For full disclosure, before this rant gets well underway, Mary Katharine Ham is a friend of mine, a colleague, and a fellow contributor here at Hot Air for a significant period of time. Don’t doubt for a moment that that has something to do with the anger I felt last night after reading MK’s Substack about her secret suspension, which John covered well last night.

I, however, feel the need to add a few more points — and will try to keep my sense of humor about it, if I can.

In the first place, the suspension — secret or not — for criticizing Jeffrey Toobin obliquely in a Twitter thread is itself ridiculous. Normally, as MK acknowledges, there is an unwritten rule about criticizing one’s colleagues publicly in any organization, especially those in the media/entertainment sphere where critics aplenty abound anyway. That’s a good rule and it’s meant to keep teamwork flowing even in a crisis moment. However, this wasn’t much of a criticism — a single reference with implied criticism on Twitter, for Pete’s sake — and hardly the stuff of long suspensions.

Moreover, CNN was using MK as their go-to analyst for all things #MeToo at the time, which made Toobin part of her beat whether it embarrassed CNN or not:

In the #MeToo era, I have been asked to make public comment on basically every errant penis in the media, government, sports, and entertainment worlds, sometimes to the exclusion of everything else in the news, and at the expense of some amount of professional dignity. It is ironic that in shining a light on bad behavior, which is the right thing to do, you’re still a woman on TV talking about penises. Every professional woman in a green room, preparing to talk about Weinstein’s penchant for potted plants for the 17th time, knows this feeling. Nonetheless, speaking up remains the right thing to do, and I flatly reject the notion, then and now, that Toobin’s flagrantly errant member is the one I am not allowed to talk about— that this is the one offense about which I should be silent. I also reject the idea I’m to be quiet about being punished over it.

It goes well beyond the hypocritical for CNN to put MK out in front of their #MeToo coverage and then tell her she can’t talk about The Penis Inside The House. That’s especially true after CNN itself made it very publicly clear that Toobin’s masturbation while on camera on a conference call was unacceptable. If the company felt the need to publicly shame Toobin — instead of firing him outright — why was MK’s oblique reference to Toobin in a Twitter spat actionable at all?

But even that isn’t what angered me in this account. I have managed people for at least twenty years of my adult life in one form or another. (And hey, I’m back at it now, too!) Never in all my life have I ever, ever heard of a secret suspension, not even for contractors, let alone employees. It sounds like something out of Animal House, where Jeff Zucker and his team play Dean Vernon Wormer and Greg Marmalard (with apologies to the fine actors John Vernon and James Daughton in those roles):

I’ve certainly seen some poor management decisions on discipline, in both directions. Those are always open for critique and dissent. This, however, amazed and disgusted me:

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.

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. …

I was told it was Jeff Zucker, now gone, who put this 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.

Imagine how gutless a manager or executive has to be to suspend someone and never even tell the employee of the punishment. Put aside that such an action flies in the face of normal corporate discipline processes, which almost always require some sort of coaching or performance-plan meeting for such a step. The necessity of actually pointing out the alleged error or violation to the employee is likely so assumed in these processes that it would be almost silly to make it a formal step.

In Zucker’s regime, however, MK’s offense was so great that she couldn’t be let on the air … but not enough to call her up to discuss the offense in the first place. This is at the same time while Zucker had his girlfriend reporting directly to him at CNN and was cooking coverage for Andrew Cuomo. This was hardly a management figure who had credibility on ethics issues in the first place, of course, especially on something so minor as a single oblique reference to a disgraced colleague who should have been fired up front.

It’s the sheer gutlessness of it that astounds me. If an employee commits an error and especially an offense, the first duty of management is to address it with the employee. That allows the employee to at least know that an alleged error or offense occurred and that their employer is unhappy about it. That gives the employee the dignity of directly facing the conflict and an opportunity to be heard about it. All that takes is the smallest modicum of intestinal fortitude by the managers involved to inform the employee and get that process rolling.

CNN didn’t just rob MK of that opportunity. They robbed her of her dignity as an employee/contractor, and as a person. And they did so because the man at the top was a gutless coward who (rightly) feared MK’s strength and power.

And it’s not just the gutlessness of Zucker, but also of his team who had to have known about MK’s double-secret suspension and never said a word to her about it. Every single person in that chain should be ashamed of themselves as managers and executives, and this should follow all of them around to whatever positions they get in the future. None of them should ever be put in charge of personnel again, and every single one of them owes MK a public apology.