While I was away, Washington Post reporter Dave Weigel posted a joke on Twitter:
This is a tasteless joke and I have no idea what prompted Dave to retweet it. A little too much to drink? A recent breakup? Beats me. I hope his editors tell him that this was inappropriate and he needs to knock it—
Wait. What's that? This retweet caused an enormous backlash among some of his fellow reporters and then went viral? And the Post then suspended Dave for a month without pay—the equivalent of a five-figure fine?
WTF? There has to be something more to this. What is it that we're all missing?
That's actually pretty good for a tweet.
Of course, I had a terrible upbringing.
Am I the only one who thinks this is a quite tame and harmless joke? One can imagine it said by Rodney Dangerfield with a rimshot afterwards. What has happened? In the last couple of years, I feel like the entire point of jokes and comedy has been completely lost - sacrificed to the overwhelming steamroller of ultra heightened sensitivity and identity politics.
Me too.
It's funny because it's not necessarily true but sounds like it could be. I mean, women can be both, can't they?
Stereotyping women is pretty cool huh?
What if you change it to 'actors', are you still offended?
Acting is a profession, not a primary identity. Being a woman, on the other hand, definitely is.
People are reacting to this really trivial remark as if it were victimizing a minority group in the manner as if that were wit, the kind of thing that gratifies the self-conceit of the kind of people who have little or no interaction with the group they want to think they have a clue about, --but everybody know women.
In this joke the speaker knows he's revealing as much or more about himself as a regular guy bonehead as he does about whatever he thinks he knows about women. There's a self-reflexive presence here that's absent in actually offensive content.
Stereotyping men and women can indeed be funny as real human beings have complex relations that are mutually frustrating by structure.
Humourless Woke ideologues of course differ in their lived experience.
- it goes without saying women's verison of the same aimed at men would go unremarked except by offenderati incels.
he's not Rodney Dangerfield. he's a professional journalist who uses twitter professionally. this joke was wildly inappropriate in that context.
Agreed.
Right it was inappropriate, but suspension w/o pay for a month? If there's nothing else going on, how in the world is this an appropriate punishment? I mean, I'm sure he has a nice nest egg, but how screwed would you be if suddenly you lost a month's pay?
This is economic violence.
Dangerfield's comedy was all about respect--who gets it and who doesn't. This isn't an appropriate area for a columnist covering national politics for a prestigious news outlet to explore in public.
This was not his column. It was his Twitter account, which he's had for fourteen years, not created for the Washington Post. The Post might have some standing, with Weigel's consent, to impose restrictions on what he tweets on this account, as long as he's working for the Post, but I don't think I have that standing. He can quote jokes of questionable taste, I'm all right with that.
To borrow from Porno Matt's (@centristmadness) own retweets, what Prog Rock Boi retweeted is the kind of thing a marginal Podcaster like Centrist Madness should be retweeting, not a highflying national journo for the Bezos Advertiser.
I gave my decoder ring to a panhandler in Boise because he had a tattoo of Nancy Pelosi as an angel helping a limping raccoon couple onto Noah's Ark.
I don't practice santeria, either.
Apparently staffers had been complaining for a long while that the paper's "guidelines" for online activity were unevenly enforced with "star" writers given more leeway and less punishment.
Nah, this seems about right to me, assuming it also comes with the talking to and reflection and bettering himself that you mention.
Weigel is a (minor) public figure. He has an obligation not to spread misogyny or worsen the stigma of mental illnesses. It's entirely appropriate for his employer, especially given that it's one of the country's major news outlets, to take whatever disciplinary action it deems appropriate - including "five-figure fines."
Maybe he should've thought about the implications of what he was about to retweet before he retweeted it.
Thinking before retweeting? You must be joking.
!
People have been outright fired for much less than this idiotic sexist joke, but then they don't have an army of elite pundits and journalists to spring to their defense.
Lucky he wasn't fired.
Exactly.
As with Don Imus being let go "only for calling the Rutgers Scarlet Knights women's basketball team 'nappyhead hos'", the offense that triggered the one month suspension was just the latest offense, not a one-off exercise in poor judgment.
Glibertarian Beta Boi Davy Dubz has been on a glide path to getting his shit pushed in.
citation needed.
