Ex-Washington Post Editor: We Were Right to Suspend Reporter Over Kobe Tweet

Former Washington Post editor Marty Baron and CNN anchor Jake Tapper on Wednesday debated the paper’s January 2020 suspension of national political reporter Felicia Sonmez, due at least in part to a tweet she sent about an hour after the death of NBA star Kobe Bryant.

Sonmez had posted a link to a 2016 Daily Beast article detailing the 2003 rape allegation against the longtime Los Angeles Laker. Sonmez was then put on administrative leave. In June 2022, she was fired for “misconduct that includes insubordination, maligning your co-workers online and violating The Post’s standards on workplace collegiality and inclusivity,” according to a termination letter viewed by The New York Times.

“I can’t think of anything more journalistic—in the sense that we are the ones that are supposed to bring up the most uncomfortable truths to the public—than that tweet,” Tapper told Baron. “And second of all, I bet there were millions of rape survivors and sexual assault survivors that saw her tweet, and thought, ‘Thank God somebody out there is speaking for me.'”

Baron, whose new memoir also delves into the Post suspending Sonmez and also banning her from covering sexual assault stories, noted that individuals’ faults were mentioned in the Post’s obituaries, and that “certain people” are left to write those stories.

“We don’t expect anybody in the newsroom to decide to throw out commentary as they wish, whenever they wish, and in whatever manner they wish, and so of course we were going to deal with those rape allegations in the obituary that we were writing,” Baron said, adding that Sonmez “wasn’t involved” in the paper’s coverage of Bryant and that her tweet “distracted attention” from it.

While Tapper claimed that Sonmez’s post was “just a tweet,” Baron disagreed.

“It wasn’t just a tweet, okay?” he responded.

The former editor of The Boston Globe during that paper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation into rampant sex abuse in the Catholic Church, Baron explained that he wanted to handle Bryant’s tragic death with the same level of caution regarding social media policies.

“We took great care with how we did those stories. We didn’t have everybody tweeting whatever they wanted. We didn’t have people tweeting about celibacy or anything like that. We picked the reporters to work on that. We selected the headlines. We were very careful with the headlines. We were very careful with how the stories were written, and that’s what a news organization is supposed to do,” he said. “That’s what we wanted to do in the case of Kobe Bryant.”