Raw America managing editor Carl Gibson recently sat down with former Washington Post opinion columnist Karen Attiah for an in-depth conversation about the state of media today as a small group of billionaires seek to control it.
Gibson and Attiah also discussed:
Her ongoing arbitration fight against the Post after being fired via email following comments she made in the wake of the death of far-right activist Charlie Kirk.
The gutting of the Post’s opinion section under Jeff Bezos, and what that says about billionaire control of American media.
What it means for a newspaper serving a prominent Black community having no more Black columnists on its opinion page.
The threat AI poses to organic, human journalism, and what independent media needs to do to survive.
Attiah’s recent loss of her father, and what grief has taught her.
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‘Who Actually Wanted Me Out of There?’: Inside Attiah’s Fight with Washington Post Management
Eight months after being fired via email following more than a decade at the Washington Post, Attiah is fighting back through the arbitration with the support of her union: the Washington-Baltimore News Guild.
The paper’s management accused her of “gross misconduct” for posts she wrote on her Bluesky account in the immediate aftermath of Kirk’s death. In one post, she bluntly wrote she would decline to perform public mourning for a man she described as someone who had long espoused hatred toward Black people and women. Attiah argued her posts were less about Kirk specifically than about America’s reflexive insistence that people publicly grieve for recently deceased figures regardless of what those people stood for.
What emerged during arbitration, she said, was even more damning for the Post. A white male colleague — whom Gibson correctly guessed was conservative opinion writer Mark Thiessen — had been posting content on his own social media account encouraging people to dox and harass people expressing negative opinion about Charlie Kirk, yet faced no consequences. Attiah said the disparity in how they were treated makes it clear what the Post is actually willing to tolerate, and from whom.
Attiah said the arbitration also revealed that the Post never called her to discuss the posts, never checked on her safety amid a wave of death threats and bypassed its own basic journalistic standards before firing her, complaining that backlash from her comments necessitated it.
“On a scale of one to ten of crazy backlash or threats, I would consider that a 0.5 in my career,” Attiah said. “I went and had macaroni and cheese for dinner, went about my day, did not see any incoming threats.”
A decision in the arbitration is expected in the coming weeks. The potential outcome includes full reinstatement at the Post, with back pay.
Firing the Last Black Columnist at a Paper Serving a Significant Black Population
Gibson asked Attiah what it says about the Washington Post that it now no longer has any Black columnists on its opinion section, despite the paper serving a city that is more than 43 percent Black according to the latest Census data. Attiah said key indicators that the paper was taking a sharply different direction was Bezos’s 2024 decision to kill the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris, along with ordering the opinion section to cover only “personal liberties and free markets.” Management even offered the entire opinion section a buyout. Attiah said the entire process was an omen of things to come, both for Washington Post employees and for the media at large.
“It sends a profound chilling permission signal to other outlets to say, ‘sure, let’s get back to our white male points of view, like it should have always been,’” Attiah said. “This is an institution that has decided to take the lead in dismantling Black journalistic progress in this city. And it’s blatant, in your face.”
What Billionaires Are Actually Buying When They Acquire Media Outlets
Gibson asked Attiah to weigh in on the larger wave of major media acquisitions by billionaires ideologically aligned with President Donald Trump’s administration. This includes Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post, as well as David Ellison — the son of billionaire Trump donor Larry Ellison — now poised to own CNN’s parent company after the Department of Justice greenlit Paramount-Skydance’s merger with Warner Bros. Discovery. Fox also recently acquired streaming platform Roku, making it the third-largest player in U.S. television. When Gibson asked Attiah if she thought billionaires were investing in journalism or aiming to control narratives, she didn’t hesitate.
“I’m gonna go with door number two,” Attiah said. “We’re already seeing it.”
The former Post columnist put the current moment in historical context, noting that for most of American media history, most media outlets were openly owned by wealthy oligarchs who used them as tools to suppress dissent and reinforce existing power structures. The mid-20th century ideal of an independent, objective press was, she argued, a relatively brief and commercially motivated aberration, and that what’s happening now is looking more and more like a reversion to the historical norm.
“I view it as a techno-fascist acceleration of a return to a mean in this country,” Attiah said. “We’ve been perhaps lucky in a lot of ways that we have gotten used to at least this myth of a media that is independent, is free from political pressures, has the power to take down presidents.”
She also sounded the alarm about how media maga-mergers are impacting the economics of investigative journalism, which has never been self-sustaining and has historically depended on institutional support that is now being stripped away or redirected.
“I don’t know if we’re going to Substack our way out of that problem,” Attiah said.
The Danger AI Poses to Journalism and the Internet Itself
When Gibson asked if AI had a role in modern newsrooms, Attiah acknowledged some potential uses, like AI poterntially help journalists search and retrieve information from decades of newspaper archives. But she said what’s actually being done with AI is for a much different purpose.
“Right now we’re in a point where the language is about increasing engagement or displacing human labor,” Attiah said. “That’s not towards getting people to understand more.”
She also raised the concern that AI-generated content is creating a new default voice for online writing, which she characterized as overly safe and less risky, and that even writers who don’t use AI are being pulled toward imitating its voice.
“It’s flattened what people write,” Attiah said. “There’s now a certain cadence that we can all recognize, and even if you don’t use AI, there’s now an incredible temptation to at least sound like it.”
Attiah argued that the fundamental value of journalism lies in original reporting, new framing and lived experiences, and that this is exactly what AI cannot replicate. She added a warning that news outlets embracing the tool as a replacement for human writers are undermining the one thing that makes them worth reading.
Resistance Summer School: Teaching What Columbia Wouldn’t Let Her Teach
Attiah announced that she’s now teaching courses through her Resistance Summer School, the independent online program she launched after Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs canceled her course on the history of American media and its intersection with race. She noted that decision came in direct direct response to pressure the Trump administration forced on the university.
Her course now has more than 1,000 students across two iterations, and she’s teaching it again this summer, using her direct experience as the Post’s last Black columnist.
“I am now a radical headmistress who gets to teach what I like,” Attiah said.
She connected the moment to historical precedents in European Eastern Bloc countries, where professors under authoritarian regimes established underground “flying universities” to keep knowledge going when the government came after education. Attiah noted that both independent journalists and educators are now operating in a similar fashion.
‘Am I Gonna Be Okay?’ How Grief Creates Opportunities for Reinvention
Toward the end of the conversation, Gibson asked Attiah about a February piece she’d written on her Substack, The Golden Hour, about losing her father in the midst of her contesting her firing from the Washington Post.
Attiah said she only learned in the final months of his life that her father — a doctor who immigrated from Ghana — had been a student journalist, and had once even been expelled from school over an article he wrote criticizing a paint job on the building. His grandfather had to beg the school to reinstate him.
“To have that gift [of writing] from him, to know that maybe it’s in the blood, has given me a lot of strength to keep going,” Attiah said.
Attiah reflected on the convergence of losses over the past year, including her job, her father and her university teaching position, and what it means to rebuild one’s life well into adulthood. But she observed that grief has also clarified a lot, and allowed her to find freedom in something new after experiencing significant loss.
“I do think there’s a lot of grief in general for a lot of people right now,” Attiah said. “And I think we have an opportunity to build new worlds right now and build something else, or at the very least to support one another as we’re all navigating a sense of loss.”
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