If anything, his place of business didn't sanction him enough (I'd have fired this jackass on the spot, if I'd had my druthers.) I am beyond tired of these petty, mean-spirited microaggressions, especially those of the online sort. The 'just asking qustions' schtick -- to name but one kind of bullying among many -- should get the offender road out of town on a rail the first time they tried to pull this stunt. And only allowed back after a lengthy appeal process larded with consequences every step of the way.
'Rode', ugh.
I sometimes wonder what the twitters think they are achieving with these tasteless tweets. Maintaining and reinforcing a societal pecking order?
What they are saying, in fact is both brutal and simple: "I can hurt you. But you can't hurt me." That's the beginning and end of it.
WTF? There has to be something more to this. What is it that we're all missing?
Why does there have to be something missing? People have been fired for less, never mind suspended. The razor-sharp elbowed, woker-than-woke, Ivy-league Puritans who staff places like WaPo don't tolerate tasteless humor.
Have you really been out of the country for just two weeks? Sheesh!
(Mind you I am relieved, of course, that America has been spared the catastrophic effects that would certainly have flowed from ignoring a lame bro joke on the internet).
I’m not Ivy-League, nor ‘woker-than-woke’, but it’s not lame, it’s offensive. Can you imagine substituting any other term for a historically-discriminated-against group for ‘girl’ (sic), and not having it sound offensive?
OK, it’s also lame.
Always a good lesson with these tropes, substitute another group for the stereotyped group targeted by the "joke". Instead of women, makes it "black", or "gypsies", or "Jews", or the list goes on.
...substitute another group for the stereotyped group targeted by the "joke". Instead of women, makes it "black", or "gypsies", or "Jews", or the list goes on.
But that's exactly why it's not a good lesson! The joke wasn't about Jews or Blacks or what have you. Sure, in theory, any joke could indeed become incandescently vulgar or offensive or what have you if you, erm, change the joke.
Logic fail!
I base my judgment that the punishment was excessive on two factors: A) There's always been a bit of an comprehensibility gap between the sexes. The joke was crude (and I'd argue lame as in, "not particularly clever") to be sure. But to my ears it had an air of "man doesn't understand the mystery that is woman yada yada" that it couldn't have/wouldn't have had if the joke had focused on a different group. Also (and this is my main objection) it was just a retweeted joke, and the dude got a whole month. Wowza.
Weigel's a pretty famous journalist who no doubt commands a decent income stream. So he'll be fine: it's by no means the biggest issue of the day. But yeah, I thought it was an over-the-top reaction by the Post. YMMV.
Yes, it was lame and offensive, baviouut by far the worst apsect of this type of behaviour is that it was meant to be offensive. Thinking about our own homegrown trolls and why I find, exactly, what is so offensive with their conduct is the intent behind the words. And then the smirking defensive that I can't 'prove' their motivations are what I say they are, and gosh darn it, they're offended that I would even dare think that of them.
IMVH0 -- but a very strongly held one -- the time has long since pat to hold these jaspers to account.
well, my defense isn't that you can't prove my motivations, it's that i actually haven't said anything offensive and am the victim of mistaken identity and some sort of grudge you hold against a previous commenter who i'm totally unfamiliar with.
anyway, the tweet was stupid, and i feel like 1-month without pay is a reasonable punishment.
What are you talking about?
Monty Mongoose has accused me of being some previously known (to them at least) anti-Semitic poster under a new name, and when I insisted I wasn’t who they think I am (I’ve truly never posted on this site under any other name, and not at all on any previous site), you replied with the following:
“No, I think Monty's got you pegged just right. Did you think that just because the stats are not aumated here that no one bothers to keep tabs on our more egregious offenders.”
So that’s what I’m talking about. I’ve never commented anything remotely relevant to what I’ve been accused of. Closest I’ve come to trolling is making jokes about Kevin owning a Porche and being bad at computers.
Your username is Sig Heil Hitler 88.
It's only a surprise all your comments aren't 14 words long.
No it isn’t, I already explained it. It’s the word “sigh” drawn out with an extra H. Like the sound you’re making me do right now.
+1 circle game
I don’t even know what that means. I’m glad you’re pleased with yourself for supposedly cracking some code, but sadly you’re just wrong man.
Especially poor timing just-post Depp/Heard. Was the joke a response to that event?
Maybe he wasn’t suspended for the joke. Maybe he was suspended for retweeting anything Cam Harless tweeted.
