These journalists went viral for all the wrong reasons and then some of them got sent straight
to the unemployment line.
Whether it was because of professional or personal snafus, these are the reporters who
ruined their careers in a matter of seconds.
Washington Post reporter Felicia Sonmez found herself embroiled in controversy following
Kobe Bryant's tragic death in 2020 when she tweeted a link to a 2016 story from the Daily
Beast that outlined the felony assault charges leveled at the basketball player in 2003.
Though Sonmez was hardly the first person to bring up Bryant's darker past following
his death, she was the one who paid the price.
Sonmez, who is a survivor of assault herself, received an email from Post executive editor
Martin Baron criticizing her since-deleted tweets, which urged her followers to remember
public figures in, quote, "their totality."
Shortly after, Sonmez was instructed by the paper's managing editor, Tracy Grant, to delete
the tweets per the organization's security policy, and she was placed on paid administrative
leave.
After outrage from some 300 Post co-workers who didn't approve of the paper's decision,
Sonmez was reinstated, although Grant still maintained that the tweets were "ill-timed."
While Sonmez's career is intact for now, she had to endure death threats and harassment.
In September 2019, a casino worker named Carson King went viral when he appeared in the background
of an episode of ESPN's College GameDay.
He was holding a sign that read "Busch Light Supply Needs Replenished" along with his Venmo
username.
This eventually resulted in King raising $3 million for a children's hospital with help
from Anheuser-Busch, who vowed to match donations.
"You were legitimately only trying to get beer?"
"Yeah, yeah, I mean I didn't think I was gonna get anything.
So, it's crazy."
Then Aaron Calvin, a reporter for the Des Moines Register, decided to profile the local
legend and ultimately lost his job as a result.
Calvin ran a standard social media background check on King before writing his piece and
uncovered some racist tweets that King had published in high school.
He included these in the profile along with King's apology.
Following the report, Calvin was slammed for trying to destroy a local hero and had to
endure harassment, doxing, and death threats.
When right-wing media figures uncovered the reporter's own offensive tweets, which included
using the n-word when quoting a Kanye West song and using the word "gay" as a pejorative,
Calvin was fired.
After he was let go, he told Buzzfeed,
"They told me they were going to offer me an option, that I could resign or I could
be fired, with no severance.
It was really a semantic difference, I guess, so I chose to be fired."
The president always pardons a turkey on Thanksgiving Day, but in 2019, he probably should've pardoned
a reporter instead.
That year, Newsweek fired Jessica Kwong for writing an inaccurate story about Trump's
turkey day plans.
The article's headline originally claimed that Trump was "tweeting, golfing, and more"
during his break, but it had no mention of the president's surprise trip to Afghanistan.
Still, should Kwong have actually gotten the ax?
A representative for Newsweek claimed that Kwong was responsible, though Kwong noted
that it was an "honest mistake" because her article was written before she knew about
the president's surprise visit.
She told the Washington Examiner that she alerted the editor as soon as the news of
Trump's visit broke and urged them to update it, but they failed to do so in a timely manner.
Newsweek did eventually amend the article to include the trip hours after publication.
Despite her ultimate fate, Kwong's report wasn't completely inaccurate.
Trump did indeed spend part of his Thanksgiving holiday tweeting just enough to slam Newsweek
for the story, as he wrote,
"I thought Newsweek was out of business?"
The first rule of a car show is, don't disrespect the cars at the car show.
Good Day Sacramento reporter Angel Cardenas apparently didn't get that memo when he was
on location at the Sacramento International Auto Show.
During a live segment on the KMAX morning program, he noticed that he was pretty much
the only one at the show at the moment.
So he made some choices that probably weren't the wisest decisions, as he climbed on top
of the classic, privately owned cars, causing some damage and horrifying car collectors
everywhere.
"So, no one is out here to tell me which car I can't go in, 'cause, you know, some of these
are off-limits, so I'm just gonna live on the wild side.
Tell me what you think about this pose."
Cardenas climbed into the driver's seat of one of the classic Ford Thunderbirds, dinging
the door into a neighboring car before remarking, "nobody's looking."
According to car blog Tire Meets Road, the owner of the cars featured in the segment
put "thousands of dollars and man-hours" into restoring them.
In a Facebook post, the auto show claimed that the incident was so "astonishingly awful"
that their producer reached out to KMAX's general manager, who revealed that Cardenas
had been fired.
Maybe next time, he should just take the bus.
MSNBC anchor Alison Morris may have just ruined her career with a stutter.
Sometimes that's all it takes.
She sparked an outrage when she used what sounded like a racial slur when reporting
on the death of Kobe Bryant, but no one actually knows what she said for sure.
When mentioning the team that Bryant played on, it sounded like she said the n-word instead
of "Lakers" before correcting herself and saying, "Los Angeles Lakers."
Shortly after, Morris was hit with a wave of angry tweets from viewers who thought she
had indeed said the n-word.
She quickly defended herself, claiming that she never used a racial slur and that what
sounded like one was merely a slip of the tongue.
She tweeted,
"Earlier today, while reporting on the tragic news of Kobe Bryant's passing, I unfortunately
stuttered on air, combining the names of the Knicks and the Lakers to say 'Nakers.'
Please know I did not & would NEVER use a racist term.
