---
title: "CNN Producer Fired for His Blog – A Growing Discontent for Mainstream Media"
date: 2008-02-24
description: "$( document ).ready(function() { // Handler for .ready() called. $("
canonical_url: https://idratherbewriting.com/2008/02/24/cnn-producer-fired-for-his-blog-my-thoughts-on-corporate-blogging-policies/
---
# CNN Producer Fired for His Blog – A Growing Discontent for Mainstream Media
Chez Pazienza, a [CNN](http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/american.morning/) producer, was fired a week ago because of the strong views he expressed on his blog. When I first heard about this, I assumed he'd been writing crazy, off-the-wall posts or posting rumors and gossip about colleagues or revealing confidential company information. But really, he's an intelligent, polished writer who felt that mainstream media was losing its fire, succumbing to shareholder-encouraged stories and shying away from the real stories. He found blogging to be an outlet to pursue real issues and express his voice.

Here's Chez's post where he tells the full story of his firing: [Say What You Will (Requiem for a TV News Career).](http://www.deusexmalcontent.com/2008/02/say-what-you-will-requiem-for-tv-news.html) It's a really interesting, moving essay -- not just explaining why he was fired, but expressing the growing discontent he'd been feeling with mainstream media. 

Here are some excerpts from Chez's essay:

> ... Over the past several years though, something has changed. Drastically. And I'm not sure whether it's me, or television news, or both.... the profession I once loved and felt honored to be a part of has lost its way. [By the way, at a South by Southwest conference Dan Rather also [echoed a similar refrain](https://idratherbewriting.com/2007/03/16/dan-rather-podcast-from-south-by-southwest-journalism-needs-a-spine-transplant-it-has-lost-its-guts/), accusing journalism of "losing its spine."]
> I say this with the knowledge of implied complicity: I continued to draw a salary from stations at the local level and national networks long after I had noticed an unsettling trend in which real news was being regularly abandoned in favor of, well, crap. I may not have drank the Kool-aid, but I did take the money. I may have been uncomfortable with a lot of what I was putting on the air, but I was comfortable in the life that it provided me. I just figured, screw it, most people don't like their jobs; shut up and do what you're told, or at least try to.
> ...TV news wasn't the least bit fulfilling anymore, and I either needed to get out of it once and for all or find an outlet for my nascent iconoclastic tendencies.
> ...During this time, I still didn't consider telling my superiors at CNN [that I was blogging] on the side, simply because, having never been provided with an employee handbook, I hadn't seen a pertinent rule and never signed any agreement stipulating that I wouldn't write on my own time. I hadn't divulged my place of work and wasn't writing about what went on at the office. The views expressed on my blog, Deus Ex Malcontent, were mine and mine alone. I represented no one but myself, and I didn't make a dime doing it.
> ...Like anyone who considers him or herself a respectable news professional, whatever my personal opinions were, they were checked at the door when I walked into work.
> ...Right before I hung up [on the phone with my boss], I asked for the "official grounds" for my dismissal, figuring the information might be important later. At first they repeated the line about not writing anything outside of CNN without permission, but HR then made a surprising comment: "It's also, you know, the nature of what you've been writing."
> ...I'm dead sure though that my superiors never concerned themselves with my ability or inability to remain objective at work, given my strong opinions; they worried only about an *appearance* of bias (specifically, a liberal bias), and apparently they worried about it more than any potential fallout from firing a popular blogger with an audience that was already large and was sure to grow much larger when news of his firing put him in the national spotlight.
> ...CNN fired me, and did it without even a thought to the power that I might wield as an average person with a brain, a computer, and an audience. The mainstream media doesn't believe that new media can embarrass them, hurt them or generally hold them accountable in any way, and they've never been more wrong.