In a Substack post on Thursday, conservative CNN contributor Mary Katharine Ham alleged that former CNN president Jeff Zucker quietly suspended her for publicly criticizing the network’s embrace of legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin after he had been caught masturbating during a company Zoom meeting.
“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,” wrote Ham.
She had no idea that CNN under Jeff Zucker’s leadership issued a quiet suspension against her until new leadership informed her. The suspension reportedly stemmed specifically from her comments about Toobin.
Rather, I’m told, “when it got to the comments about Jeffrey Toobin…everyone wanted a bit of a breather.”
Well, everyone but me, who had no idea there was a breather in effect. I was never informed of my punishment until it was rescinded recently by new management.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.
Toobin was suspended from CNN for just eight months, just one month more than Mary Katharine Ham allegedly was for criticizing his Zoom offense.