Reporters Who Ruined Their Careers On Social Media

Vogue editor Anna Wintour once said, "Everyone should be sacked at least once in their career because perfection doesn't exist." She offered the provocative advice in an interview for Alistair Campbell's book "Winners And How They Succeed" (via E! Online), explaining that getting fired from a job is an important "reality of life." That may be true, and losing a gig happens for many reasons. In the modern era, though, one of the more high-profile reasons for firing is social media backlash, and that's particularly a reality for extremely online figures such as reporters.

We know, we know; "cancel culture" isn't a thing. Roxane Gay prefers to call it "consequence culture" (a term she coined in Mother Jones), pointing out that for the most part, people being "canceled" often deserve to face consequences for the things they have actually said and done. Podcaster Michael Hobbes takes it a step further, pointing out that the term as it's often used — in response to so-called "woke mobs" — fails to really capture what's going on. "We constantly hear that 'cancel culture is a problem for the left' but that's simply not true," he tweeted. "First of all, right-wingers have their ways of canceling too. Second, there's no evidence that this is a 'culture.'"

Either way, many reporters who have hit social media-inflicted bumps in the road of their careers have gone on to other media positions, so read on for times when reporters said things online they shouldn't have and actually faced consequences.

When he ran into Twitter trouble, Reuters reporter Matthew Keys was already in hot water. He was embroiled in a legal situation, having been indicted on charges that he had passed along important passwords for his former employer to hackers from Anonymous. The Huffington Post reported that Keys had allegedly told the hackers, "go f**k some s**t up."

Keys also had a publicly difficult relationship with social media, having told AdWeek (via The Drum) that he was planning on taking a break from Twitter. However, he was again a regular user when he turned his Twitter account into a firehose of incorrect information in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing, sharing numerous tips and rumors which later turned out to be false (via The Awl). The Atlantic reported that Keys was fired by Reuters due to his online conduct. He told Politico that he felt Reuters was just using his Boston bombing "coverage" as an excuse, suspecting that they wanted to fire him due to his indictment. "To Reuters' credit, they did not mention the indictment during the phone call," he said. "Now, one has to wonder if the two are connected ... I assume they were looking for an out."

He was ultimately convicted in the hacking case and sentenced to two years in prison (via Wired). In 2021, the Justice Department sentenced him to six more months in jail for a similar crime, having deleted the YouTube account for his new employer, yet another media company.

Back in 2016, Us Weekly's Jon Warech interviewed controversy magnet Chrissy Teigen, asking her questions about her newborn child with husband John Legend. The resulting headline read, "Chrissy Teigen: We're Hiring a Night Nurse for Baby." Teigen didn't like that, and, as she often does, she called Warech out on Twitter, even though he hadn't written the article or the headline. Per the Daily News, Teigen wrote that she was specifically upset that the outlet had used "the last of many questions as your headline because you know it will make me look like a poor, uncaring mother and get people talking. Awesome. Doesn't go unnoticed." Warech responded by screencapping the Word document with quotes he'd sent to his editor.

That move lost him his job, as he'd shared work product online. "I felt the need to defend the story and my reporting style," Warech explained to the Daily News. "We didn't use the last of 'many questions' and none of the three questions were 'extremely personal' [as Teigen had claimed in their conversation]. I guess it wasn't my place to do so."

Years later, Warech told Page Six that the situation led to a career change, one he's grateful for. "Afterwards I started volunteering for the Holocaust Memorial in Miami Beach and the March of the Living and I found my calling. Now I'm truly in a dream job — so thanks Chrissy," he said.

In 2017, the Indianapolis 500 was won by a Japanese driver named Takuma Sato. "Unbelievable feeling. It was a tough, tough race," Sato said afterward (via The Guardian). "Hopefully the crowd enjoyed it. I can't thank enough for everyone's support." He did not, in fact, have the support of Terry Frei, a reporter for The Denver Post. In a since-deleted tweet, Frei wrote (via the New York Post, "Nothing specifically personal, but I am very uncomfortable with a Japanese driver winning the Indianapolis 500 during Memorial Day weekend." Understandably, the tweet caused a significant backlash. "What is the point of tainting that breakthrough with this ugly racism?" asked a writer for Reappropriate.

Frei tweeted a since-deleted apology. "I fouled up," he began. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said what I said when I said it." Nevertheless, Frei went on, trying to clear the air in a paragraphs-long explanation about his father's history in World War II, which he said colors his emotional response during Memorial Day. The wordy mea culpa didn't go over well, and it wasn't enough to save his job. The Denver Post let him go, and they released a statement saying, "The tweet doesn't represent what we believe nor what we stand for. We hope you will accept our profound apologies."

