Former Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah was reinstated after arbitration over social media posts about the September 2025 assassination of Charlie Kirk, a move that reignited fierce criticism from media skeptics like Matt Taibbi; this piece revisits those critiques, highlights examples from Attiah’s work, and examines how the episode fits into larger debates about free speech and the press.
She was fired, then returned to the payroll with back pay after arbitration, and she painted her dismissal as an attack on free speech and a sign of the “disposability” of black writers. That narrative didn’t sit well with critics who pointed out the process was a private grievance resolved through agreed arbitration, not a government First Amendment fight. The details matter: she filed a grievance, both sides agreed to arbitration, and the ruling followed that private route. That reality undermines the claim that the state silenced her.
Matt Taibbi and others framed Attiah as emblematic of a media class more interested in performance than craft, arguing she has long traded nuance for grievance. Taibbi went further, calling her among a cadre of hacks who clog major outlets with repetitive themes and little original reporting. The line that she “has the right to suck” captures the blunt argument: you can publish poor work and still have free speech, but that does not shield you from criticism. Critics say her social-media posts brought consequences, and those consequences are fair game for debate.
Attiah suffered consequence for what she posted, but the Post’s own speech decisions with regard to Attiah were also curtailed. The Post doesn’t have a particularly impressive recent record on speech lately, but Attiah loved canceling, until it happened to her.
She’s been consistently unsympathetic toward writers who lost jobs over speech issues. The classic example was New York Times writer Donald McNeil, whose firing over “use of the N-word” turned out to be different in reality. He was asked by a student if it was right to suspend another student for using the term and replied by asking if it was used as a slur, or repeated in a lyric or a book title, as Times writers like Paul Krugman had in print, with the consent of Times editors. McNeil’s life was wiped out for a conversation that was not intended for publication and was absurdly misrepresented. Attiah didn’t care and scoffed at the “fuss.” In the wake of the forced or semi-forced resignations of Times editorial page editor James Bennet and junior editor Adam Rubenstein, Attiah upheld the ludicrous notion that publishing an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton put “black people and black journalists in danger.”
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In a Substack column bemoaning her dismissal, she said, “I used my voice to defend freedom and democracy, challenge power and reflect on culture and politics with honesty and conviction. Now, I am the one being silenced — for doing my job.” Her explanations for her dismissal have evolved over time. Initially, she said she was fired for “refusing to tear my clothes and smear ashes on my face in performative mourning for a white man that espoused violence,” but lately she’s said she was fired for “talking about race,” which is ironic because she was clearly hired to do that almost to the exclusion of anything else.
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That Attiah is a hypocrite on speech issues is undeniable, but that isn’t the first thing that jumps out reading her copy. The bigger issue is that she sucks. She’s on a short list of the most defiantly unoriginal, skilless columnists ever employed at a major American newspaper. Her columns read like first drafts, and her social media posts are full of gems like, “White women are lucky that we are just calling them ‘Karen’s’ [sic]. And not calling for revenge.” Her columns are just a micro-step removed from Titania McGrath-type parody of the “Shakespeare was a black woman. Deal with it” variety, only she’s not in on the joke.
Taibbi noted an obvious shift: once black reporters complained about being pigeonholed into a single beat, now that beat is prized and overplayed across outlets. The result, critics say, is a dumbing-down of coverage when race becomes the default lens for every story. Attiah’s pieces on small cultural moments and etymology were called out as examples of substance-light journalism that aims to provoke rather than inform.
In a piece called “Uxoricide: The Word You Don’t Know Because You’re Not Supposed To,” Attiah explained that she took Latin in school, leaving her with a “lifelong interest” in etymology. “I have seen a number of accounts and writers explicitly use the term femicide, and specifically Black femicide.” She complained that while most people know the term “homicide” and “suicide,” and may even know patricide, matricide, filicide, and fratricide, most people have never heard uxoricide, or the killing of a wife — suspicious!
“I wonder why?” she wrote. “What does it mean that we don’t use this— or any— specific term that immediately signifies the specific act of killing one’s wife?”
This would only make sense if it were true that most English speakers didn’t know uxoricide but did know matiricide, the term for killing one’s husband. We don’t use either word, making the premise ridiculous (especially since we do use femicide and countless other terms, as she mentioned) but so what, apparently?
The controversy around James Arday’s plagiarism drew another predictable defense from her, with critics saying she prioritized identity over facts. When a high-profile academic was exposed for lifting work, Attiah framed attacks on him as part of a broader pattern of anti-black bias. Opponents say that stance glosses over academic theft and rewards identity as the sole lens for judgment.
The plagiarism case against Arday was ironclad; he lifted so much with so little effort to conceal what he was doing that he made a mockery of academia. Attiah’s main argument is that Arday’s “scholarship” was so “impactful” that the thing she doesn’t mention, his fabulism, didn’t matter. But Arday’s scholarship was essentially a verbose version of Attiah’s journalism; he repeatedly bemoaned the “centrality of Whiteness as an instrument of power,” then engaged in things like racial audits of citations, and didn’t really say anything else. Still, she says, pointing out that he lied about everything and stole work from other people amounted to “anti-black terror.” In her calculus, nothing about Arday mattered except that he was black and criticized.
Attiah sits comfortably inside a media bubble that rewards performative outrage and punishes dissenting voices unevenly, which is why critics see her reinstatement as less a vindication and more a sign of a broken incentives system. The debate here is not just about one columnist; it’s about how outlets handle misconduct, editorial standards, and who gets protected when the outrage machine turns. That tension will keep playing out as outlets decide what behavior they tolerate and which voices they elevate.
