UPDATE: Sept. 16 — After this story was published, media reporter Oliver Darcy published Attiah’s termination letter, which was written by Wayne Connell, the Washington Post’s chief HR officer. Attiah confirmed the letter’s authenticity to HuffPost. “Your postings on Bluesky (which clearly identifies you as a Post Columnist) about white men in response to the killing of Charlie Kirk do not comply with our [social media] policy,” Connell wrote. Later, he said Attiah’s “poor judgment” arose “against the backdrop of documented performance concerns, which have been raised with you.”
PREVIOUSLY: Karen Attiah, a noted Washington Post opinion columnist, said Monday that she had been fired over social media posts in the aftermath of the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
Kirk was fatally shot last week, allegedly by a lone gunman who is now in police custody.
Attiah’s firing adds to the widespread effort to crack down on the political left and those critical of Kirk ― who introduced a new generation to far-right beliefs ― and serves as the latest example of the Post’s ongoing evolution toward hyper-conservative opinion pages.
During her 11 years at the Post, Attiah wrote columns, was the newspaper’s first Global Opinions editor, and shared a 2019 George Polk award with writer David Ignatius “for eloquence and resolve in demanding accountability in the wake of the gruesome murder of Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.”
“I was the last remaining Black full-time opinion columnist at the Post, in one of the nation’s most diverse regions. Washington D.C. no longer has a paper that reflects the people it serves,” Attiah wrote in a Substack post Monday. “What happened to me is 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.”
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In February, Jeff Bezos, the Post’s owner, announced that the paper’s opinion section would be “writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.” Opinion editor David Shipley resigned over the change. The new editor, Adam O’Neal, said in June that opinion page editors would be “unapologetically patriotic” and that the section’s philosophy would be “rooted in fundamental optimism about the future of this country.” Along the way, many journalists have left the paper.
In the aftermath of the Kirk shooting, Attiah plainly denounced murder, but also posted and reposted several opinions on gun violence and racism in America ― as might be expected from an opinion writer.
Nonetheless, Attiah was fired for, as she described it, “Speaking out against political violence, racial double standards, and America’s apathy toward guns.” She said the Post had alleged that her posts, on the Bluesky platform, were “unacceptable,” “gross misconduct” and endangered her colleagues’ physical safety — “charges without evidence, which I reject completely as false,” Attiah wrote.
“For the record. My posts were not even about Kirk directly, but about America’s apathy towards political violence, and the coddling of white male shooters and hate peddlers,” she added separately. “I was fired because I mentioned race: white men and violence― that was my ‘gross misconduct.’”
HuffPost wasn’t able to reach Attiah for further comment, and a Post spokesperson declined to comment “on personnel matters.”
The Washington Post Guild, the union for the paper’s employees, condemned Attiah’s firing and said it would continue to “support her and defend her rights.”
The Post “flagrantly disregarded standard disciplinary processes” and “undermined its own mandate to be a champion of free speech” by firing Attiah “over her social media posts,” guild leadership wrote in a statement Monday.
Attiah highlighted a few of her Bluesky posts in the Substack post announcing she had been fired:
That last post is a slight misquote. Kirk, in a 2023 discussion of affirmative action, didn’t refer to “Black women” generally. Instead, according to a widely-circulated clip, he called out four Black women in particular ― journalist Joy Reid, former first lady Michelle Obama, the late Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas), and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson — who had all commented on the court majority’s ruling against the constitutionality of affirmative action in colleges and universities.
“You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously,” Kirk said at the time, after referring to the women. “You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.”
In addition to being an opinion journalist and Substack author, Attiah is the creator of “Resistance Summer School,” an online educational platform. The platform will soon offer beginner- and intermediate-level classes on “Race, Media and International Affairs.”