Opinion | The Real Problem With the AP’s Firing of Emily Wilder - POLITICO
Janine Zacharia reported on the Middle East and foreign policy for close to two decades including stints as Jerusalem Bureau Chief for the Washington Post, State Department correspondent for Bloomberg News, Washington bureau chief for the Jerusalem Post, and Jerusalem correspondent for Reuters. She is currently the Carlos Kelly McClatchy lecturer in the Department of Communication at Stanford University, where she teaches news reporting and writing fundamentals and foreign correspondence. She is the co-author of How to Responsibly Report on Hacks and Disinformation.
In the aftermath of the Associated Press’ May 19 firing of Emily Wilder, a spirited discussion has broken out about social media policies and practices in newsrooms. Wilder, a 22-year-old news associate in Arizona with an online record of pro-Palestinian activism in college, was dismissed, according to the AP, for “some tweets” it said “violated AP’s News Values and Principles.” Which tweets? The organization didn’t say. But Wilder’s firing came on the heels of a campaign by the Stanford College Republicans and allies to portray her as an “anti-Israel agitator” and thus call the AP’s objectivity on the issue into question.
For me, the issues surrounding her firing are important for journalism, but they’re personal, too: She was my student at Stanford.
