MEDIA WINNER: Mary Katherine Ham CNN commentator Mary Katherine Ham dropped a nuclear truth bomb on the cable news network with a Substack post she published Thursday evening revealing the reason she hasn’t been seen on-air in months. In a frank piece titled “In the Age of Quiet Quitting, I Was Quiet Suspended, And I Can’t Shut Up About It,” Ham shared how she had been subject to a “secret sentence” barring her from appearing on CNN programs for critically tweeting about the decision to bring legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin back on air. Toobin “was off air for eight months; I was off for seven,” wrote Ham. “One month was the difference between punishment for jacking off at work versus commenting on the inadvisability of jacking off at work.” With leadership changes at CNN in the wake of the Warner Bros. Discovery merger, Ham was informed of the punishment enacted by the former regime, and was shocked. She was invited back on air by new management, but, as she wrote, “I determined it was impossible for me to come back without saying why I’d been gone.” Ham’s article is brutal in its exposure of industry machinations, but it’s a precisely targeted and unquestionably fair critique. We hope to see her back on our television screens soon — if not at CNN, then undoubtedly some other savvy network will snap her up. |