to find that they aren’t on the best legal grounds. Your policies are only as good as your enforcement of them, and WaPo seems to have made an utter mess of this.
I’m not going to pretend I’ve been following this either, but as far as I see it it’s not great that a woman is criticised/faces consequences for something men seem to do with impunity.
Arty:
Perhaps I should have saved my comment featuring Jones, O on the previous post for this one…
guest @ 3 – do they though? Men, do it with impunity? I don’t know, but it does seem rash to go on and on and ON about your employers’ faults on Twitter where they and everyone else can see it.
I suppose we can be grateful that no one named Karen has chimed in (and I know the Post has at least two actual Karens who write op-eds).
@Screech Monkey,
I think there’s a difference between a columnist saying “I disagree with my colleague on monetary policy” and a reporter repeatedly calling out her colleagues. The former are paid to have differing opinions, and they’re used to debating those differences in public forums. As long as they keep the debates civil, I don’t see any problem with them spilling over to social media. Reporters, on the other hand, are supposed to keep their opinions out of their work as much as possible, and on top of that, it looks like Sonmez wasn’t letting the issue go even after the Post suspended her colleague.
By the way (and apologies Ophelia if I’ve overlooked you mentioning this), Sonmez sued the Post for discrimination last year when she was banned from covering all stories related to sexual misconduct after going public about her own experiences with sexual assault (and she didn’t drop the suit even after the ban was lifted).
This. Very much this. I dislike any dogmatic positions on the Oxford comma. There are times when it’s useful, and times when it isn’t. The whole purpose of punctuation is to make written texts easier to read and parse; that should always trump those “rules”. (I feel much the same about putting punctuation inside quotes vs. outside quotes.)
Yes. It’s funny, the US and UK have opposite rules about that one, and I often find myself hesitating for a second when quoting some brief UKnian item (not copy-pasted) over which I should use. It makes no difference to anything, it’s just a stumbling block.
Good article from an older, conservative, gay man on the rise of the gender borgs and the harm they are doing to LGB people.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/08/21/how-trans-ideology-hijacked-the-gay-rights-movement/