One Dallas journalist’s use of the word “bruh” has reportedly landed her out of a job.
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 alleged the local media had “no interest” in reporting on a drop in violent crime numbers in the city.
Johnson wrote the tweet despite multiple media outlets – including The Dallas Morning News – covering the drop.
Mangrum later responded to the tweet herself.
“Bruh, national news is always going to chase the trend. Cultivate relationships with quality local news partnerships,” Mangrum wrote.
“Standing up for my colleagues and the work that we do, when I know we’re doing good and honest work, is something I pride myself on and something that I look for in my colleagues and in my workplace as well,” she told D Magazine.
The use of the word led to criticism from the mayor, and his chief of staff, in its aftermath.
“Gotta love when folks let their inherent biases show. I get to be addressed as ‘bruh’ by someone who writes for my daily local paper whom I’ve never met.🤷🏾♂️,” wrote Johnson, who also directly questioned Mangrum’s reply.
Mangrum, who is white, claimed that the executive editor at the paper, who is Black, later asked if she would use the word if Johnson was white.
She responded that she would still use the word to address the mayor.
“Bruh,” made popular in part due to memes on the defunct social media platform Vine, is defined as a word meant to “convey frustration or disappointment at something,” according to KnowYourMeme.
Dictionary.com notes that the word has ties to use in Black English and adds that it “spread as an interjection variously expressing surprise or dismay since at least the 2010s.”
D Magazine noted that Mangrum has used “bruh” toward “all sorts of accounts.”
She was fired from her role at the Dallas newspaper three days after the tweet, according to D Magazine, for violating the paper’s social media policy and said the paper didn’t tell her the section she violated in the policy.
Mangrum was fired on a day that included an earlier Dallas News Guild protest that she participated in and helped organize in February.
Mangrum, in an email to HuffPost, wrote that she is devastated to have lost her job and disappointed with management’s response despite no prior discipline.
She added that she thinks her story “is one alarming incident in a broader story of the 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 number of other complaints filed with the board in recent months.
The paper announced it would disband its Spanish-language newspaper Al Día, a move that caused its reporters – which the union noted have been “radically underpaid and overworked in recent years” – to be reassigned to different departments.
“It is just one of the many concerning events that have occurred recently, but it directly impacts critical reporters, some of whom are on visas and worry 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.
