A Dallas reporter’s use of the word “bruh” reportedly got her fired.
The firing of Meghan Mangrum, a former education reporter for The Dallas Morning News, comes after she spotted a Feb. 11 tweet from Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson that claimed local media outlets were “not interested” in reporting to reduce the number of violent crimes in town.
Johnson wrote the tweet despite multiple media outlets — including The Dallas Morning News — covering the fall.
Mangrum later responded to the tweet herself.
“Bruh, the national news will always chase the trend. Cultivate relationships with quality local news partnerships,” Mangrum wrote.
“Standing up for my colleagues and the work we do, when I know we’re doing a good and honest job, is something I take pride in and something I look for in my colleagues and in my workplace,” he said. Magazine D.
The use of the word led to criticism by the mayor, and his chief of staffin its wake.
“Gotta love it when people let their inherent biases show. Someone who writes for my local daily paper, whom I’ve never met, calls me “bruh”. Johnson wrotewho also directly challenged Mangrum’s answer.
Mangrum, who is white, claimed that the paper’s executive editor, who is black, later asked if she would use the word if Johnson were white.
She replied that she would still use the word to address the mayor.
“Bruh,” made popular in part by memes on the defunct social media platform Vine, is defined as a word meant to “convey frustration or disappointment about something,” according to KnowYourMeme.
Dictionary.com notes that the word has ties to Black English usage and adds that it “has been popularized as an interjection variously expressing surprise or dismay since at least the 2010s.”
D Magazine noted that Mangrum has used “bruh” for “all kinds of bills.”
She was fired from her role at the Dallas paper three days after the tweet, according to D Magazine, for violating the paper’s social media policy and said the paper did not tell her which section of the policy she violated.
Mangrum was fired on a day that included an earlier Dallas News Guild protest she participated in and helped organize in February.
Mangrum, in an email to HuffPost, wrote that she is devastated to lose her job and disappointed by management’s response, despite the lack of previous discipline.
She added that she believed her story “is a troubling incident in a larger story of challenges facing journalists” at her former paper.
The union filed a complaint on her behalf with the National Labor Relations Board, Mangrum wrote, following a series of other complaints filed with the board in recent months.
The newspaper announced it would disband its Spanish-language Al Día newspaper, a move that saw its journalists – who the union noted had been “radically underpaid and overworked in recent years” – reassigned to different departments.
“It’s just one of many related events that have occurred recently, but it directly affects critical journalists, some of whom have visas and are concerned about their immigration status as a result of any job changes,” Mangrum wrote.
HuffPost also reached out to The Dallas Morning News and Johnson’s office for comment.
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