This reporting appears as one of several scoops featured in this week’s edition of Confider, the media newsletter that pulls back the curtain to reveal what’s really going on inside the world’s most powerful navel-gazing industry. Subscribe here and send your questions, tips, and complaints here.
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Members of The Washington Post’s “old guard,” including staffers on its national and politics desks, are “irate” at star tech reporter Taylor Lorenz for what they view as sloppy reporting resulting in the latest editorial scandal to engulf the outlet.
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Several heavy hitters at the paper have voiced their concerns to Executive Editor Sally Buzbee over Lorenz’s piece about content creators profiting off the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trial, which had to be updated no less than three times (including two editor’s notes), but the cock-up that has upset them may not have been entirely Lorenz’s fault, Confider has learned.
“The first published version of this story stated incorrectly that Internet influencers Alyte Mazeika and ThatUmbrellaGuy had been contacted for comment before publication. In fact, only Mazeika was asked, via Instagram,” read one of the editor’s notes.
But it was Lorenz’s editor, Deputy Features Editor David Malitz, who dressed in a line that the two influencers had been contacted for comment when they had not—the result of a miscommunication between editor and reporter—that may now cost Malitz the plum features editor gig he was apparently about to be handed.
The paper has yet to explain how Lorenz’s piece also came to misattribute a quote to Depp’s lawyer Adam Waldman, prompting the second correction. A spokesperson for The Washington Post declined to comment. Lorenz hung up on Confider when reached for comment.
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But wait, there’s more! Veteran WaPo political reporter David Weigel has been suspended for a month, two people with knowledge of the matter told Confider, capping off the weekend’s worth of drama at the paper.
Weigel did not respond to a request for comment, but CNN’s Oliver Darcy, who scooped us on the suspension, noted that an out-of-office email reply indicated he’d be back on July 5.
Weigel on Friday retweeted a post reading “Every girl is bi. You just have to figure out if it’s polar or sexual.” He later apologized but not before a rebuking from management, which was prompted by a very public call-out by his WaPo colleague Felicia Sonmez, who wrote: “Fantastic to work at a news outlet where retweets like this are allowed!”
Sonmez, who last year sued the paper for banning her from covering sexual-assault stories after she outed herself as a survivor, was in turn publicly bashed by another WaPo reporter, Jose A. Del Real, who accused her of “repeated and targeted public harassment of a colleague.”
The messy ordeal resulted in Buzbee issuing a somewhat vague statement telling staffers to play nice. Tensions remained high on Monday, however, as WaPo video technician Breanna Muir reportedly replied-all to Buzbee’s memo to cheer on Sonmez, call out a colleague for referring to her in a tweet as “Breanna Taylor,” and suggest the paper has a “toxic work environment.”
A spokesperson for The Washington Post yet again declined to comment.
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