Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart has revealed that he quit that paper’s editorial board after his colleague ran an editorial that claimed President Biden’s decision to call Georgia’s voting laws “Jim Crow 2.0” was “hyperbolic.”
Capehart, the only Black person on the board at that time, writes in his new book Yet Here I Am: Lessons from a Black Man’s Search for Home, that he became even more frustrated after Tumulty, a white Opinions editor, defended the take by saying Biden’s characterization was insulting to those who lived through racial segregation in the South.
“Tumulty took an incident where I felt ignored and compounded the insult by robbing me of my humanity,” Capehart writes of the incident, which occurred in Dec. 2022. “She either couldn’t or wouldn’t see that I was Black, that I came to the conversation with knowledge and history she could never have, that my worldview, albeit different from hers, was equally valid.”
Tumulty did not respond to an immediate request for comment, but she told Semafor that the Post repeatedly published papers that contested Georgia’s laws restricting ballot access.
“I have a very different recognition of the events and conversations that are described in this book, but out of respect for the longstanding principle that Washington Post editorial board deliberations are confidential I am not going to say anything further,” she told Semafor.
After complaining to human resources and senior staff at the paper, Capehart quit the Post‘s editorial board that same month over the disagreement, though he remains at the paper as a columnist. His resignation left the paper with an all-white editorial board, according to Axios.
Capehart, who co-hosts MSNBC’s The Weekend, did not respond to an immediate request for comment.
The disagreement—and the decision to run the editorial–sent enough shockwaves through the newsroom that then-opinions editor David Shipley was asked to meet with Rev. Al Sharpton to discuss it and other lapses from the opinions section, according to Semafor. Some Post staffers said that they felt Capehart’s book violated the paper’s collegiality rules by pitting him against Tumulty years after the incident.
The Post has been rocked by in-fighting from staffers before. Former Post reporter David Weigel’s jokes online incensed former colleagues Felicia Sonmez, who was later fired over “insubordination” and for publicly criticizing her colleagues.
Former Post columnist Taylor Lorenz also publicly criticized an editor on Twitter for an error ending up in her story, and the editor later was denied a planned promotion to run the Post‘s feature department. (Then-executive editor Sally Buzbee denied it was over the error.)
The revelation from Capehart comes as the paper offered voluntary buyouts to its entire opinion desk as billionaire owner Jeff Bezos seeks to focus it on “free markets and personal liberties.“ The move will allow staffers to “make a clear-eyed decision on whether they want to be part of the new direction for Post Opinion,” a memo sent to them Tuesday read.
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