Don’t know who Cam Harless is, but the photo looks like a guy who has Confederate battle flag stickers on the bumpers of his pickup, and Truck Nutz on the hitch. Retweet at your own peril.
He went on Tucker Carlson to brag about getting a Washington Post columnist in trouble, if that tells you anything.
Judging by appearances?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hNvqU9UV54&ab_channel=BeauoftheFifthColumn
Judging by the tweet's timing, it was probably late at night and he thought he was being ironic and edgy by retweeting it. It's a dumb, tasteless, sexist joke, and it's good that Weigel apologized and cancelled his retweet.
A month's loss of pay does seem excessive, though. I think a week's pay and a stern warning would have been more appropriate.
And again: IMHO, they didn't go nearly far enough. Call the current state of affairs something like microaggresion creep.
Hard disagree. The point is to deter Weigel from retweeting sexist jokes, not to make an example of him with something over the top disproportionate in response.
Blink. That is exactly the point and exactly what I want to do, which in this specific case is to deter Weigel from retweeting crass jokes in extremely poor taste. Not sure where you got the notion that I was trying to make an example of him, and certainly not with an over the top response. But -- and I am genuinely sorry to say this about my fellow countrymen -- but people like Weigel won't understand much of anything less than a brick to the head.
...it was probably late at night and he thought he was being ironic and edgy by retweeting it. It's a dumb, tasteless, sexist joke, and it's good that Weigel apologized and cancelled his retweet. A month's loss of pay does seem excessive, though. I think a week's pay and a stern warning would have been more appropriate.
Well-put.
Weigel is a Chapo Traphouse hanger-on, so that sounds plausible.
Never tweet (h/t Dan Kennedy)
One other bit of information - this is not Weigel's first offense, apparently he has a history of in appropriate tweets that has gotten him in trouble before. Apparently this tweet was sent and quickly deleted but not before a bunch of Washington Post employees spotted it, screen captured it and started a brouhaha - one female employee was leading the complaints and ended up being blocked by another employee in management, apparently sick of her tweeting about it.
It's a bad tweet but apparently Weigel had enemies waiting to pounce on him.
He has enemies? Sounds like he created some enemies by repeatedly being an asshole. Funny how that works.
People might take offense at offensive tweets? What’s the world coming to?
There's enemies and there's enemies - sounds to me like it's a toxic workplace that escalated to airing dirty laundry on twitter. That's really bad for management - they let it get this way apparently.
I'm sure he has enemies. So does Trump.
Felicia Sonmez highlighted it, then Jose del Real got down with his machista Mexican self & went on a warpath against Felicia.
If I see Davy & Pepe eating burritos in Mount Pleasant the next time I am in DC, someone is getting a beating.
Sure. Here's your backgrounder: https://bityl.co/CbER
I'm surprised no one read about it. Weigel put WaPo in the position of having to do something about it. When you're employed, you have to be judicious about your actions, given that everything you do reflects upon your employer, not just you.
I agree, but they didn't enforce that policy against others. This is about singling out not really the content.
And here is the Washington Post covering the story:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2022/06/07/buzbee-memo-washington-post-sonmez-weigel-social-media/
Drunk or sober, David Weigel seems to be showing his true colors. Why does there have to be something more to this?
When hasn't he?
He's a Reason alum, Ron Paul fanboi, who drifted over from the rLOVEution to OurRevolution for clout.
Tru, dat. If anyone is concerned about singling out a particular individual, the question is not, 'Why were't other people fingered as well?' but rather 'Why did no one drop the hammer on him before now?'
If you're in that business, part of your job is building a Twitter following. One builds a Twitter following by being edgy and controversial, it's a time-honored method, practiced and perfected by some very, ahem, visible individuals.
And then oops, you went too far.
If publishers want their creative public-facing employees to market themselves, it's going to have the consequence that at some point those creative public-facing employees with followings will wonder just what the publisher is doing for them.
Dave Weigel should probably start a Substack.
Dave Weigel should probably start a Substack. THIS. I'm sure he'd find the company much more to his liking than it currently is.
Oops. Bad tag again. I don't know why, but the blockquote tag in particular has been giving me more trouble than usual.
I wish that every individual person on Twitter would keep their personal account separate from any account they might want to associate with their employer. The comments and jokes they share on their personal account may be seen as tasteless or sexist or offensive by many, but the employer should have nothing to say about them.
