The headline in The New York Times was this:
Infighting Overshadows Big Plans at The Washington Post
The aim of Sally Buzbee, The Post’s editor, is to broaden the newspaper’s reach. A year into the job, she’s dealing with internal tumult over some longstanding grievances.
Well isn’t this interesting? The liberal decidedly woke newspaper in New York is interested in (chuckling over?) the woke woes that have lately swamped its liberal counterpart in the nation’s capital.
The Times story says, in part, this:
“When Sally Buzbee joined The Washington Post a year ago this month, she took over a newsroom that had nearly doubled to more than 1,000 journalists under the ownership of Jeff Bezos, who bought it in 2013. Its coverage regularly won Pulitzer Prizes.
The newspaper has continued growing in the months since. It has opened breaking news hubs in Seoul and London to become more of a 24-hour global operation. It expanded coverage of technology, climate and personal health. Its reporting won the Pulitzer Prize for public service this year.
But Ms. Buzbee is now on the defensive, yet to completely win over the newsroom and facing internal strife that has eclipsed some of her bold plans.”
The Times goes on to reveal that “more than two dozen current and former Post staff members” quite willingly — if anonymously — spoke up to the Times about all the internal goings on at their own paper, the Post.
In the style of the 21st century, one of the glaring problems at the Post was how Post employees behaved online. The paper has just been through an embarrassing dust-up when political reporter David Weigel retweeted what the liberal Times called “a sexist and homophobic joke.” In a sign of the times in which hypersensitive, woke leftists live, the Times reports that “Felicia Sonmez, another political reporter at The Post, tweeted: ‘Fantastic to work at a news outlet where retweets like this are allowed!’”
What followed was a wildly narcissistic, woke skirmish in which Weigel was suspended for a month, with Sonmez continuing to tweet her hurt feelings non-stop. Reports the Times of editor Buzbee and Fred Ryan, the Post’s publisher:
“She said the newspaper unevenly punished journalists for what they wrote on Twitter, and critiqued her co-workers publicly.
Mr. Ryan and Ms. Buzbee agreed that the only option was to fire her, according to a person with knowledge of the discussion. They met with top editors to talk through the decision. Some suggested other options, including a suspension. Eventually, there was broad agreement that Ms. Sonmez had to go, the person said.
Ms. Buzbee planned to fire Ms. Sonmez the next evening, June 9, the person said. But after Ms. Sonmez tweeted early the next morning, the timeline moved up a few hours. The termination letter sent by The Post accused her of ‘insubordination, maligning your co-workers online and violating The Post’s standards on workplace collegiality and inclusivity.’”
Hmmm. A woke employee has their feelings hurt by another employee and unleashes their woke fury in public, resulting in a departure from the paper. Where have we heard a story like this before?
Why, at the New York Times, of course.
Recall this headline from the New York Post in June of 2020.
NY Times editorial page editor James Bennet resigns after Tom Cotton op-ed fiasco
The “fiasco” was that the Times editor had approved an Op-Ed from Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton urging that the Insurrection Act of 1807 be invoked by President Trump to send in federal troops to the numerous American cities who were experiencing riots, burning, looting and general mayhem in the wake of the George Floyd killing.
And in a situation not dissimilar to the Washington Post’s current situation, all hell broke loose from the woke lefties who staffed the Times.
The New York Post (and it wasn’t alone) reported that episode this way:
New York Times staffers condemn paper for publishing Tom Cotton op-ed
The NY Post story said this:
“Dozens of New York Times staffers erupted in outrage at the newspaper publishing an op-ed from Republican Sen. Tom Cotton urging President Trump to call out the US military to crack down on protests that have turned violent in many parts of the country.
…Nikole Hannah-Jones, who won the Pulitzer Prize in May for the Times’ “1619 Project,” said on Twitter: “As a black woman, as a journalist, as an American, I am deeply ashamed that we ran this.”
Charlie Warzel, who works on the newspaper’s opinion staff, posted: “i disagree with every word in that Tom Cotton op-ed and it does not reflect my values.”
Roxane Gay, an advice columnist in the Times business section, called Cotton’s op-ed “inflammatory” and said he was “endorsing military occupation as if the constitution didn’t exist.”
“As a NYT writer I absolutely stand in opposition to that Tom Cotton ‘editorial.’ We are well served by robust and ideologically diverse public discourse that includes radical, liberal, and conservative voices,” Gay said in another tweet.
The NewsGuild of New York, the union that represents many Times employees, released a statement claiming ‘Cotton’s Op-Ed pours gasoline on the fire’ and ‘promotes hate.’”
The best response to all this obsessive wokeness came from Senator Cotton. Said the Senator in the voice of an adult, the reaction of the Times staffers…:
“…exposes the hypocrisy of all these woke progressives who claim to defend liberal values but as soon as they are presented with an opinion with which they disagree, they go into meltdown, they demand censorship, they refer to words as violence, they call for firings.”
Exactly.
So what do we have here?
What we have here are the two flagship liberal newspapers in America essentially staffed with immature, narcissistic, woke employees who have managed to make their respective workplaces a decidedly unhappy place to be.
What amuses in this latest instance is that the New York Times is running a story on the woke internals of the Washington Post - when in fact the very same wokeness problem infects the Times itself.
Ya can’t make it up.