I apologize for the confusion this caused."
Despite Morris' defense, viewers continued to call for her to be fired.
A Change.org petition urging for her termination had received more than 190,000 signatures
by March 2020.
Television reporters are always on the clock, which is why it's probably not the best idea
to cause a public scene.
Colleen Campbell of Philadelphia's PHL-17 learned this the hard way when she was fired
from the network following a tirade outside of the Helium comedy club in 2017 that was
recorded and posted on Facebook.
Campbell was booted from the club for disturbing other guests, and then she completely went
off on a police officer in a profanity-laced rant.
She then appeared to try and spit in the face of a club employee and was finally put in
handcuffs.
She was ultimately charged with resisting arrest, criminal mischief, and disorderly
conduct and removed from her position at the news station.
In an interview with Philadelphia Magazine, Campbell claimed that she only had two drinks
at Helium, though she also admitted to drinking prior to the show.
She also said that she believed she may have been drugged.
She had no idea a video existed until she was fired.
As she explained it,
"When I came home, I called my producer to talk about why I was absent.
I didn't realize a video was out.
I found out about it later, because HR called me and said I was being terminated."
Campbell's career eventually rebounded when she was hired as a weekend meteorologist and
weekday reporter for WDTV in Clarksburg, West Virginia.
Before Megyn Kelly was hired by NBC, she already had a history of controversial comments during
her time on Fox News.
So perhaps it was no surprise how her time on the Peacock Network ended up.
Her morning show, Megyn Kelly Today, was cancelled when she questioned whether or not blackface
was racist during a segment in 2018.
"Back when I was a kid, that was okay as long as you were dressing up as, like, a character."
Kelly also defended Real Housewives of New York cast member Luann de Lesseps, who had
darkened her skin while dressing up as Diana Ross for a Halloween party.
Kelly's commentary was unsurprisingly met with plenty of criticism.
Though she reportedly apologized to NBC staff internally and made a public apology the following
day, Megyn Kelly Today was given the axe not long after.
TV reporters have to get into the nitty gritty when they're on location, but one reporter
for TV Azteca acted like her shoes were more important than her story, which is a bad look
when you're covering a natural disaster.
Lydia Cumming was fired after she was recorded being carried by townspeople through a large
puddle as she reported on flooding in the central Mexican city of Puebla.
She had both her arms wrapped around two people who had their feet completely submerged in
the flooding.
Unsurprisingly, it didn't take long for Cumming to be turned into a meme.
Across the internet, her image was Photoshopped into various situations like being carried
out of a tequila bar while wearing a sombrero or being escorted out of danger in movie scenes
like The Force Awakens and Titanic.
Cumming defended herself in an interview with the Spanish-language newspaper El Pais by
claiming,
"I try to maintain a relationship of empathy with people and was afraid of sounding rude
if I refused the favor.
I was [carried] for two seconds and then asked them to put me [down]."
Alas, her apology was too late.
TV Azteca believed that she disrespected locals who were part of the coverage and ultimately
gave her the boot.
A journalist for Rochester, Minnesota's NBC affiliate KTTC learned about objective reporting
the hard way when he was fired from his job for wearing a "Make America Great Again" hat
while on duty.
That might sound like a rookie mistake, except apparently he did it on purpose.
Jim Bunner was covering a Donald Trump rally in Rochester when he was snapped by a photographer
for the Star Tribune while wearing the hat along with his KTTC jacket.
That photo subsequently went viral, and Bunner was swiftly fired.
KTTC's news director told BuzzFeed that Bunner had violated station policy by wearing campaign
clothing while on assignment.
KTTC's rule isn't unique.
Most news outlets urge their reporters not to make political statements in order to protect
the objectivity in their reporting, but Bunner didn't seem to be that concerned.
BuzzFeed reported that he promoted the NRA on social media and that he had posted a picture
of himself dancing in a newsroom apparently celebrating Trump's inauguration.
Bunner claimed that he only wore the hat to develop trust with Trump supporters, who were
reportedly booing and calling him "fake news" before he put it on.
Jim Bunner could've probably avoided trouble if he had just paid attention a couple years
earlier when a Texas reporter was fired from her job for a similar objectivity snafu.
Scarlett Fakhar was axed from her gig at KRIV, Houston's Fox affiliate, for some decidedly
partisan social media activity.
As reported by the New York Post, Fakhar claimed in a since-deleted Facebook post that Barack
Obama made the "entire county hate one another" and that God "had a hand" in Trump's election
victory.
She also mentioned that she was so thrilled by his win that she could "barely sleep."
In other since-deleted Facebook posts, she revealed that she was fired for expressing
her conservative views on her private Facebook page.
"I mean, I posted this as an individual.
I didn't post it as a journalist."
Fakhar also claimed that KRIV tried to get her to remove her fan page from Facebook,
and that wasn't the end of it.
She also called out the Houston Chronicle by claiming that the newspaper had incorrectly
reported that she had criticized African-Americans.
According to the Post, this referenced a social media entry in which she claimed that the
number of African Americans killed by other African-Amerians far outweighs the number
of them killed by whites.
Fakhar seems to have bounced back after the controversy.
At one point, she was working for Real Investment News, although her Instagram bio lists her
as a "barre instructor."
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