WaPo Journalist Fired Over Kill-Justify Tweets

Adriana Stone 0 2 min read

WaPo Journalist Fired Over Kill-Justify Tweets

The Washington Post cut ties with Karen Attiah this week. The newsroom was already reeling from major staff cuts. Attiah’s posts made the situation worse.

Her critics say she spent the period after Charlie Kirk’s killing twisting quotes to make the act look justified. People called that unforgivable. Editors agreed.

Attiah has a loud presence on Bluesky. She used it to criticize the layoffs and to put the Post’s problems into a broad historical frame.

She wrote that, in her classes, she teaches about how the press in early America worked to serve wealthy white power holders. She argued the so-called independent press grew as a business when publishers sold ads instead of depending on government backing. Her posts read like a history class. But after the other posts about Kirk, readers saw them differently.

Here are her exact words, posted on Bluesky:

“As terrible as what is happening right now to journalism, we actually should dismantle the romantic myths we have of the press in America,”

“I teach in my class about colonial press censorship, and then how the independent press was a tool for the wealthy, white power holders to maintain dominance.”

She continued in a follow-up thread:

“What people don\u2019t know is they the [sic] colonial American press became independent was not because it was enshrined in some glittering document,”

“The press in America became independent once the [sic] figured out they could sell advertising to get out from having to depend on colonial government backing.”

“So counter-intuitively— capitalism was an early means to a freer press,” she added. “British imposed heavy fines, taxes and restrictions on press in many of its colonies around the world, including the U.S.

“Advertising + wealthy owners then became baked into the U.S. newspaper system.”

Those tweets sparked two reactions. One group saw scholarly context and debate. The other saw tone-deaf commentary that followed posts many viewed as celebrating a violent act.

There was also a widely shared post accusing Attiah of altering Charlie Kirk’s quote to make it sound broader than it was. That post read exactly as it appeared on Twitter:

So Karen Attiah says she quoted Charlie Kirk’s own words.

She did not. She said “you do not” — speaking of specific women — and Karen dishonestly changed it to “black women do not.”

She deserved to be fired, entirely, and without any question.

The Post’s ownership and finances also landed in the story. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns the paper. The company has been shrinking staff and reshaping coverage. The Post reportedly lost a large sum in 2023 and has restructured leadership. Those cuts prompted the broader debate about whether newsrooms are being run as businesses first, or as civic institutions.

Some writers urged Bezos to keep funding a paper many see as politically aligned and influential. Others argued a private owner should demand results. That tension is part of why the company moved so aggressively.

For conservatives skeptical of legacy media, this is vindication. They see a paper that long pushed a partisan line being forced to answer to the bottom line. For those inside the building, it felt like a purge. For readers, it raised one clear question: when newsroom culture crosses a line, who decides the consequences?

Attiah’s defenders call her dismissal silencing. Her critics call it accountability. Either way, her posts made an already tense moment explode. The Post cut staff. Tempers flared. Debate moved from the newsroom to the feeds. And the larger fight over media trust and standards keeps getting louder.

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