"In case you're wondering, as I did, how my punishment for tweeting about Toobin compares to Toobin's suspension for his offense...."

"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. On one hand, the people who made this call about me are gone from the network, so maybe I could let it lie. But on the other hand, many of my colleagues no doubt knew about my banning from air, but not the reasons behind it, thereby leaving the impression I must have done something tantamount to Toobining. I did not. 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.... 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...."

Writes Mary Katharine Ham, in "In the Age of Quiet Quitting, I Was Quiet Suspended, And I Can't Shut Up About It/On Toobin's wake, professionalism, and the lessons I thought we learned in #MeToo" (Substack).

"At Zucker’s Trump-baiting CNN, Stelter thrived.... But Zucker was forced to resign from the network, and a new regime under Chris Licht stepped in..."

"... with a goal of rejiggering CNN’s programming, scrubbing it of liberal political valence....Under new ownership, CNN’s parent company was in thrall to the libertarian billionaire John Malone, who said that he wanted to see 'CNN evolve back to the kind of journalism that it started with, and actually have journalists, which would be unique and refreshing.'"

Writes Clare Malone in "A TV Face of the Trump Resistance Exits/Brian Stelter, the host of the CNN show 'Reliable Sources,' which was cancelled this week, went from media chronicler to media-chronicled" (The New Yorker).

I had trouble understanding that headline because I have been using the tag "the Trump resistance" to refer Trump and his supporters as they've resisted accepting Biden's victory in the 2020 election. That includes the January 6th riot/insurrection and the investigation into it. So it took me a couple seconds to see "the Trump resistance" as meaning the resistance to Trump and not the resistance by and on behalf of Trump. That reveals how little I have bothered with the CNN eminence that was Brian Stelter. The truth is, I don't watch any TV news channels.

Back to the article. This next sentence had me almost changing course and inviting readers to participate in a sentence-diagramming contest (or just to rewrite this in as few words as possible):

"In the spring of 2020... [i]f ​ever there was a time for news organizations to educate and inform the public, this was it. Instead, Zucker apparently believed..."

"... it was the perfect time to exploit the situation for political gain and to help the network's ratings. Andrew Cuomo benefited from briefings that made him​ appear to be the adult in the room ​regarding COVID-19 and Trump ​appear to be the villain. ​Cuomo got a $5.1 million book deal as a result. Chris Cuomo and Zucker/Gollust/CNN benefited from marathon interviews with ​Cuomo's governor/brother, which didn't touch the governor's alleged nursing home scandal. Ratings soared. So, was Zucker's departure ​simply about a consensual relationship with a co-worker?... Moving forward, what's next for CNN when the company falls under the Discovery Channel umbrella later this year? Let's hear from its soon-to-be largest shareholder, John Malone of Liberty Media. 'I would like to see CNN evolve back to the kind of journalism that it started with, and actually have journalists, which would be unique and refreshing,' Malone said...."

From "CNN's collapse is now complete" by Joe Concha (at The Hill).

Let's take a quick look at the Wikipedia page of John Malone, "an American billionaire businessman, landowner and philanthropist." We're told his "political beliefs have been described as libertarian, and "he is on the board of directors for the Cato Institute." Also:

Malone reportedly shuns the limelight and glamorous lifestyle and takes his family vacations alongside long time friend Gary Biskup, in a recreational vehicle. However, in business dealings he has been dubbed "Darth Vader," a nickname allegedly given to him by Al Gore.... In 1994, Wired portrayed Malone on their cover as "Mad Max" from The Road Warrior....

Here's the "amazing Wired interview," if you want to read about the "cable wars" of the early 1990s.

"The same worlds where abuse was likely to have been taken seriously and codified during the rise of Me Too—cloistered, rivalrous, impossibly competitive, liberal-leaning zones like television networks, academia, and Democratic politics..."

"... are now the worlds in which the accusations are most easily weaponized by power players seeking an advantage. Zucker may be the most recent example, but he’s certainly not alone....  It is only by dint of the world taking sexual misconduct so seriously that it has become something to be cynically exploited, ironically enough. The Zucker affair is starkly similar to this month’s scandal at the University of Michigan. It was another situation where an affair—between the university’s president, Mark Schlissel, and an employee—was consensual, but the power dynamic made it against policy... [T]he people who actually seem most likely to turn Me Too into a targeted weapon are those who already have power, or are actively seeking it. 'It’s like the ending of Reservoir Dogs,' one TV executive said of the Zucker/Cuomo situation to Vanity Fair’s Pompeo, citing a movie that was distributed by Harvey Weinstein. Everyone leaving one another splayed out, riddled with millions of dollars’ worth of lawsuit settlements and exit payments."

From "Did Jeff Zucker and Chris Cuomo Make Me Too a Weapon in Their Power Struggle? The former CNN executive’s workplace romance sure doesn’t seem like the real reason he’s resigning" by Noreen Malone (Slate). 

Doesn't that seem as though she's saying that, in retrospect, the Me Too movement was a mistake, that instead of elevating the subordinated, it's made the powerful more intensely and chaotically powerful?

Isn't that what feminist theory would predict — that the patriarchy will endlessly reinforce the patriarchy? To expect anything else is naive feminism. For sophisticated feminism, it's vindication.

Everyone in the office knew? Fire everyone!

That was my out-loud outburst when I read: "'The network needs to step up and fire Brian Stelter,' the CNN insider told DailyMail.com. 'He is allegedly our top media reporter - yet he failed to report on the scoop that everyone in the office knew. And if he wants to say he didn't know, he is truly terrible at his job.'"

That's in "CNN insider says network 'needs to step up and fire Brian Stelter' for not exposing Jeff Zucker affair: report/The network employee said Stelter's 'been sitting on his moral high horse doing Jeff's biddling'" (Fox News).

One suspects that no one reported it because no one perceived it as wrong... wrong enough.  But it was against the rules. Zucker, resigning, said: "I was required to disclose it when it began but I didn’t. I was wrong."

The top comment over at Fox is: "Zucker's relationship was no secret and was not the reason he was fired. It was an excuse to fire him after programming an 80% decline in viewership in one year. There is accountability when you work for a public company."

An interesting take on accountability, firing a person for a fake reason. If the reason given is fake, not only is CNN allowing him to evade public responsibility for his degradation of the substance of what was actually televised on CNN, but it is raising expectations that CNN is serious about the sex rule Zucker flouted. And now they're going to have to keep enforcing it, including retrospectively.