Male Journalist Preparing Questions For Press Conference (Photo by Aleksandar Georgie)
By Stacy M. Brown
Black Press USA Senior National Correspondent
The dismissal of Karen Attiah from the Washington Post has become more than a personnel decision. It is a scarlet warning, a reminder of what has long haunted the American press: the Black voice is too often invited in only to be pushed out when it dares to speak of the nation’s truths. Attiah, the Post’s only Black female opinion writer, said she was terminated after more than a decade at the paper for posts she wrote on social media addressing violence and the dangers of white extremism. “Being pushed out of the Washington Post for expressing myself, for not even expressing myself, for doing my job as a journalist, is really a deep, sort of cruel 180,” she told the Associated Press.
Her removal comes at a time when Black journalists already stand on fragile ground in an industry that continues to exclude them. According to the Pew Research Center’s most recent survey of American newsrooms, only 6 percent of reporting journalists in 2022 were Black, though Black people make up 12 percent of the population. White journalists accounted for 76 percent of reporters, even though the white population stands at 61 percent. The National Association of Black Journalists said Attiah’s firing had “raised an alarm about the erosion of Black voices across the media.” “The absence of Black journalists doesn’t just harm us, it impoverishes the entire profession,” NABJ President Errin Haines declared. “When our voices are missing, stories go untold, perspectives go unchallenged, and the truth remains incomplete.”
For diversity advocates, the danger is not confined to one journalist. It sets a precedent that ripples across the profession. Media 2070, a group dedicated to racial equity in journalism, called the firing “a dangerous and deliberate act of erasure by media owners.” Philip Lewis, president of the Washington Association of Black Journalists, called it a chilling moment. “This firing sends a message to other Black journalists and writers that our perspectives aren’t valued unless we align with the status quo.” Attiah has refused to go silent. At the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s Annual Legislative Conference, she spoke during a panel on Black women in media and warned that the campaign against truth would not stop with her. “I hate to be Debbie Dark Cloud, but if you think things are really bad, they can and they will, and they’re trying to make it worse,” she said.
Experts caution that the absence of diverse voices has real consequences. “When you disappear people from spaces, you lose those valuable discussions that help our nation really process who we are and what kind of country we want to be,” Khadijah Costley White, a professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University, said. Eric Deggans, the Knight Chair in Journalism and Media Ethics at Washington and Lee University, questioned the Post’s judgment. “I don’t understand why the most extreme punishment is the first punishment,” Deggans said. “I don’t understand why there’s not an attempt to sort of talk with the employee and let them know what they did wrong.”
The Pew study found that Black journalists are most visible in coverage of social issues and policy, where they make up 15 percent of those reporters, but remain scarce across politics, the economy, science, and technology. This clustering leaves most national conversations filtered through a white lens, even as the country grows more diverse. Despite her firing, Attiah has insisted there is still a possibility in this moment. “I think this is also a time for profound creativity,” she said, “being like water rising and like water moving around the cracks and actually, over time, eroding and undoing.”