A former member of the Washington Post editorial board accused a colleague of robbing him of his humanity and confessed to going to HR over a line in an editorial he disagreed with, according to a review of his upcoming memoir.
Jonathan Capehart wrote he was sent into an “eye-popping rage” that caused him to quit the Washington Post editorial board and fire off a frantic email to HR over a sentence in an editorial concerning Georgia’s “Election Integrity Act of 2021,” according to a review written by Chronicles Magazine’s Mark Judge, who obtained an early copy of the book.
Former President Joe Biden had called the Peach State’s voting law, which placed restrictions on mail-in voting and gave state officials more control over how elections were run, “Jim Crow 2.0”. Major corporate backlash hit the state after the bill’s passage, including the MLB pulling the 2021 All-Star game from the state, and the Biden administration launched a lawsuit against the state.
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In his memoir, “Yet Here I Am: Lessons from a Black Man’s Search for Home,” Capehart recalls meeting where the Election Integrity Act was discussed with the Washington Post’s editorial board that particularly unnerved him, and ultimately led to his quitting the board altogether.
“How could it be voter suppression if all these people are coming out to vote?” Washington Post editorial board member Karen Tumulty had allegedly asked.
Capehart, who is also an MSNBC host and PBS contributor, wrote that the meeting had so “disturbed” him that he penned an email to everyone present. When the editorial board wrote that Georgia’s voter turnout “remained high despite hyperbolic warnings by President Biden and other Democrats that updated voting rules amounted to Jim Crow 2.0,” in a 2022 editorial. Capehart wrote that he was sent into an “eye popping rage.” The journalist wrote that his anger at the line was so piqued that it ultimately led to him quitting the editorial board in 2023.
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“I was sitting at my desk in the den of my apartment when I read the editorial in the print edition on December 8. A fine, perfectly reasonable piece … Reasonable until I hit the third sentence of the fifth paragraph. I was a tornado of emotions, eye-popping rage, and disbelief. I couldn’t stay.”
Capehart wrote that he emailed his resignation from the editorial board to Washington Post staff and reported his frustrations surrounding the editorial to HR. Capehart is still an opinion writer for the paper. The memoir details a subsequent, contentious, meeting he had with Tumulty in which she apologized for “misunderstandings” between them, but defended the use of the word “hyperbolic” to describe Biden’s criticisms of the law.
“I do think use of the word ‘hyperbolic’ is defensible… I have a rule: No one should be called a Nazi unless they were an actual Nazi,’ she told me. ‘So for President Biden to call the Georgia voter law ‘Jim Crow 2.0,’ well that’s an insult to people who lived through Jim Crow,’” Tumulty allegedly said.
Capehart wrote that he felt he was being “punked” by his colleague, and said she “robbed me of my humanity.” He wrote that he sat gripping his chair as Tumulty made her remarks, and claimed that she had made a racial situation “worse.”
“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 it different from hers, was equally valid,” Capehart wrote.
Reviewer Mark Judge described Capehart’s behavior as a “hissy fit” in his review, and said Tumulty’s only crime was treating him “like an adult.”
“You don’t go to HR because you disagree with an editorial, grow up,” Judge told Fox News Digital.
Tumulty told Fox News Digital she had not seen Capehart’s book. Capehart did not respond to a request for comment. The Washington Post did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request to comment.
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