Via Huffington Post
by Chez Pazienza
How to Lose a Job in 13 Days?
It was the last thing I expected to wake up to, and I’m still not entirely sure how to react.
This morning, CNN U.S. President Jon Klein announced that Ed Litvak — Executive Producer of American Morning, my former supervisor, the man who fired me two weeks ago — is resigning. He’s leaving both the show and the network under circumstances which, even to the least cynical, would seem slightly suspect. The early inside line is that he’s ready to do something that doesn’t involve waking up at two in the morning, and Klein’s official eulogy does little more than pump the requisite amount of platitudinal sunshine up the ass of the soon-to-be dearly departed without really shedding any light on why Ed is out.
You’d be a fool though not to take the timing, given recent events, into account.
Last week, I wrote a column that not only described in detail my final conversations with Ed Litvak as a CNN employee — his decision to summarily terminate my employment as a producer, supposedly for maintaining a blog on my own time — but also excoriated the management of American Morning and CNN in general. I did this because I believed at the time, and still do, that the once-venerated reputation of CNN — to say nothing of its counterparts in TV news — has been insouciantly stripped away through one dubious decision after another. I came to CNN four years ago because it was, in my mind, the gold standard of television news; I left believing something else entirely, and how I left has no bearing whatsoever on the issues confronting the network at the moment.
Read the rest here.
