In an internal town hall with employees on Wednesday, managers at the Associated Press reportedly told employees the news giant erred in its handling of its termination of Emily Wilder last week. Wilder announced in April she’d be joining the AP as a news associate in Phoenix. Five weeks later she was terminated for an unspecified violation of the AP’s rules on employees’ social media accounts. The personnel decision sparked outcry among many employees.

During the town hall, AP managing editor Brian Carovillano admitted, the Washington Post reports, the company had made “mistakes of process, and not of outcome,” strongly suggesting the news outlet ultimately stands by the decision to terminate Wilder.

“We failed to initially see this as more than an HR issue,” said assistant managing editor Julie Pace. “We thought this was the type of internal, personnel issue that AP is used to dealing with. What we failed to see is how this impacted our staff broadly in so many ways.”

In the days leading up to her firing, Wilder had been targeted by the Stanford College Republicans’ Twitter account for her past pro-Palestine activism in college. The account highlighted Wilder’s characterization of Ben Shapiro as a “little turd,” and the late casino tycoon Sheldon Adelson as a “naked mole rat.” The Twitter thread spawned articles on the Fox News and Federalist websites, both of which called Wilder, who is Jewish, “anti-Israel.”

Upon her termination, the AP refused to reveal which social media post(s) of hers violated company rules, according to Wilder. On Wednesday the Post reported, “Company managers felt that her tweets showed a bias toward the Palestinian people.”

“We saw it primarily as an issue of social media standards,” said Pace during the town hall. “We failed to see that it is much deeper than that.”

The AP announced Tuesday it was conducting a review of its social media policies for employees. In a news report on itself, the AP said, “The incident illustrates how it can be difficult for a news organization, particularly a traditionalist like The Associated Press, to handle the free-wheeling nature of social media.”

The post AP Managers Reportedly Tell Employees They Made ‘Mistakes of Process’ in Terminating Emily Wilder for Social Media Posts first appeared on Mediaite.

from Mediaite https://ift.tt/3oTnWWU