Frei was still working as a sports journalist as of 2021. According to his website, some of his work has been published by Mile High Sports Magazine. 

Catherine Deveny, an Australian columnist and comedian, tweeted about the Logie Awards in 2010, firing off jokes about the Aussie television awards show. Deveny had previously written for the show itself (via IMDb), but that year she just made jokes on social media. Though she wrote about a number of other celebrities too, it was her joke about a then-11-year-old Bindi Irwin that drew swift backlash. "I do so hope Bindi Irwin gets laid," she wrote (via CBC) about the beloved eldest child of late "Crocodile Hunter" star Steve Irwin.

Deveny defended herself after the controversy, saying (via the Sydney Morning Herald) that her jokes were "taken out of context." She insisted, "This was a ludicrous remark that was as ridiculous as me saying I hope the dog that Molly Meldrum brought with him got drunk," a joke that probably makes sense to Australians who know who Molly Meldrum is. (He's a music critic, for the record). However, she lost her column at The Age because the paper did not agree with her defense. "We are appreciative of the columns Catherine has written for The Age over several years but the views she has expressed recently on Twitter are not in keeping with the standards we set at The Age," said Editor-in-Chief Paul Ramadge.

Since her firing for her social media posts, Deveny has gone on to write regularly for The Guardian, ABC (the Australian Broadcasting Corporation), and Insight, among others.

In 2014, as the conflict between Israel and Palestine heated up again, journalist Tala Halawa tweeted a message that claimed Israelis were acting like Nazis and also included the hashtag "#HitlerWasRight." Despite the posts being on a public Twitter account, Halawa was hired by the BBC a few years later, per The Jerusalem Post. When the obviously offensive tweets resurfaced in 2021, the BBC told The Spectator, "These tweets predate the individual's employment with the BBC but we are nevertheless taking this very seriously and are investigating." 

Halawa deleted her social media accounts amid the backlash, per Insider, though they have since been reactivated. "We are clear there is no place for views like this to exist within the BBC and we deplore racism and antisemitism of any kind," the BBC told the outlet.

The BBC let Halawa go, and she released a lengthy statement online explaining what had happened and why she tweeted what she had. "The offensive and ignorant words I posted at the time do not reflect my political views then as much as they do not today," she wrote. Halawa then went on to claim that the backlash to the post was the result of "bad-faith intimidation of reporters" and that her firing was an attempt to "maintain institutional pro-Israel bias." At the time of this writing, Halawa has not tweeted since the controversy.

ESPN hired betting analyst Kelly Stewart to report on sports betting in May 2021. The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported that Stewart would be an analyst on ESPN2's show "Daily Wager," as well as making appearances on "SportsCenter" and other ESPN shows as necessary. "I'm beyond excited for the future," Stewart told the outlet, which she had worked for in the past in a similar capacity.

As news spread of her hiring, however, people on Twitter pointed to past homophobic tweets Stewart had made online. A user named Logan Matthews uploaded screenshots of numerous since-deleted messages that contained multiple anti-gay slurs; Stewart was apparently quite fond of a particular one beginning with "f," which she aimed at everyone from her followers to football player Vernon Davis. A month later, shortly before Stewart was due to begin her on-air job, Front Office Sports broke the news that ESPN had let her go.

She released a statement on Twitter saying that she wished the company had stood behind her, casting her choice of language as poor but insisting that the emotion behind the tweets was due to the "vile, threatening, and misogynistic attacks" she was responding to. Though she lost her job at ESPN over her affinity for slurs, Stewart was snapped up by the bastions of respectability over at Barstool Sports.

In the days leading up to Joe Biden's inauguration as president, Lauren Wolfe, a freelance editor at The New York Times, tweeted "I have chills" as she watched his plane touch down in D.C. for his inauguration. Accusations of impartiality went viral, and Wolfe lost her job at The New York Times over the controversy. The Advocate reported that Wolfe tweeted about having received death threats, and the outlet noted a tweet from a friend of hers reading in part, "the NYT was pressured by fascists, Trumpkins and hypocrites on the right." In a statement to The Wrap, a New York Times spokesperson claimed, "For privacy reasons we don't get into the details of personnel matters but we can say that we didn't end someone's employment over a single tweet."

In the firestorm that followed her firing, Wolfe was particularly upset with the behavior of a reporter from the New York Post who claimed that she was unavailable for comment even though she said she'd never been asked to address the issue by the outlet. She tweeted, "Are you proud of stalking me today? ... Judging me as a journalist on these terms, while I am being stalked by your photog and getting death treats—you judge ME my work? Shame on you."

Since losing her job with The New York Times, Wolfe has pivoted to Substack, where she runs a newsletter about journalism, aptly named Chills.