I'm still following Dave Weigel, and I don't care if he ever links to articles in the Washington Post. I can go to their web site if I want to see what's there. But all signs are he wants to do his time and keep himself linked up.
personally, suspending him would def not have been my decision if i was in charge at WaPo. BUT, I don't think it's unreasonable because his twitter account, though technically i believe his personal one, is highly integrated with his work and his employer. His job and a link wapo twitter and website is in his bio. He uses the account to promote his wapo work. and he has 600k followers. so this isn't just a "bad joke". it's a direct and significant black eye to his professional reputation and that of wapo. and it was very, very stupid and very, very misogynistic. he chose to make twitter his professional public face, and then he chose to make a very unprofessional post there. consequences happen.
If a "star reporter" doesn't understand the difference between telling a joke to some bros in a bar and posting it on a public social media app, he's probably in the wrong business, star or not.
Hell. Some 'star reporters' don't know it's not okay to masturbate doing a professional meet on Zoom.
Tooby, baby! Yeah!
It's a dumb joke, and stereotypes women, all the qualities I look for in an ace journalist. Hopefully he learns something.
Certainly, he has had reinforcement for the lesson that the Woke cancel culture is humourless and overreaching.
Yet another reason to loathe Twitter and what it's doing to our country. Every darn little lame joke becomes a cause for outrage and ignites a culture war (as the comments above illustrate).
If Musk wants to improve the world, please, buy Twitter and shut it down.
Indeed, it's an idiotic platform and toxic - as well as a source of Activist (right and left) self-deception and toxic distortion (from different sides but same toxic effects).
Of course other lesson is never allow oneself to use some tool like that for both professional mini-blogging and goofy and yes even unfunny lame jokes (God forbid).
It's all right wingers that use it. Yes, Gay Rights/Women is historically right wing in origin. Like a left hegelian care about it. Marx and Engels said capitalism turns you into faggots. Better fax that truth to twitter.
Twitter isn't a private sms chain between Weigel and his buddies. Other people will see what he writes. He's oblivious if he thinks whoever reads that tweet will understand the context he meant it in.* if he can't figure that out, then WaPo ought to discipline him. I've reprimanded public-facing direct reports for saying dumb shit like this.
(*I'm being generous here. Seems like the context is "mockery" but we're all supposed to give him the benefit of the doubt and look for a more harmless explanation.)
Also, I'm tired of hearing old men downplay their shit-talking about other people. What standing do you think you have to tell others what's offensive to them?
On please, I see plenty of old women making jokes in the same manner. Ignore it.
(*I'm being generous here. Seems like the context is "mockery" but we're all supposed to give him the benefit of the doubt and look for a more harmless explanation.)
And that, dear sir, was his entire point. "I can bully you but you aren't allowed to say that's exactly my raison d'être for doing so in the first place."
This reminds me: has antiwokista Kevin Drum retweeted his fellow California dimbulb Caitlin Flanagan's encomium for Kate Mc Kinnon's College Slampiece Bari Weiss?
Dave Weigel should go to a reeducation camp for six months, minimum. And following that, publicly confess his deviant thoughts, beg for forgiveness, quit his job, and take up a new career as a fisherman in Hudson Bay.
Dave Weigel is the secondmost overrated thing about Delaware, after Joe Flacco.
Pretty plain what caused the suspension, IMO. More about Felicia Sonmez’s history. It’s all online. I am sympathetic to her position but many colleagues are not.
While reporting in China, she was sexually assaulted by another reporter. She eventually reported it. He denied, said it was consensual, got some light suspension (going from memory), despite the fact that another woman had made similar accusations against him. He eventually was “cleared” in some way.
She went rather public with her complaints that injustice was done. Many colleagues thought she was being too loud and unfair to him after he was “cleared.” WaPo eventually disciplined her somehow, and later said she could not cover any story with a sexual assault component, including the Kavanaugh hearings, even though there were no substantive complaints about her reporting.
She eventually shamed the Guild into backing her as there were no similar prohibitions with reporters on any other issue. She later sued WaPo (there are a lot more facts that I don’t remember). WaPo obtained dismissal by saying they weren’t discriminating against sexual assault complainants; all their discipline was because she created a bad public image through her tweets. That was the offense.
