The public despises the mainstream media for a lot of reasons, most typically for left-leaning bias in their reporting.  They slant stories, omit stories or critical details, skip fairness, and act as public relations agents to just one side of the story.

But there is also the actual personal behavior of certain journalists that discredits the entire profession.

Think of Jim Acosta with his "Dear Diary"–style whinings about how President Trump won't call on him and nobody buys his book.

Think of that sleazy little troll at Bloomberg Law who patrolled the comments sections of personal social media sites in a bid to twist the words and destroy the life of an innocent Trump official at the Department of Labor.  Remember Ben Penn?

Think of David Leavitt, who used his blue-check power to doxx a Target employee who refused to sell him an $89.99 toothbrush for one cent, based on his own misreading of an inventory display sign.  He had some sort of excessive obsession with getting a bargain and shaking down multiple companies this way, Dunkin Donuts as well.

Much of the problem with the press is actually personal.

This brings us to Felicia Sonmez of the Washington Post, who tweeted out an old sex assault story from the Daily Beast about basketball great Kobe Bryant as news came out about the helicopter crash that killed him, doing it as the fires were still burning with Bryant's dead body on that California hillside.  She got herself suspended for that disgusting act, a cold lack of compassion if there ever was one, given that millions of fans were in mourning, basketball legends like Shaquille O'Neill were in tears, and Bryant's young family was undoubtedly in a state of shock.

It was time to bring up a two-decade-old story about some kind of sex harassment.

There's always a time and place, but not in Sonmez's pinched little mind.  She embarrassed the Post's brass by her "lack of judgment," got herself suspended for doxxing one of her critics on Twitter, and then got the matter reversed without an apology to the public.  Who knows how many subscriptions she cost the Post in the Los Angeles market, where Bryant was revered?

The #MeToo agenda is always her thing.  At the time the story came out, I dismissed it as a bad tweet from a tin ear that probably didn't merit firing if an apology were given.  But that's far from Sonmez's actual story.

First, there was this.  I'll cite CBS as a more disinterested source than the Post itself:

The Washington Post has reinstated Felicia Sonmez, a national political reporter who had been placed on administrative leave after tweeting about the rape allegation against Kobe Bryant in the wake of the NBA legend's death. The reinstatement comes after the newspaper faced harsh internal and external backlash over the suspension.

"After conducting an internal review, we have determined that, while we consider Felicia's tweets ill-timed, she was not in clear and direct violation of our social media policy," managing editor Tracy Grant said in a statement sent to CBS News. 

"Reporters on social media represent The Washington Post, and our policy states 'we must be ever mindful of preserving the reputation of The Washington Post for journalistic excellence, fairness and independence'" Grant added. "We consistently urge restraint, which is particularly important when there are tragic deaths. We regret having spoken publicly about a personnel matter."

Notice that the Post seemed to mea culpa itself.  Still no apology for the disgusting tweet and its reflection on the Post.

Instead of graciously accepting that and offering an apology to Kobe's fans for her vile tweet condemning Bryant while the hillside was still burning, she decided to insult her boss:

"I believe the Washington Post readers and employees, including myself, deserve to hear directly from Marty Baron on the newspaper's handling of this matter," Somnez [sic] said.

"Washington Post journalists endeavor to live up to the paper's mission statement, which states, 'The newspaper shall tell ALL the truth so far as it can learn it, concerning the important affairs of America and the world.' My suspension, and Mr. Baron's Jan. 26 email warning me that my tweets about a matter of public record were 'hurting this institution,' have unfortunately sown confusion about the depth of managements commitment to this goal.

And no apology to the readers for the vile tweet, either.  She was right: the rest of us who were offended by her disgusting timing were somehow wrong.

File under "insolent brat" with no self-awareness.

It gets worse when you look at her history.  Turns out Sonmez has actually got a pattern of this kind of self-referential bad behavior. She's the one who was featured in Reason's piece on cancel culture and the excesses of the #MeToo movement, telling the story of how she ruined the life of a Los Angeles Times bureau chief. Over a muddled consent-no consent, sexual encounter in Beijing, with then-Los Angeles bureau chief Jon Kaiman, she charged him with sexual assault and got him fired, ruining his life, despite her own bad behavior in that wretched hookup, which she took no consequences for. She profited actually, failing upward to a new job with the Washington Post. Reason wrote all about that shambles in August 2019, here.

One can be glad that she's now the Post's problem, they ought to have known what they were getting into when they hired her after her destruction of Kaiman, because the specter of egotistic behavior rewarded now continues. 

The public, though, is offended. It's disgusted by all of these examples of bad personal behavior from the press. What kind of people are these people anyway? In terms of a discredited profession, slanted coverage is just the tip of the iceberg.