Anatomy of a controversy: Inside the drama at The Washington Post

It didn’t start with a retweet.

The controversy currently swirling around The Washington Post doesn’t go back days. It goes back years.

If you want to truly understand how one of the most respected news organizations in the world is smack dab in the middle of a hot mess, you can’t start with a high-profile reporter retweeting a sexist and homophobic tweet. You have to look at the history of the reporter who objected to that retweet and her relationship with the paper she works for, as well as the inconsistent social media policy of that paper.

And to do all that, you have to go back to at least 2018 when Brett Kavanaugh was a controversial nominee for the Supreme Court, controversial because of allegations of sexual assault and misconduct. Post reporter Felicia Sonmez, a politics breaking news reporter, was told by her editors that she could not cover stories involving Kavanaugh because they felt it was a conflict of interest. How? Because Sonmez had been open and public about being a survivor of sexual assault.