The Washington Post was ordered Monday (August 25, 2026) to reinstate columnist Karen Attiah, who was fired over social media posts she wrote in the aftermath of right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk’s assassination.
Her other posts took aim at the Trump administration’s framing of Kirk as a martyr for the conservative cause.
Kirk was shot dead in September on a Utah college campus, sparking a wave of grief among conservatives and threats of a clampdown on the “radical left” from President Donald Trump. She was later fired, with the Post accusing her of “gross misconduct” and of violating its social media policies, according to the paper’s own reporting. The Post said it respected the arbitration process but declined to comment further. Since 2013, when billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos purchased the Post, the newspaper’s opinion section has shifted its tone to focus more on “personal liberties and free markets,” according to internal mandates.
