Brian Stelter writes:

More than 100 employees at the Associated Press have signed an open letter calling for more information about the recent firing of 22-year-old journalist Emily Wilder.

Wilder’s ouster, and the newswire’s lack of candor about its cause, has caused a rare uproar inside the storied news organization.

Monday’s open letter said the lack of communication about Wilder’s firing “gives us no confidence that any one of us couldn’t be next, sacrificed without explanation. It has left our colleagues — particularly emerging journalists — wondering how we treat our own, what culture we embrace and what values we truly espouse as a company.”

Wilder was fired last week after just two weeks on the job. In a statement on Saturday, Wilder said she is “one victim to the asymmetrical enforcement of rules around objectivity and social media that has censored so many journalists — particularly Palestinian journalists and other journalists of color — before me.”

Before joining the AP, Wilder was an active member of pro-Palestinian groups at her college. She was a proponent of Palestinian human rights and a critic of the Israeli government. She is Jewish. And she is a believer in journalism. She joined the Phoenix bureau of the AP after ten months at The Arizona Republic. “I was proud to land a job at the AP,” she said.

Wilder’s statement was retweeted more than 50,000 times over the weekend. Former colleagues at the Republic and the AP rallied to her defense. “Broadly, the coverage of this story has come down on the side of the young reporter,” Claire Atkinson pointed out on Sunday’s “Reliable Sources.”

So why was Wilder fired? And what does it say about modern newsrooms and social media policies? [Continue reading…]