WaPo Thrown Into Wild Tailspin After Reporter Melts Down Over Colleague’s ‘Sexist’ Retweet
“Fantastic to work at a news outlet where retweets like this are allowed!” Washington Post reporter Felicia Sonmez raged after sharing a screengrabbed retweet from colleague Dave Weigel.
![https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEikmxEdI-w](https://c1.legalinsurrection.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Washington-Post-WaPo.jpg)
There’s been no shortage of drama and intrigue at the Washington Post over the last few days after one of their reporters, Felicia Sonmez, lashed out at a colleague on Twitter over what she and her sisters in solidarity have deemed a “sexist” retweet.
It all started Friday after Dave Weigel, a political correspondent at the paper, shared a tweet from another Twitter user who joked about how in his view “Every girl is bi. You just have to figure out if it’s polar or sexual.”
This set Sonmez off, so much so that instead of taking her issue with Weigel to DMs where they could maybe settle it amicably (and privately), she screengrabbed it and posted it to her own feed with the caption “Fantastic to work at a news outlet where retweets like this are allowed!”
Fantastic to work at a news outlet where retweets like this are allowed! pic.twitter.com/zs4dX4qprH
— Felicia Sonmez (@feliciasonmez) June 3, 2022
As per the norm, a pile on commenced, with ex-CNNer Soledad O’Brien accusing Weigel of retweeting “misogynistic crap,” and BBC reporter Megha Mohan trotting out the woman card by proclaiming that a “minority journalist, monitored ferociously by certain colleagues, would not get away” with what Weigel (didn’t) get away with. Sonmez, of course, enthusiastically retweeted the reactions of those who rushed to her side in suggesting the WaPo fostered a toxic working environment.
Though Weigel deleted the RT and apologized a short time later and the Washington Post declared that such language would not be tolerated at the paper, it wasn’t enough to soothe Sonmez’s frayed edges.
Since then, Sonmez has written umpteen threads about the “issue,” and also blasted another colleague (in a couple of threads at last check) for committing the sin of telling her in so many words that she was being counterproductive by overreacting (and for then defending himself when she lambasted him again later).
She has also made sure to remind readers of her longstanding grievances with the paper, including how they suspended her once over tweets about Kobe Bryant after he was killed in a helicopter crash, and how they allegedly “punished me for my own trauma” by limiting her reporting on sexual assault cases over concern there would be questions about her impartiality due to the fact that Sonmez claimed to be sexually assaulted in 2017 when working for the Wall Street Journal.
In March, Sonmez lost a discrimination lawsuit against the Washington Post after D.C. Superior Court Judge Anthony Epstein “ruled that Sonmez’s suit did not plausibly allege a valid discrimination claim under D.C. law because the Post appeared to have limited her assignments based on concerns about the paper’s perceived impartiality.” So obviously Sonmez has a lot of pent-up frustrations with the WaPo and Weigel, it sounds like, just happened to be a convenient target.
Because Sonmez and the outrage mob have continued to kick up dust over the “issue” of Weigel’s supposedly offensive retweet, he was suspended without pay for a month. Interestingly enough, Weigel was one of the numerous Washington Post reporters who defended Sonmez in 2020 after the paper suspended her over the Kobe Bryant tweets, proving once again that in woke newsrooms, no good deed goes unpunished:
When @feliciasonmez comes back m to the newsroom https://t.co/ZXv8baPHgi pic.twitter.com/YZ5A43QRqD
— David Weigel (@daveweigel) January 29, 2020
In an odd twist to this story, on Tuesday, numerous Washington Post reporters took to the Twitter machine to express how much they supposedly loved working for the paper in what appeared to be a coordinated PR campaign similar to the one VP Kamala Harris’ staff members engaged in in 2021 after she faced a wave of bad press:
They're still doing this. More and more: all saying exactly the same thing with the exact same words, publicly professing their love for the Washington Post in identical language. This is not healthy behavior. Why are they doing this? pic.twitter.com/f2iG5JoFL4
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 7, 2022
Those tweets came after a new memo was issued by WaPo higher-ups taking what appeared to be a veiled shot at Sonmez’s obnoxious antics:
New: @SallyBuzbee sends stern memo to WaPo staff, reiterating newsroom's values against "racist or sexist behavior" and saying that "we do not tolerate colleagues attacking colleagues either face to face or online." pic.twitter.com/E2bpiFCCyS
— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) June 7, 2022
What do famed WaPo journalists Woodward and Bernstein have to say about all of this? Nothing as of yet, but that hasn’t stopped others (like yours truly) of asking questions of them about the matter in the meantime:
"Woodward and Bernstein share Watergate journalism lessons that still apply today" – does that include shouting down WaPo colleagues in public for 1) tacky (but harmless) jokes and 2) for calling for civility? https://t.co/q1tIbgipmy
— Sister Toldjah 😁 (@sistertoldjah) June 7, 2022
The very public spat between the WaPo and Sonmez comes as they face more criticism from readers over tech/social media reporter Taylor Lorenz’s highly questionable reporting methods, most recently in a piece where they had to issue multiple corrections (with some of them “revised”) on a story she wrote about Internet influencers and the Depp-Heard trial.
