The Washington Post has discharged reporter Felicia Sonmez, a national political reporter after a feud on social media put The Post’s newsroom in the limelight.

Ms Sonmez was fired on Thursday, media reports said, and her access to the paper’s Slack channel was promptly deactivated. 

In an emailed termination letter on Thursday,  sighted by The New York Times, Ms Sonmez was fired from The Post, “for misconduct that includes insubordination, maligning your co-workers online and violating The Post’s standards on workplace collegiality and inclusivity.”

“We cannot allow you to continue to work as a journalist representing The Washington Post,” the letter said. 

Ahead of her dismissal, Ms Sonmez has been at the centre of a public firestorm over the newsroom’s culture. 

On Friday, Dave Weigel, a political reporter at The Post, retweeted a joke that said women were either bisexual or bipolar. 

“Fantastic to work at a news outlet where retweets like this are allowed!” Ms Sonmez tweeted. 

Mr Weigel apologised for the tweet but was later suspended by The Post for a month.  Executive Editor Sally Buzbee intervened, via a memo, warning employees on Tuesday to refrain from “attacking colleagues either face to face or online.”

Ms Sonmez also wrote a series of posts on Twitter about the newsroom culture at The Post and what she said was the uneven way its social media policy was applied to different reporters.

Ms Sonmez had faced turbulence while at The Post, suing the paper and several top editors in 2021, accusing them of discriminating against her. Ms Sonmez said the editors stopped her from covering stories about sexual assault after she had publicly identified herself as a victim of assault. The case was dismissed in March over failure to prove discrimination. 

Ms Sonmez had covered breaking news from the White House as well as Congress. She had spent over four years in Beijing, working first as a correspondent for Agence France-Presse and later as the editor of The Wall Street Journal’s China Real Time Report.

Mrs Sonmez’ dismissal came two years after she made headlines for sharing sexual assault allegations against Kobe Bryant, barely hours after the basketball star was killed in a helicopter crash with his daughter and crew members.

The Post suspended Ms Sonmez over the tweet, then summarily reinstated her after her colleagues protested that she had shared a factual article, even though it was largely seen as insensitive by a vast section of the public.