“The View” weighed in Wednesday on the widening rift within the Washington Post’s newsroom – with co-hosts questioning a politics reporter’s move to publicly lambast a colleague for retweeting a joke she deemed sexist.
Co-host Whoopi Goldberg gave a detailed account of the internal turmoil at the Jeff Bezos-owned broadsheet and admitted that she “lost the whole trail a little while ago.”
But guest host Lindsey Granger was more pointed in her remarks, taking aim at Felicia Sonmez — who unleashed a social media onslaught over the retweet by fellow staffer Dave Weigel and after the subsequent suspension of the longtime journalist
“This always gets lost on me, that people insert themselves and make themselves the story when that’s the number one thing you’re taught not to do,” Granger said.
Weigel apologized and was suspended without pay for one month after sharing the joke, but Sonmez has continued clashing with colleagues online – with tensions running so high that an editor stepped in to demand reporters “treat each other with respect and kindness.”
Granger added that Sonmez is “living in a glass house” after once being suspended herself in 2020 for tweeting about past rape allegations against NBA legend Kobe Bryant within hours of his death in a helicopter crash.
“Don’t use Twitter as a public square. Use Twitter responsibly and use Twitter to share the story and be a real journalist,” she said.
Sara Haines concurred, arguing that Twitter users should remember that their online commentary was a reflection on their employers and their families.
“The woman’s tone, if read that back and forth, she tries to say that she’s now fighting ‘the man’ on these issues that have never been dealt with, her tone is really disappointing,” Haines said. “One of her other colleagues calls out and says ‘please stop doing this.’ ”
“At this point, she’s trolling but she’s trying to ride the self-righteous wave of, ‘I’m doing something right’ while taking down everyone,” Haines added.
Joy Behar said she was “of two minds” on the issue and ripped Weigel for sharing the joke on his Twitter account in the first place.
“Maybe she should have handled it internally, but why is he putting out these sexist jokes? It’s like, what are you, 12? Grow up,” Behar said.
“People make mistakes. There’s room for a mistake. That happens,” Haines responded.
Sunny Hostin pointed out that Weigel had defended Sonmez after her suspension for the Bryant tweet. The panelist also questioned why Sonmez chose to address the situation on Twitter rather than speak out against sexism in an article for the paper.
“I was a little surprised that even after the editor-in-chief said let’s handle this internally, she continued arguing on Twitter,” Hostin said. “Twitter is not the real world.”
Sonmez slammed another Washington Post reporter’s description of the newsroom as “collegial” and criticized leadership for not requiring another reporter, Jose Del Real, to delete tweets in which he questioned her public attack on Weigel.
“These tweets falsely accusing me of ‘clout chasing,’ ‘bullying,’ ‘cruelty,’ and directing an ‘eager mob’ to carry out ‘a barrage of online abuse’ are still up…even after I repeatedly raised them to management and noted that I’ve been receiving threats and abuse,” Sonmez tweeted.
Another reporter, Lisa Rein, asked Sonmez to “please stop” her tweetstorm.
[Written in collaboration with other media outlets with information from the following sources]
