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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 24, 2026

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Probably not. Sonmez was fired, but it took a six-day tweetstorm (and, frankly, a psychotic break), presumably with a bunch of warnings, and she had past bad conduct and punishment (including a previous incident involving a tragic death). Horwitz got a short suspension for plagiarism (copying two paragraphs about a legal regime), not a firing. Achenbach's hard to tell since it's a MeToo era case, so no idea where to put it except to say he was only suspended. In other cases, people just duck out of the business in a 'you can't fire me I quit sense': Cooke was definitely worse, and 'Ratfucker' Weigel wasn't worse and resigned or got a suspension, depending on which time you want to go with.

If you include other major press, you can find examples, even union shops like McNeil from the NYT or government-adjacent groups like Williams at NPR. But they're a different CBA or legal regime.

Of course, that leaves us debating whether a major newspaper has its hands tied because the staff behaved, or the previous owners were nutjobs letting bad behavior go reign free, long enough.

I notice that the arbitrator did not point to a part of the contract defining or limiting the bounds of "gross misconduct". Instead, she made a comparison to someone not covered by the policy to begin with, and described his situation in the last favorable manner.