Photo by Dion Hinchcliffe via Flickr. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

This past weekend, some rather extreme drama unfolded between Washington Post reporters Felicia Sonmez and Dave Weigel. After Weigel retweeted a joke that Sonmez and others considered sexist, the latter publicly called out the former. “Every girl is bi,” the joke reads. “You just have to figure out if it’s polar or sexual.”

Sonmez didn’t mince words. “Fantastic to work at a news outlet where retweets like this are allowed!” she tweeted.

Weigel retracted the retweet and issued an apology. “I just removed a retweet of an offensive joke,” he tweeted. “I apologize and did not mean to cause any harm.” But Sonmez continued tweeting about the incident until the Post finally decided to suspend Weigel for a full month without pay.

On social media, there are essentially two competing narratives regarding this incident.

One of those two narratives portrays Sonmez in an unflattering light, characterizing her behavior as exceedingly vindictive and self-serving. Her critics contend that she could have and should have given him the benefit of the doubt and handled this privately. They argue that it wasn’t necessary to keep pressing the issue until the Post finally sanctioned Weigel, especially since he apologized and deleted the retweet almost right away.

One of Sonmez’s peers at the Post, reporter Jose A. Del Real, challenged her behavior on the grounds that she was engaging in targeted harassment. He acknowledged that the joke was “terrible and unacceptable” but insisted that “rallying the internet to attack him for a mistake he made doesn’t actually solve anything.”

Sonmez and her supporters have put forth a second, much different narrative. They argue that publicly calling out sexism is always right, as doing so sends a clear message that misogyny has no place in journalism, and that women who work in media need not tolerate the boys-will-be-boys behavior that was endemic to the industry for a very long time.

“There are women you don’t know, and who you may never meet, but who see a Post reporter retweet a sexist joke and wonder whether they’re supposed to accept that as ‘normal’ because no one at the Post says anything about it,” she tweeted. “Saying something matters to them. And it matters to me.”

Truthfully, I think there is some merit to both of these narratives — but I also think it’s absolutely absurd that this situation has become such a massive dumpster fire. As soon as Real engaged Sonmez, things took an especially nasty turn, and someone at the Post should have intervened to deescalate the situation and play peacekeeper, at least until all of the parties involved could sit down and have a professional, civilized discussion about what had transpired.

But that didn’t happen. Instead, Post editor Sally Buzbee issued a memo asking the paper’s reporters to be kind and respectful towards one another. Not surprisingly, the weakly-worded directive didn’t have much of an impact. It probably didn’t help that the memo wasn’t directed at anyone in particular, made no mention of any specific tweets or criticisms that Buzbee found objectionable, and was essentially nothing more than a helpless plea to Post reporters to behave like adults.

When the Post later chose to suspend Weigel for an entire month, it struck many people as a disproportionate punishment. The timing of the suspension was the bigger misstep, though. Had the Post announced that Weigel would be put on temporary leave while the paper investigated the incident, that might have given management some time to properly address the situation without letting social media dictate the pace or outcome of the process. By rushing to the end of that process and handing down Weigel’s suspension when it did, the Post made him look like a sacrificial lamb whose punishment was issued for the sole purpose of appeasing Sonmez and her supporters. It also made the Post seem desperate and afraid, which invited even more scrutiny of its managerial methods.

Unfortunately, Weigel’s suspension was not the end of the story. After Buzbee issued yet another memo that condemned both “racist and sexist behavior” and “colleagues attacking colleagues,” a number of Post employees tweeted that they’re proud to work for the paper. The tweets are all worded very similarly, and Sonmez’s supporters have taken notice of that. Some of them have explicitly accused the Post employees of doing damage control for the company, while Sonmez herself retweeted a tweet that insinuated the same thing.

To be blunt, this is beyond ridiculous. No matter whether you believe that Weigel deserved to be punished for retweeting a sexist joke, or that Sonmez has successfully turned a molehill into a mountain, one thing we should all agree on is that this entire episode is an epic embarrassment for the Washington Post.

In a well-managed workplace where constructive criticism is both welcome and encouraged by all; where sensible policies governing employee conduct are enforced through evenhanded processes that engender trust in the institution’s commitment to fairness and transparency; and where management takes quick, decisive action to address internal conflicts before they cause irreparable harm between colleagues, situations like the one involving Felicia Sonmez and Dave Weigel don’t happen very frequently.

Is it possible that the Post has managed to construct just such a workplace, and that this incident is an isolated one that is unlikely to happen again? Maybe, maybe not. But even if it is an isolated incident, the responsibility for addressing it swiftly, professionally, and impartially belonged entirely to the paper’s top brass. And in that respect, they failed in a very big and very public way.