A new book by a Washington Post opinion editor is spilling a years-old fight back out into the open, privately frustrating some colleagues and putting the paper in an awkward position.
Last week, Washington Post opinion editor Jonathan Capehart published a book detailing his decision to step down from the paper’s editorial board in 2023. He attributed the move to a disagreement he had with another editor in the section, Karen Tumulty, over a piece by the editorial board saying that then-President Joe Biden’s decision to call Georgia’s voting laws “Jim Crow 2.0” was “hyperbolic.”
According to the book, Capehart, the only Black man on the Post’s editorial board at the time, agreed with Biden’s description and was bothered by the editorial and the fact that readers may believe it represented his view. He was incensed when Tumulty later did not apologize to him for publishing it; Capehart said he felt additionally put off when Tumulty said Biden’s choice of words was insulting to people who had 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,” he wrote in the book, which was published last week. “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.”
Capehart left the editorial board after complaining about the incident to human resources and other senior figures at the paper. According to one person with knowledge of the situation, Capehart’s frustrations were notable enough that after the piece was published, top opinion editor David Shipley was asked to meet privately with Rev. Al Sharpton to discuss the Capehart incident and alleged shortcomings in the paper’s opinion coverage.
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