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.
But Capehart’s description of the incident in his book, along with a discussion about it he held with former Biden administration official Susan Rice at the Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington last week, has been the subject of internal recriminations at the Post in recent days.
According to two Washington Post staffers, staff have complained privately that the book publicly pitted current colleagues against each other and appeared to run afoul of the Post’s editorial guidelines around collegiality, as well as rules that restrict staff from publicly disclosing internal editorial conversations. A spokesperson for the Post did not respond to requests for comment. Capehart did not respond to requests for comment.
In a statement to Semafor, Tumulty noted that the paper had repeatedly published opinion pieces criticizing Georgia’s 2021 voting laws limiting ballot access, but said she would not comment further on the book or the Post’s editorial processes.
“I have a very different recognition of the events and conversations that are described in this book, but out of respect for the longstanding principle that Washington Post editorial board deliberations are confidential I am not going to say anything further.”
Some current and former staff told Semafor that they felt Capehart’s decision to go after Tumulty in a book and on his book tour over an editorial disagreement, as well as the actual description of the incident, was unfair to her.
“Ed board members, current and former, are honor bound not to discuss specific deliberations publicly,” former deputy opinion editor Chuck Lane said in a text. “I can only say that Karen took an unsought leadership role when the paper needed her, and performed it superbly and 100 percent honorably, despite extraordinary health challenges — for which I admire her greatly.”
The internal rehash of the 2023 saga comes at a moment when the Post is trying to keep attention off of its Opinion section, which has been the subject of reader fury following owner Jeff Bezos’ decision not to endorse in the 2024 election, as well as his subsequent decisions to overhaul the section.