They argued that the public call for sexism is always right, as it sends a clear message that misogyny has no place in the workplace. After Sally Buzbee, executive editor, issued a statement calling the staff “constructive and collective,” several journalists defended the newspaper, writing on Twitter that while the Post was not perfect, they were proud to work there. Ms Sonmez defied an order from the administration to curb her cyber-attacks on colleagues. “Of course the Washington Post is a great place to work. “It’s a great workplace * for them *,” Ms. Sonmez wrote in response, arguing that her advocates were mostly white, men and well-paid. “The system works * for them *. What about everyone else? ” This latest uproar from tweets from the scorched earth seemed to seal her fate. Ms Sonmez was informed on Thursday afternoon that The Post was terminating her employment on charges of “disobedience, harassment of your colleagues on the Internet and breach of The Post standards of collegiality and participation in the workplace”.
Click-bait feed
The epic was written last week at Vanity Fair, chewed on the popular US talk show The View and became food for political commentators. Conservatives see a rather different issue at stake: that which essentially concerns freedom of speech. They see major cultural institutions, such as universities, entertainment and the media, being “held hostage” by “intolerant ideologues”. Megan McCain, the daughter of the late Republican Sen. John McCain and a former presenter at The View, described the Washington Post as “the canary in the coal mine.” “It proves how much our culture has shifted and how irrational and hysterical the people who run these spaces have become,” he wrote. Josh Barrow, a powerful Republican journalist, claimed that “liberal-run” organizations had developed toxic cultures of public controversy because the administration was too weak to tell employees to behave and act as a team. “If I ran the Post, I would hand out punishments, including suspensions, like candy, until all this nonsense stopped,” he said. Prior to her dismissal, Ms Sonmez had dismissed the idea that this was another “culture-breaking” story. “This is a company where internal calls for change have not been heeded for very, very long,” he said.
Women’s rights at the crossroads
The drama comes at a crossroads for women’s rights. Activists see women being attacked in a post-MeToo USA where their reproductive rights have been curtailed in recent months and allegations of sexual abuse have been mocked. It is not lost on Post officials that these events unfolded in the same newspaper that published Mrs. Herd’s article on domestic violence, the one that sparked Mr. Depp’s lawsuit. “As a newspaper we took the mantra ‘believe women’ and that may be the tone of our coverage, but that is not the culture of our journalistic space,” an official at the international bureau told the Telegraph. “While I may not agree with how Felicia handled it, you can be sure that she will not improve when she leaves.”