She didn’t like that, and I don’t blame her. But she understandably makes a big deal when other tweeting behavior seems to be ignored. She complained, and WaPo obviously felt backed into a corner as they had taken the legal position that bad tweets get you disciplined. And she was again attacked by colleagues for not being a better sport and shutting up about how women are treated.
More context in this thread
https://twitter.com/feliciasonmez/status/1534881980168515584?s=20&t=wFB77iqiQmY9EYhQz7VMOw
Remember the 70's? I do. That's when "conservatives" were the old uptight snobs who tsk-tsked at any kind of humor that was off-color or insulting, and "liberals" were the young, edgy avant-garde rule-breakers who weren't afraid to tell jokes about sex, drugs, race, sex, and sex. That's when we got Laugh-In and the Smothers Brothers and then Saturday Night Live. Everything goes!
My oh my, how things have changed. It's the "conservatives" who go around wearing t-shirts that say "Fuck your feelings," and "liberals" who tar and feather a guy for telling a joke that would have been tame in the 70's.
This is why we can't have President Al Franken.
Well, Kevin Drum got his wish: WaPo fired Felicia Sonmez.
Sheesh, the nerve of a private company parting ways with an employee conducting a non-stop internet flame war attacking them.
Moreso, it's WaPo Depp vs. Heard verdict moment: just like Johnny D got 10 million for his ex defaming him while Heard got 2 million for herself being defamed, Weigel gets a monthlong break to really explore the King Crimson boxset & his opponent gets fired.
Wow! I shouldn’t be surprised that so many of you are here to cheer on a liberal being humiliated and fined. What is it they say about Trump supporters? The pain is the point. So many of you claim you are against Trumpism, but subscribe to the most crucial points. You want to attack people to show how much better you are.
It isn’t just that all of the people who support this suspension have said much worse things about many different groups in the past. It is that you will say much worse things in the future. You won’t even think of holding back. You want to cause pain. And then you will declare yourself a hero. Maybe you will explain why it was OK for you to make fun of that group. Maybe you won’t. But if anyone says they are offended by what you said you will just declare yourself a victim - you know, just like the Trumpers do.
By declaring how this offends you, you think you sound like James Baldwin standing up to William F. Buckley. Instead, you just sound like the people who want “Beloved” removed from schools because they are offended at the way white people are portrayed. Or the people who used to flood TV stations with angry complaints if they had a gay person on because they were protecting their kids from The Gay. It was OK to do that because they were offended after all.
You want to hurt many of the same Liberals that Trumpers do, but for slightly different reasons. Saving the world from the jokes you don’t like because you are offended. You are truly awful people.
If I’d gotten this out the same day of the original post I’m sure I would have gotten attacked by several people. The Trumpers know why you would do that: the pain is the point. And because of that I will never understand what drives Trumpism as well as you do.
Pretty sure Weigel's not a liberal. Maybe I'm thinking of someone else, but if I recall correctly his entry into big league journalism was made possible largely because of his connections to Republican news sources. I think most of the people cheering on the suspension here* are doing so because of their good faith belief that the communication in question merited such a step (not because of hidden MAGA tendencies on their part).
*Like Kevin I personally thought it was a bit over the top on WaPo's part; but again, I don't get the vibe that the commenters who disagree with me on this one are pro-Trump. They just see the incident differently. Fair play.
Weigel is a Glibertarian doof with vibesey tendencies, thus his curiosity for the Bernie Left & the Dirtbaggers, specifically. Of late, though, his feints were toward speculating that maybe J.D. ANTIVAXXX is on to something.
The Mighty Boosh is full of self-importance and I do not hear his words.
The Washington Post writer who publicly criticized him for it has been fired.
Personally, I think news outlets need to drop their restrictive social media policies, because too often they're meant to suppress internal criticism of their publishing from going public. If Krugman thinks Bret Stephens is wrong (or vice versa), he should be able to say so publicly.
Outside of a very narrow and specific range of online misbehavior, media companies should let their employees post what they want to their personal accounts. If they think that will reflect badly on their organization, they should consider who they hire more carefully.
(I do think what he retweeted was incredibly offensive and not just a dumb joke.)
Speaking of Bret Stephens, has he ever apologized for namesearching Twitter & trying to get a 37 follower count GWU professor fire for calling him a bedbug? Has fellow GWU professor Johnathan Turdley said peep to defend his office colleague facing attempted murd--... kancellation by the media elite?
We need a beer summit so this can be hashed out.