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BLACK VOICES ARE VITAL TO DEMOCRACY. THE MEDIA MUST STOP FIRING THEM.
 
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Perry Bacon
September 15, 2025
The American Prospect
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_ The Washington Post’s Karen Attiah is the latest prominent Black
journalist to lose her job. The trend is a sign of retrenchment in
both fighting racism and saving democracy. _

Journalist Karen Attiah (right) at an event in 2018 , lya S.
Savenok/Getty Images

 

From around 2014 to 2021, two important, long-needed “reckonings”
were happening. The mainstream media was reevaluating its coverage of
politics and beginning to recognize that its attempt to cover politics
“neutrally” had resulted in downplaying how radical and
antidemocratic the modern Republican Party had become. Meanwhile, the
entire country, including the media, was looking at whether the United
States had done enough to address the deep racial inequality that
remained from centuries of discrimination against Native Americans and
African Americans in particular. Black journalists were acutely aware
of both problems, making them some of the leading voices in this
period, perhaps best exemplified by the “1619 Project” helmed by
Nikole Hannah-Jones of _The New York Times. _

 
But it’s not 2020 anymore. We are seeing a huge retrenchment,
particularly in elite institutions, from caring about racial
inequality and describing the Republican Party honestly. The latest
example came Monday morning, when _Washington Post_ columnist Karen
Attiah announced that the paper had fired her
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for posts Attiah wrote on social media after the killing of
conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Her posts (at least the ones I
have seen) were not particularly incendiary. Attiah, while condemning
Kirk’s shooting, argued that the U.S. is rife with political
violence and that the country seems to accept it
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was the only full-time Black opinion columnist at the paper.

The paper has not yet commented on Attiah’s departure, and there may
be other details I am not privy to here. But her apparent dismissal
fits with broader changes happening at the paper.

Owner Jeff Bezos blocked from publication an editorial endorsing
Kamala Harris that the Opinion staff wrote last fall. He attended
Trump’s inauguration. In February, he announced the paper’s
Opinion section would focus on “personal liberties and free markets
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a former _Wall Street Journal _editorial page staffer to run the
_Post_’s Opinion section. Nearly all of the left-leaning writers,
myself included, accepted buyouts, as it became clear that the _Post_
would not want our content.

Attiah opted to stay. I was worried that her time at the _Post_ would
not be long, and it was not. The _Post_ is far from the only news
institution swinging to the right, either because its owners want to
curry favor with Trump, because they are aligned with him on some
issues, or a bit of both. CBS News is going in a pro-Trump direction
even faster, installing conservatives in key roles
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Outlets such as CNN and _The New York Times_ are constantly casting
Trump’s autocratic actions in muted language, seeming desperate to
not be seen as liberally biased.

I wrote enthusiastically a few years ago
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that the mainstream media was leaning into playing a more
pro-democracy role. That’s over now. Covering democracy honestly
would entail covering politics in an unbalanced way, because the
Republican Party of this era is much more antidemocratic than the
Democrats. So major outlets are instead leaning into the “both
sides” model that they were reconsidering from 2014 to 2021. So, for
example, CNN’s 10 p.m. show, which during Trump 1.0 featured
journalists explaining why Trump was a uniquely radical president, is
now conservative and liberal pundits getting equal time.

For honest coverage of American politics, you often have to seek out
outlets based abroad, such as the _Financial Times _and _The
Guardian;_ smaller organizations like The xxxxxx, The Contrarian, and
_The New Republic_; and journalists writing independently, including
former _Times_ columnist Paul Krugman.

And while the media changes are more subtle, the racial retrenchment
is obvious. Republican appointees on the Supreme Court and lower-level
courts and now the Trump administration have essentially outlawed any
program that seeks to address racial disparities.

Put these retrenchments together, and you have a very hostile
environment for Black journalists. The political right is trying to
basically outlaw any discussion of racial inequality—and news
organizations are trying to appease the political right. So while the
circumstances differ in these cases, Attiah, Jonathan Capehart, Eugene
Robinson, and I are all gone from _The Washington Post_; Joy Reid was
stripped of her show on MSNBC; and Charles Blow left _The New York
Times_. Many other Black journalists tell me privately that their
roles are diminished from a few years ago, with editors much less
willing to publish and promote their work.

I am obviously very personally invested in the plight of Black
political journalists. These are my peers and, in some cases, my close
friends. But my concerns are much deeper than whether I or my friends
lose prestigious jobs. (I quickly landed at TNR after leaving the
_Post_.) The U.S. remains a place where being Black too often means
that you are less likely to have a job with good pay and health
insurance and more likely to be the victim of racial discrimination.
It’s also a place where our commitment to democratic norms and
principles increasingly pales in comparison to other nations. Black
journalists, like Black activists and politicians, are often the
people in their profession most willing to discuss America’s
shortcomings forthrightly and urge the country to do better. For
example, Attiah and Reid were two of the most prominent voices at
their organizations calling for the United States to change its
policies toward Israel to prevent the mass deaths of Palestinian
civilians.

Our reckonings on racism and journalism didn’t go too far. The
opposite is true—they didn’t go far enough. And the diminishment
of prominent Black journalists is the latest indication that a period
of progress in the U.S. has ended and a period of retrenchment is in
full bloom. An America where Black people, journalists, and Black
journalists lose political power is one where inequality, racism,
authoritarianism and other ills will be rampant. Institutions such as
the _Post_ may be done with reckoning with their shortcomings, but the
rest of us should carry forward the ideas and ideals of 2014–2021.

===

Perry Bacon is a staff writer at _The New Republic_ and host of the
TNR show _Right Now With Perry Bacon
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to TNR, he was a weekly columnist at _The Washington Post_. Perry has
also been a commentator at MSNBC, a fellow at New America and the
University of Chicago Institute of Politics, and a political writer at
_Time_, TheGrio, NBC News, and FiveThirtyEight. He has covered six
presidential campaigns and interviewed Joe Biden, Barack Obama,
Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren, John McCain, Mitt Romney, Nancy
Pelosi, and numerous other prominent politicians. He is a graduate of
Yale University and lives in Louisville, his hometown.

* Washington Post; Black Journalists; Republicans
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* Karen Attiah
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