Washington Post columnist says she was fired over posts after Charlie Kirk’s killing

Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah says she has been fired from the newspaper over social media posts about gun control and race in the aftermath of far right commentator Charlie Kirk’s killing.

Attiah, 39, recounted in a Substack post that she had been dropped as a Post columnist after 11 years for “speaking out against political violence, racial double standards, and America’s apathy toward guns”.

The Post, she wrote, accused “my measured Bluesky posts of being ‘unacceptable, ‘gross misconduct’ and of endangering the physical safety of colleagues – charges without evidence, which I reject completely as false”.

Attiah continued: “They rushed to fire me without even a conversation. This was not only a hasty overreach, but a violation of the very standards of journalistic fairness and rigor the Post claims to uphold.”

The columnist’s job was understood to be in jeopardy after she clashed with Post opinion editor Adam O’Neal, formerly of the Economist and the Wall Street Journal, who has reportedly offered buyouts to writers whose work does not fit with the editorial mix of the newspaper owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos.

The Bezos-owned Amazon contributed $1m to the fund for the inauguration of the second presidency of Donald Trump, for whom Kirk was a close ally. And the Post decided to forego endorsing a candidate in the November election won by Trump, a Republican, after the newspaper’s editorial board had voted to endorse Democratic nominee Kamala Harris.

In her Substack post, Attiah noted that she “was the last remaining Black full-time opinion columnist” on the paper and blasted that Washington DC, “one of the nation’s most diverse regions, … no longer has a paper that reflects the people it serves”.

Attiah said her firing was “part of a broader purge of Black voices from academia, business, government, and media – a historical pattern as dangerous as it is shameful – and tragic”.

The Washington Post is under an editorial mandate for the newspaper’s opinion section to focus specifically on supporting and defending “personal liberties and free markets”.

A Washington Post spokesperson declined to comment on personnel matters and pointed to the organization’s policies and standards, including a section governing social media use.

In writings on Bluesky, Attiah lamented that the US, in her opinion, “accepts and worships” gun violence.

“My only direct reference to Kirk was one post – his own words on record,” she said in her Substack letter. The letter included a screenshot of a Bluesky post alluding to a 2023 remark from Kirk about how several prominent Black women “do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously.

“You have to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.”

Attiah continued that she was pointing “to the familiar pattern of America shrugging off gun deaths and giving compassion for white men who commit and espouse political violence”.

The firing described by Attiah came after the Status media newsletter – citing sources – reported in August that she had refused a buyout offer. It also comes days after MSNBC political analyst Matthew Dowd was dismissed for describing Kirk – in the aftermath of his killing – as a “divisive” figure who pushed “hate speech”.

Some accused Dowd of implicitly justifying the violence against Kirk by having said that “hateful words” lead to “hateful actions”. Dowd has since written his comments were “misconstrued” and MSNBC caved to pressure from a “rightwing media mob”.

Dowd was one of the earliest instances of people across the US either being fired from or disciplined at their jobs amid a coordinated effort to clamp down on commentary that is critical about Kirk.

In August, the Post published an opinion piece by Trump administration official Jay Bhattacharya to argue that the federal health and human services department’s decision to cut to support to mRNA vaccine development was a “necessary” step. Experts have warned that the approach is wrongheaded, with mRNA vaccines having saved millions of lives during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The editorial page also published an opinion from Jeanine Pirro, a former host at the conservative Fox News network who is now serving as a Washington DC district attorney, that promoted the administration’s decision to deploy national guard troops on the streets of the capital to allegedly make them safer – even though the city’s violent crime rate is at 30-year low.

O’Neal reportedly sent a memo on 14 July asserting that his “top priority will be to significantly increase the reach and effect of our work”.

“Advocating for free markets and personal liberties will be critical as we rebuild trust with more Americans and scale our high quality journalism,” the memo reportedly said. It said the changes were “not a partisan project” and the paper “won’t let sentimentality slow down much-needed reform”.