*After conservative columnist Stacy Washington was suspended by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for defending the National Rifle Association from comparisons to ISIS, she fired back with her resignation.
Washington was suspended by the paper last Friday after her column entitled “Guns and the Media” took aim at the low representation of conservative journalists in newsrooms across the nation.
“It’s understandable that we seek out opinions and news that support our viewpoint,” Washington wrote in the column, which was published April 28. “Confirmation bias is a very real part of how people consume news and media. However, we should be appalled to see neighbors with whom we work, attend church, people who have children defending this country through military service — in other words, good decent people — portrayed in the same light as demonic murderers for the simple act of owning a firearm.”
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My column on the @NRA being nothing like ISIS got me suspended from @stltoday….
#SOTR pic.twitter.com/bg8ZvAAswJ— Stacy Washington (@StacyOnTheRight) May 1, 2017
.@StacyOnTheRight was suspended by @stltoday for challenging the leftist lie that the #NRA is like ISIS. She joins @MrColionNoir to respond. pic.twitter.com/Zpz0PuvsUZ
— NRATV (@NRATV) May 4, 2017
She added, “[W]hen has a member of the NRA ever decapitated, set on fire, tossed from a rooftop or otherwise terrorized another American? The linkage is not only rife with improper context; it is false on its face.”
Washington’s column also notes the lack of conservatives in U.S. newsrooms. “This failure to represent the opposing, especially conservative, view is an increasingly apparent deficit in the news reporting apparatus in our country.”
Hours after Washington’s column ran, she was being suspended. However, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch denies suspending her over her column, but rather for failing to disclose her promotional work and professional affiliation with the NRA, per NY Post.
“Her active promotional activities and professional association with the National Rifle Association represented an unacceptable conflict of interest in her most recent column, which resulted in our suspension of her work,” Tod Robberson, the Post-Dispatch’s editorial page editor, wrote in a response to Washington’s suspension and quitting.
Robberson added: “Columnists are expected to fully disclose conflicts of interest when writing about topics where such a conflict might arise. We apply this standard regardless of the lobbying or advocacy group being written about in a column.”
Following her suspension, Washington took to Twitter to note the irony of a conservative columnist being suspended from a mainstream newspaper.
“I’m not ashamed that I’m an NRA supporter, a Bible-thumper, that I love Jesus Christ. I’m all the way out there. There’s nothing else that I can do to articulate my perspective any more clearly on where I stand,” she said
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