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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Comments
It’s a bunch of whiny children. Well, mainly one named Felicia.
Bi Felicia…
The problem isn’t with Whiney, crybaby, self-absorbed Sonmez, but with institutions such as the Wash. Post which even bother to take her seriously. The other journalist definitely should not be suspended, but in the end all these so-called Progressives looking under the. carpet for so-called micro-aggressions will eventually destroy each other and that’s good news for the rest of us.
Leftist are a bunch of Snowflakes who melt at the first sign of heat
Tom MacDonald is well worth checking out if anyone hasn’t done so. Snowflakes is a good place to start.
Live by crybullying die by crybullying.
She is woman! Hear her cry!
At least till she the master and she is crybullied out of her position.
She is master of her bipolar fate and captain of her bisexual soul.
maybe she should learn to code–she obviously can’t hack it as a “journalist”
She is already using code. Journalist is code for political activist.
OUCH!!!
I’m so glad I don’t work at a place that polices my social media usage. Not that they would find much there but there is a certain principle involved of separating work from real life.
But the left doesn’t allow anything to separate them from their outrage.
I was turned down for a rather good job. I refused to give log-in’s and passwords for my social networking sites.
I did so for a good reason. I had none.
wow, Grizzly. what kinda ahole job wants your logins as a requirement for employment? damn. I would have to give that the job the finger too.
I would have said that I wasn’t on social media
Forget the “bi”… go directly to crazy. Obviously, it hit home… so… maybe both?
Remarks tend to hurt in proportion to their truth. -Will Rogers
As an employee, this woman is a toxic dumpster fire. I wonder what hiring manager is deeply regretting ever giving her an offer at the Washington Post?
Agree…Sonmez proving the protested tweet to be 100% true…
I wuz a thinkin of droppin the “bi” bit, and just leaving “polar” in place. Polar places are generally quite frigid. As in, not warm and cozy.
If I were an employer, I would not hire someone like Felicia. She appears to have significant issues with tolerating others outside of her group think. She seems to insist on having the last word.
By the way, why should an employer care about what jokes an employee retweets on their own time and on their own account? Sounds like freedom of speech to me.
I guess she answered the question of “bi or polar”……
We are men and women. It almost always matters which we are. Men and women are aggressive. Their regard for each other is clouded by grudges, suspicions, fears, needs, desires, and narcississtic postures. There’s no scrubbing them out. The best you can hope for is domestication, as in football, rock, humor, happy marriage, and a good prose style. Jokes trade on offensiveness; PC is not a funny dialect. The unconscious is a joker, a sexist and aggressive creature. Our sexuality has always been scandalous. – Wm. Kerrigan
If you suppress jokes, you get the undomesticated form.
Sonmez sounds like a bitch on wheels that needs a different job.
New Nina?
New Nina?
New Nina?
WaPo is in a tailspin? I hope they crash and burn.
i’ll show the world that women aren’t bi-polar… by acting… psycho
So the answer with this one is “polar” then?
Too much “polar”, not enough of the other.
“Polar or sexual” are not mutually exclusive.
Well, now we know. Sonmez IS bi-polar. Probably a humorless dunce as well.
Every liberal is bi. You just have to figure out if it’s polar or sexual.
