John Hinderaker writes for the Power Line blog about the latest journalistic malfeasance at one of the nation’s leading legacy media outlets.
Probably the worst crime a journalist can commit is attributing to someone a statement–putting it in quotation marks–that the person never said. That would get you fired from a 9th grade student paper.
But it is exactly what former Washington Post “journalist” Karen Attiah did, on the BlueSky hate platform.
The quote Attiah attributed to Charlie Kirk? He never said it. She just made it up. Her fabrication was rapidly exposed on X, and The Washington Post did the only thing it could, confronted with such misconduct: they fired her.
So Attiah took her grievance to the New York Times, which printed a sympathetic account by one Benjamin Mullin:
“Karen Attiah, an opinion columnist for The Washington Post, said she was fired last week after posting on social media about gun violence and “racial double standards” following the assassination of the right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk.
“In a post on Substack announcing her firing, Ms. Attiah cited several social media posts made in the wake of Mr. Kirk’s death that expressed antipathy toward political violence and frustration with the lack of effort to curb gun violence.”
But she wasn’t fired for that. She was fired for fabricating a quote to malign a political enemy–a political enemy who had just been murdered.
The Times suggests that Attiah’s firing may be due to a new, right-wing slant at the Post:
“The company’s opinion section has been reshaped over the past year after an edict from Jeff Bezos, its owner, declaring that The Post would embrace ‘personal liberties and free markets.’” …
… “‘My only direct reference to Kirk was one post — his own words on record,’ Ms. Attiah wrote.”
But Attiah did not quote Kirk’s “own words on record.” His own words didn’t give her the ammunition she needed, so she fabricated a fake quote, for which she was fired. Amazingly, you can read the entire Times article without being told that this was her offense.
