It’s not easy to get fired from AP but Emily Wilder was. On Thursday, Associated Press management announced her termination after only two weeks on the job. They didn’t like her social media posts.
AP motivation obvious
The way Wilder puts it, AP execs told her privately that she had “violated the company’s social media policy.” They “would not tell her which posts had been found to be in violation.”
The company told Washington Post that they happened while she was employed with them. The reason isn’t all that mysterious though.
It seems that Wilder got canned for “criticizing the news media’s uncritical devotion to supposed objectivity in covering Israel’s occupation of Palestine on Twitter.”
One can hardly blame AP for being a little biased in their coverage after the IDF nuked their office building to a smoking pile of rubble. The big problem is that Wilder ticked off some Republicans she went to school with.
AP suits were not happy at all that “Wilder drew the ire of the Stanford College Republicans.” Some students from her alma mater “launched a public harassment campaign against her.”
Over the next few days, “members of the campus group surfaced an old Facebook post of Wilder’s about joining an anti-Birthright protest.” They also “used her association with the university’s Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine organizations as evidence of bias.”
Opinions she had in college
Wilder swears up and down that before she was hired by Associated Press, “an editor reassured her that she wouldn’t get into trouble for opinions she had in college.”
He didn’t know she had left behind some powerful and conservative enemies there. “conservative news outlets swiftly picked up the story and excoriated the AP for the recent hire.” She was out the door within days. She’s not happy to find herself “canceled.”
The past week, Wilder laments, are “a textbook example of getting canceled.” The same Republicans who had her plug pulled “would certainly decry ‘cancel culture’ in general,” she whines. That’s called Karma. Suck it up baby. “There’s no question I was just canceled. This is exactly the issue with the rhetoric around ‘cancel culture.'”
AP can’t have her around because she says things like, “to Republicans, cancel culture is usually seen as teens or young people online advocating that people be held accountable over accusations of racism or whatever it may be, but when it comes down to who actually has to deal with the lifelong ramifications of the selective enforcement of cancel culture—specifically over the issue of Israel and Palestine—it’s always the same side.”
Wilder continues to insist she did nothing wrong, the editorial choices that AP calls objective “reveal their own biases,” she claims. They just “tend to reflect the dominant ideology, which benefits from being considered neutral.”
Associated Press added in a separate statement that every one of their journalists “is responsible for safeguarding our ability to report on this conflict, or any other, with fairness and credibility, and cannot take sides in public forums.”
