Something that may have gotten lost in the controversy between Felicia Sonmez and Dave Weigel is that yesterday was the first day for the Washington Post summer interns, if we are to believe a tweet from multiplatform editor Laura Michalski.
Those interns surely had an unenviable start date. If they were able to get placements at such a great paper of record, they are certainly talented. But seeing their colleagues engaging in a Twitter spat resulting in the suspension of one of them must not have been what they expected for their first day.
As a fellow summer intern, I can empathize with their situation. We are all trying to break into the journalism industry. Doing so at a publication in the throes of controversy must not be easy. Still, we have a duty to learn skills not only to advance our own careers but also to make the world of journalism better as a whole.
It is worth looking at what impression the interns’ workplace may be making on them. These are the journalists of the future, and they will no doubt be eager to learn from their more-senior colleagues. If we look at the story through this lens, we can see that the decision by the Post to suspend Weigel has implications long into the future.
This new generation of journalists is learning something that is already instilled in them on their college campuses: that their emotional security is paramount.
People can go back and forth over whether the joke Weigel retweeted was professional or appropriate for his job. Even if it was not and Sonmez’s offense to the retweet was well-founded, the way she went about expressing it was wholly inappropriate.
From the beginning of our lives, our parents teach us the proper way to approach most problems we have with others: we first talk to them, then, if the issue can not be resolved on a personal level, we bring it up the chain of command. If we ever think to take the dispute public, we do so only as an absolute last resort after we have exhausted all other options.
My first real job was a non-political one. On my first day, my boss brought my co-workers and me into his office to talk about how we can be cohesive in our jobs. Our chief takeaway from the meeting was that, when a colleague says something offensive, we should sleep on it and see if we are still upset over it.
Unfortunately, the world of left-wing publications is developing different rules. The habits that their new, young hires are learning toxify the publication’s culture in two different ways.
The first is that it emboldens employees to emulate the actions of Sonmez and Lorenz. Youngsters at the Post will believe that this type of behavior is appropriate for a professional setting. The higher-ups are doing them a disservice in their professional and personal development.
Second, it creates a culture of fear within the workplace. Weigel has done valuable work for the publication, but now he has been suspended over a retweet. Employees may now be scared that one mistake could define the way their bosses see them or even damage their employment statuses.
None of this is conducive to a healthy work environment, but it is what young journalists will learn if the Washington Post normalizes this behavior. Storied publications like the Post need to ensure their survival in the future, but if this is what the editors want their future to look like, they will be in for a rude awakening.