Fixed
Leftists cannot have a sense of humor, and this one is a humorless, dried up old scrunt.
Well, I guess this Sonmez woman is definitely not bisexual…
Nice, though I think your comment was over the heads of most folks who post here …
Would more jokes help the situation?
Only if you are not employed there—otherwise you will be sacked, discharged, dismissed, let go, laid off, made jobless, unemployed and terminated posthaste.
All the tweets criticizing Weigel’s joke called is “unfunny”/”not funny” and “offensive.”
Liberals seem not to understand that just because they find something offensive doesn’t mean it’s not funny (or not true). They want humor (like “truth”) to always be inoffensive, but the real world refuses to conform to their beliefs.
It was like 30 years ago when I first heard the joke:
“How many feminists does it take to change a lightbulb?
That’s not funny!“
actually it’s a hackneyed, stale joke and he’s a jerk for posting it – and he’s even more of a jerk for apologizing – appeasement and groveling only incite the vindictive left to become more belligerent and vengeful.
Just think: if SHE had been mature enough to simpy toss it off her strong back, the whole thing would have faded away in the night like a night blooming jasmine bush. This little child got her unmentionabls all beknotted and, besotted with her “miff”, she elected to retaliate. Now she’s proven beyond reasonable doubt she’s about as mature as a seven year old Only Child,
WaPo were not mature enough to leave her to fester where she was previously. Now she has soiled their nest as well.
It seems safe to assume she learnd her tricks in gummit skewlz with things like timeouts, evening up the score, you are pweshus and never wrong., and should repay every slight slight. It would seem that growing up BEFORE hiring out to an signficant situation with a firm of some signficance is no longer a desirable practice. No sympathy for any of them. MAYBE if SOME of them could write well on significant topics their antics could be overlooked as part of the price for the benefits of steady employment.
Is he trans/homo? Sexist or genderist? Transgenderist? Much ado about trans/bis who have measured the pulse of political congruence (“=”). Irreconcilable. Fortunately, journolists overwhelming subscribe to the Pro-Choice “ethical” (i.e. relativistic, selective) religion.
When I saw the original tweet, I laughed…loudly. My husband asked what was so funny so I read it to him. Now he generally doesn’t laugh at that kind of humor but even he couldn’t help himself.
Sonmez is a grievance mongering harpy who seems to think everyone in the world is talking about her, even when her name is not mentioned.
one wonders where you live. That joke is so old it has a long white beard.
What is it with these women with last names ending in “z”?
So a friend was rambling on tonight about how almost all news stories are written by AI. It seems like perhaps that is true for the WaPo tweets as well.
I am old enough to remember when this country had a sense of humor.
A bisexual, a bi-polar, and 215th gender-trans-queer-++ walk into a bar…
so am I – and the joke is part of that era – Playboy Magazine, circa 1980.
Sally Buzbee wrote that? The grammar and punctuation is horrible!
oops..’are horrible’ but then I don’t make my living with it.
no WONDER I did not “get it”.
post delayed i,, and in the wrong place.
More popcorn, please.
The WP like the NYT is an expensive Twitter page It is living on the fumes of its past reputation
The joke is true in many cases. That’s what makes it funny and this shrew just proved it.
.
yes, she is a shrew. No, the joke is neither true nor funny. Classic incel comment.
Weigel was joking around. It’s a shame some people can’t appreciate humor anymore. Grow up and act like an adult Felicia and others who can’t appreciate the humor. I am sure you make jokes about men. Get a grip!
Henny Youngman called. He wants a royalty payment on his joke.
It really is time some people grew a spine!
Let me get this straight (no pun intended), Weigel gets suspended for a month for a slightly funny post,
She hates working for WAPO, but hasn’t quit?
Assessment: privileged, victim, humorless, few real friends, and believes that the 1st Amendment only applies to her.
she is clearly getting advice from an ambulance-chasing attorney (or self-researched using the same level of inability to focus rationally) on how to build a discrimination case.
I think her screeching mob friends just want in on the payday.
WaPo has demonstrated to be another spineless corp. that treats people as chattel instead of humans.
to counter this nonsense, am glad to see actual journalists working for small outfits or self-publishing on substack.
wapo is a relic. can’t wait to see it wither and die.