Former WMAL radio host Amber Athey told Newsmax on Wednesday she was fired over the phone after leftists claimed racism over her Twitter joke about Vice President Kamala Harris' brown suit during the State of the Union.
"[Cumulus Media executives] didn't even have the decency to do it face to face," Athey told Wednesday's "Greg Kelly Reports." "I received a phone call late in the afternoon from two corporate executives, Jeff Bowden and Kriston Fancellas, and they told me that they had been made aware of this tweet, that they had determined that it was racist, and that I was going to be terminated immediately for violating the company's social media policy."
Athey tweeted during President Joe Biden's speech March 1 that, "Kamala looks like a UPS employee – What can brown do for you? Nothing good apparently."
After she started getting backlash from the left about the joke, Athey, who is the Washington Editor for The Spectator, tweeted out her employers, thinking they would disregard the complaints for the simple joke.
While the Spectator did just that, Cumulus Media, which features several right-wing personalities like Dan Bongino, Ben Shapiro, and Mark Levin, decided the tweet was racist and let Athey go.
"I was not offered the opportunity to defend myself, and the only way that I knew how to make my voice heard, in that moment, was that I asked if I could make a parting comment for the record, which I think was probably like three or four minutes of me just being really angry and that was it," she said. "They said the last communication that I would have with the company was to get my final pay stub."
In addition to her Spectator duties, Athey was one of the co-hosts for the Washington, D.C., news talk station's 5-9 a.m. ET morning drive show, "O'Connor and Company."
She said she received support from her colleagues at the station, with some commenting on her firing on the air, and the real problem for conservatives in the media is the corporate executives.
"My friends at WMAL have been actually incredibly supportive," she said. "My former co-host Larry O'Connor was just on the program before this, and he's been speaking out on my behalf. It's actually been incredible to see.
"I think pretty much every host, at this point, has commented on the situation on their shows on the radio station. The real problem here is the corporate executives, and this is a problem across conservative media."
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