The Associated Press hired a young journalist out of Stanford at the beginning of this month, then fired her about two weeks later. But this was no ordinary personnel issue, and.
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Last week, no one had heard of Emily Wilder. Then she became the focus of a national campaign to get her fired. Days later, she was.
Things move fast. So there’s a good chance that days from now, the story of a rookie journalist who lost her job because of the way she used social media to discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, will have faded from the discourse. Her firing will become just another bullet point in future stories about “cancel culture” on the right and left.
In her first TV interview, Democracy Now! speaks with Emily Wilder, the young reporter fired by the Associated Press after she was targeted in a Republican smear campaign for her pro-Palestinian activism in college. Wilder is Jewish and was a member of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace at Stanford University before she graduated in 2020. She was two weeks into her new job with the AP when the Stanford College Republicans singled out some of her past social media posts, triggering a conservative frenzy. The AP announced Wilder’s firing shortly thereafter, citing unspecified violations of its social media policy. Less than 48 hours after Stanford College Republicans began to post about me, I was fired,” says Wilder. I was not given an explanation for what social media policy I had violated.