Conservative CNN analyst Mary Katharine Ham lashed out at her employer in a series of stinging tweets and Substack post meant to expose their ludicrous standards of coverage and double standards. Ham was quietly suspended a while back by CNN when since-fired CEO Jeff Zucker took issue with her commenting on the also-fired Jeffrey Toobin’s onanism scandal.
Writing on her Substack, here is how Ham summed up her suspension for merely addressing Toobin’s situation:
In case you’re wondering, as I did, how my punishment for tweeting about Toobin compares to Toobin’s suspension for his offense, I can tell you,” Ham said. “He was off air for eight months; I was off for seven. One month was the difference between punishment for [j******] off at work versus commenting on the inadvisability of [j******] off at work.
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Is she wrong? Obviously, CNN and Toobin went way back, and so his utterly embarrassing and disgraceful conduct was something they wished to just brush under the rug. At the time, CNN was also facing severe pressure to deal with several sex scandals relating to Chris Cuomo’s behavior as well as other producers being busted for gross and illegal behaviors.
Even more outrageous is the idea that Ham was kept in the dark on the entire thing, only just recently learning about her suspension at all. She claims no one ever actually addressed her Toobin remarks with her.
I was never informed of my punishment until it was rescinded recently by new management. No one called me or my representation about it. There was no announcement of a suspension, or notification of in-house disciplinary action, which I would have preferred, even welcomed by comparison to serving a secret sentence.
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Ham continued, suggesting her suspension came from the top of CNN’s hierarchy.
“I was told it was Jeff Zucker, now gone, who put this order in place and a deputy, also gone, who kept it there,” she said. “I was also told I wasn’t informed of the network’s displeasure because I had just had a baby and someone in the old leadership thought I might be a ‘loose cannon.’ Not as loose as Toobin’s, but I digress.”
“On one hand, the people who made this call about me are gone from the network, so maybe I could let it lie. But on the other hand, many of my colleagues no doubt knew about my banning from air, but not the reasons behind it, thereby leaving the impression I must have done something tantamount to Toobining. I did not,” Ham continued.
Conservative Brief recounted how a seemingly innocuous exchange – by cesspool Twitter standards, at least – ended with Ham wondering if she would ever go on air with CNN again.
It started on Twitter when she suggested that the [2017] shooting of a Republican Congressman during practice for a Congressional baseball game did not get the coverage it deserved on the network.
“I lived a block from the baseball field. Under 48 hours, the news vans were gone. I was on TV, live from the baseball field where they played the game a day later, after almost being canceled by mass murder, but my topic was ‘Mike Pence reportedly hired a lawyer,’” she said.
Ham pointed out that the media wasn’t interested in covering a Bernie Sanders guy unloading on Republicans and suggested the media’s coverage would have been drastically different if the politics of the shooter and victims were reversed.
Picking up from there, Conservative Brief continued:
That was when another CNN talent, Andrew Kaczynski, showed a photo of her reporting on the shooting for CNN.
“It looks you discussed the baseball game?” he said.
She responded by saying “Got jack to say about Cuomo and Toobin, but gotta fact-check me when he’s got nothing.”
In her piece she claimed that she was punished for mentioning Toobin in that tweet.