Ham brings the hammer

I've been an admirer of Mary Katharine Ham's work for more than a decade, whether it was her writings at various conservative publications or commentary on cable TV news channels (first Fox News, then CNN). She possesses a razor sharp wit with substantive insights to match. I also admired the inspirational strength she displayed in losing her husband Jake (while pregnant with their second child) in 2015 and was deliriously happy for her when she found love again a few years later, culminating in a March 2020 wedding to current husband Steve. 

With all that said, I was incensed on her behalf when reading her Substack piece about how she was "suspended" from her duties as CNN commentator without ever being informed as to why.....until the network was under new management. 

It came to my attention in July that I had been punished under old CNN leadership— kept off air since January— for tweeting about Jeffrey Toobin in a Twitter dust-up with Andrew Kaczynski (another CNN employee) regarding our network's coverage of the 2017 Congressional baseball shooting.

You can read about that Twitter fight, here, which — although it got heated and brought in ugly trolling from others — remained basically above board between Kaczynski and me and resulted in no bad blood, as far as I knew, and as I assessed in an after-action debrief over private messages. I suppose some might reasonably conclude that critiquing CNN's coverage in a factual and calm tweet, or arguing with Kaczynski, could have spurred some disciplinary action, as it violates the rule against “shooting inside the tent” among colleagues. But it turns out that didn’t do me in. Rather, I’m told, “when it got to the comments about Jeffrey Toobin…everyone wanted a bit of a breather.”

If you'll recall, Toobin, who was CNN's top legal contributor, was suspended for...ahem....."interrogating his little witness" while on a Zoom meeting with colleagues from his fulltime gig at The New Yorker. However, he was brought back to CNN less than a year later, a development which Ham herself noticed. 

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. He was off air for eight months; I was off for seven. One month was the difference between punishment for jacking off at work versus commenting on the inadvisability of jacking off at work.

It's pretty obvious why CNN was hesitant to tell MK she had been suspended. She no doubt would have used her platform to point out this gross injustice, the kind of publicity that the floundering network certainly didn't desire. So when Ham was finally cued in on why she wasn't informed about the suspension she had no idea she was under, the rationale was left wanting. 

 

I was told it was Jeff Zucker, now gone, who put (the suspension) order in place and a deputy, also gone, who kept it there. 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.

(Look, if you’re gonna tell a grown-ass woman her former bosses thought her postpartum state made it problematic to inform her of routine information about her employment, she is entitled to the occasional penis pun.)

Nothing like a self-proclaimed "progressive" network not sharing bad news with a woman out of fear she might display stereotypical female emotions. 

As MK also chronicled in this piece, it's rather ironic that CNN was all too willing to have her come on and discuss the reckoning of the many big name perpetrators in the #MeToo fallout, yet she was banished the millisecond she called out a prominent offender within the network's own camp.

The old bosses at CNN certainly didn't deserve Mary Katharine Ham anyways. Here's hoping the new brass has earned her invaluable service. 

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