Jonathan Capehart is a columnist for the Washington Post and also hosts a Sunday show on MSNBC. Capehart has a new book out titled "Yet Here I Am: Lessons from a Black Man’s Search for Home" which includes an explanation of his decision to quit the Post's editorial board in 2023. According to Capehart, it was all the fault of his fellow board member Karen Tumulty.

In his book, Capehart, who remains a columnist at the paper, writes that he clashed with Tumulty over an editorial which took issue with then-President Joe Biden’s criticism of a 2021 Georgia voting law.

Biden described the law as “Jim Crow 2.0” — a characterization that the Washington Post editorial board deemed to be “hyperbolic.”...

“Tumulty took an incident where I felt she ignored and compounded the insult by robbing me of my humanity,” he wrote in the book, which was published last week.

“She either couldn’t or wouldn’t see that I was black, that I came to the conversation with knowledge and history she could never have, that my worldview, albeit different from hers, was equally valid.”

So, basically, Capehart didn't get his way in an editorial and quit because Tumulty wouldn't recognize his lived truth or some such nonsense in defense of a partisan talking point. And it was nonsense. Just to put this in context, here's a bit of what Biden said back in March 2021.

“Among the outrageous parts of this new state law, it ends voting hours early so working people can’t cast their vote after their shift is over. It adds rigid restrictions on casting absentee ballots that will effectively deny the right to vote to countless voters. And it makes it a crime to provide water to voters while they wait in line — lines Republican officials themselves have created by reducing the number of polling sites across the state, disproportionately in Black neighborhoods.”

“This is Jim Crow in the 21st Century. It must end,” he said.

This was a big deal at the time. Major League Baseball Commissioner Robert Manfred moved the 2021 All-Star Game out of Atlanta to protest the new law. The ACLU filed lawsuits. But as the Washington Post itself pointed out, some of what Biden was saying about the new law was a lie:

On Election Day in Georgia, polling places are open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., and if you are in line by 7 p.m., you are allowed to cast your ballot. Nothing in the new law changes those rules.

However, the law did make some changes to early voting. But experts say the net effect of the new early-voting rules was to expand the opportunities to vote for most Georgians, not limit them.

“You can criticize the bill for many things, but I don’t think you can criticize it for reducing the hours you can vote,” said University of Georgia political scientist Charles S. Bullock III. He speculated that Biden may have been briefed on an early version of the bill — “there were 25 versions floating around” — and he did not get an update on the final version.

Details aside, the idea was that dastardly Republicans were trying to prevent minorities in Georgia from voting. So how did that work out in the 2022 election? Not like Biden and other Democrats predicted.

A survey by the University of Georgia and election data compiled by Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on voter turnout show just how wrong those odious claims were and present a stunningly different picture of the recently concluded midterm elections...

The survey from the Survey Research Center of the School of Public & International Affairs at the University of Georgia found that precisely 0% of black respondents said that they had a “poor” experience voting in 2022, compared to 0.9% of white voters.

That’s right—zero percent! In fact, 96.2% of black voters said their voting experience was “excellent” or “good,” compared to 96% of whites, a statistically insignificant difference...

This result is fundamentally at odds with the Left’s provocative claim of rampant voter suppression of black voters. Further, this reporting comes at a time when Georgians cast “more votes … than [in] any other midterm” in the state’s history, with black voters making up 48% of this increase since 2000, according to the Pew Research Center.

So, getting back to Jonathan Capehart, he quit the editorial board in 2023, after the record turnout of the 2022 election in Georgia, because the editorial board had called false claims about the Georgia voting law "hyperbolic." By that point it was undeniable that the new law had not prevented black voters (or anyone else) from voting, so calling it "Jim Crow 2.0" or "Jim Crow in the 21st Century" clearly was silly.

Capehart is also getting some backlash because the Post has a "collegiality" rule which says you're not supposed to attack your co-workers by name or reveal details of private discussions. His new book seems to violate that rule.

According to two Washington Post staffers, staff have complained privately that the book publicly pitted current colleagues against each other and appeared to run afoul of the Post’s editorial guidelines around collegiality, as well as rules that restrict staff from publicly disclosing internal editorial conversations. A spokesperson for the Post did not respond to requests for comment. Capehart did not respond to requests for comment...

Some current and former staff told Semafor that they felt Capehart’s decision to go after Tumulty in a book and on his book tour over an editorial disagreement, as well as the actual description of the incident, was unfair to her.

“Ed board members, current and former, are honor bound not to discuss specific deliberations publicly,” former deputy opinion editor Chuck Lane said in a text. “I can only say that Karen took an unsought leadership role when the paper needed her, and performed it superbly and 100 percent honorably, despite extraordinary health challenges — for which I admire her greatly.”

Will he be punished for breaking the rules everyone else is expected to follow? Probably not because that would only play into his identity as a victim.

Finally, it's worth noting that the last time I wrote about Capehart was last November.. Capehart was pushing a conspiracy theory about then-candidate Trump's plan to contest voting outcomes in Pennsylvania when an exasperated Hugh Hewitt pointed out that the GOP had sued in that case and won. In other words, a judge agreed they were right.

In Bucks County, PA, officials cut-off early-voting lines HOURS before they were supposed-to.

Some Americans were denied an opportunity to vote early.

This was wrong.
So the @GOP sued.
And TODAY, THE GOP WON.

There will now be 3 additional days of early voting in Bucks County. pic.twitter.com/1XRtWOcOHu

— Byron Donalds (@ByronDonalds) October 30, 2024

So the GOP sued and won thereby expanding voting hours, but still Capehart twisted it into an anti-Trump narrative. Hewitt pointed out the facts and Capehart had a hissy fit and chastised Hewitt for speaking the truth. Hewitt wound up walking off the show and quitting his job at the Post.

"Bucks County was reversed by the court and instructed to open up extra days because they violated the law and told people to go home..."

A FURIOUS @hughhewitt storms off a Washington Post Live stream for what he called "unfair" reporting.

Jonathan Capehart and Ruth Marcus were… pic.twitter.com/bRfaQI3xcN

— Kyle Becker (@kylenabecker) November 1, 2024

You get the impression Jonathan Capehart has very thin skin. He can be easily offended by any contradiction, public or private, even one that is undeniably correct.