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CNN producer axed for blogging
Posted on February 19, 2008 3:54 PM
The closer you are to the public eye, the more you have to keep some things quiet.
To readers of Chez Pazienza's Deus Ex Malcontent, their readership was the same as watching Icarus take the wax wings too far up into the skies, only to fall to earth as the symbol of Led Zeppelin's record label, Swan Song...
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.It wasn't an invite to lunch. An obscure line in CNN's employee manual gave Evil Ed and an HR robot the means to chuck Chez out of his job as one of American Morning's producers.
Then, last Monday afternoon, I got a call from my boss, Ed Litvak.
Smart move, CNN. You just freed a guy who hates what you've become, a drug dealer pushing scary stuff on the public day after day, to devote even more time to blogging.
Care to guess what kind of vitriol Chez can unleash now that he has no reason to hold back? Here's a hint...
Awhile back I was watching a great documentary on the birth of the punk scene, it closed with former Black Flag frontman and current TV host Henry Rollins saying these words: "All it takes is one person to stand up and say 'fuck this.'"Chez said there was no severance or anything other than his abrupt dismissal over the content, not the act, of his writing. He doesn't have to be nice or even circumspect now. His blog just became a must-read.