This is an update to this story. All of a sudden, the editors decided that the writer’s long running columns in both the Michigan Daily and The Michigan Review were a “conflict of interest.”

Greg Piper at The College Fix has the story:

‘Michigan Daily’: We fired columnist because he mocked our ‘experiences’

The Michigan Daily is at risk of getting a reputation as the most humorless college paper in America, largely because its editors keep talking.

When Daily columnist Omar Mahmood wrote a bitingly funny satire of trigger warnings, microaggressions and institutional bias against the “left-handyd” for the University of Michigan’s conservative paper, the Review, the Daily editors suddenly decided that Mahmood’s long-running columns in both papers constituted a “conflict of interest.”

According to Mahmood, a Daily editor told him he had created a “hostile environment” and an unidentified staffer had “felt threatened” by his Review column. The Daily suspended his column and told him to choose which paper he wanted to stay with, although remaining with the Daily would require Mahmood to write an apology, he said.

Now Mahmood’s conversations with The College Fix and other outlets have drawn a sharp rebuke from the Daily in the form of an editor’s note about the situation, intended to “combat the inaccuracies that have been perpetuated about our publication”:

The way in which the author satirically mocked the experiences of fellow Daily contributors and minority communities on campus in his Review column violated our values and integrity as a publication. His actions created a conflict of interest regarding his employment with both the Daily and the Review.