A guy named Chez Pazienza who runs Deus Ex Malcontent and was until earlier this month working for CNN as a producer on American Morning got the Dooce treatment for blogging. He was called into his boss' office and told they were concerned about the fact that he was blogging online under his own name and thought that it might reflect poorly on their efforts to remain neutral. Pazienza has a personal blog and is a regular contributor to The Huffington Post along with our friends at Pajiba.
Instead of asking Pazienza to reel it in or add a disclaimer to his writing that it is in no way a reflection on his employers, his boss had a talk with him and summarily canned him the next day, giving him no severance or warning. He had been working for CNN for nearly four years and always received good reviews from his superiors.
Panziena notes that the employee handbook is vague about employee's outside writing, and has no provision for blogs or online media:
For 20 months after starting DXM, I continued to work as a producer on American Morning, one of many charged with putting together the show. During that time, I received consistently favorable reviews (while in Atlanta I was told that I was well on my way to becoming an executive producer) and, more importantly, neither my credibility nor objectivity was ever called into question. Like anyone who considers him or herself a respectable news professional, whatever my personal opinions were, they were checked at the door when I walked into work. Having grown up in a household in which the highest ideals of journalism were never more than a conversation away -- my father was an old-school investigative reporter -- I knew full well that you couldn't avoid having opinions and viewpoints, but you never let them get in the way of your journalistic responsibility
As far as CNN knew, I was a valued employee, albeit one with almost no say in the day-to-day editorial decisions on American Morning. This held true even as I began contributing columns to the Huffington Post, giving my writing more exposure than ever before.
Then, last Monday afternoon, I got a call from my boss, Ed Litvak.
Ed, seeming to channel Bill Lumburgh from Office Space, informed me of that which I was already very well aware: that my name was "attached to some, uh, 'opinionated' blog posts" circulating around the internet. I casually admitted as much and was then informed of something I didn't know: that I could be fired outright for this offense. 24 hours later, I was. During my final conversation with Ed Litvak and a representative from HR, they hammered home a single line in the CNN employee handbook which states that any writing done for a "non-CNN outlet" must be run through the network's standards and practices department. They asked if I had seen this decree. As a matter of fact I had, but only about a month previously, when I stumbled across a copy of that handbook on someone's desk and thumbed through it. I let them know exactly what I had thought when I read the rule, namely that it was staggeringly vague and couldn't possibly apply to something as innocuous as a blog. (I didn't realize until later that CNN had canned a 29-year-old intern for having the temerity to write about her work experiences -- her positive work experiences -- in a password-protected online journal a year earlier.) I told both my boss and HR representative that a network which prides itself on being so internet savvy -- or promotes itself as such, ad nauseam -- should probably specify blogging and online networking restrictions in its handbook. I said that they can't possibly expect CNN employees, en masse, to not engage in something as popular and timely as blogging if they don't make themselves perfectly clear.
My HR rep's response: "Well, as far as we know, you're the only CNN employee who's blogging under his own name."
It took self-control I didn't know I had to keep from laughing, considering that I could name five people off the top of my head who blogged without hiding their identities.
Uh-huh, as far as you know.
When I asked, just out of curiosity, who came across my blog and/or the columns in the Huffington Post, the woman from HR answered, "We have people within the company whose job is specifically to research this kind of thing in regard to employees."
Jesus, we have a Gestapo?
A few minutes later, I was off the phone and out of a job. No severance. No warning (which would've been a much smarter proposition for CNN as it would've put the ball effectively in my court and forced me to decide between my job or the blog). No nothing. Just, go away.
Right before I hung up, I asked for the "official grounds" for my dismissal, figuring the information might be important later. At first they repeated the line about not writing anything outside of CNN without permission, but HR then made a surprising comment: "It's also, you know, the nature of what you've been writing."
[From The Huffington Post]
This news came out on Monday but we just heard last night. It seems like CNN has a lot to answer for. While you could understand that they might be concerned that an employee shows any kind of bias, he wasn't on the air. What's more is that they're going to come up with these type of situations all the time. Do people who work in the media have to keep their opinions to themselves for fear of being canned for any reason? I know that in the US most employment is "at will," which means you can be fired if you look at someone the wrong way, but surely it's short-sighted to let someone go for writing their personal opinions online.
Panziena wrote an apology to the American public just last month last year for the drivel he was putting out on CNN, saying of Anna Nicole that "I'm sorry that so many supposedly venerable news organizations have elevated the all-but-inevitable self-destruction of a B-list former-stripper, Playmate, hack-actress, gold-digger, tabloid-queen, and all-around piece of human flotsam to the lofty heights of near-Shakespearian mythology." His very passionate articles make you smile and wonder how CNN could have changed if they would have worked with him to improve their quality of reporting. Instead they confirmed what he was saying all along by kicking him to the curb for daring to criticize them.
NOTE BY JAYBIRD: As I am a full-time cable news junkie -or at least I was until I became a full-time celebrity gossip junkie - Celebitchy wanted me to note a few thoughts on CNN. While they were the first big cable news network, they've really fallen from glory in the last several years. Most of their shows are generally ratings losers next to MSNBC and Fox, with a few exceptions. When the retooled their lineup a few years ago, instead of making themselves more relevant, they added Wolf Blitzer's "The Situation Room" - what felt like ten hours of flat, dull programing. It's actually just three hours, and it's interminably long. "American Morning" has generally been seen as a "launching pad" for anchors to move on to bigger and better things. One would think that being in a constant state of flux like that could make the entire staff uneasy. It's really sad that Chez Pazienza was fired, but if nothing else, by reading his blog, you can tell that he's incredibly sharp, and a savvy network will likely snatch him up pretty quickly.
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