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Note to CNN, Washington Post: Blame the Technology, Not Your (Former) Employees

By Catharine Taylor

Updated on: July 9, 2010 / 11:19 AM EDT / MoneyWatch

Here we go again. A major news organization has fired an employee over an opinion about something they cover that they shared over the Internets. This time, as you may have read, the victim was Octavia Nasr, CNN's senior editor of Middle East affairs, who apparently couldn't stop her Twitter finger from telling the world that she had respect for a just-passed Hezbollah leader.

This post isn't about what she said, though. That's not something for a layperson like me to interpret. It's about how news organizations need to take their employees' tweets, emails, status updates and YouTube uploads in stride. If they don't, there'll be no one left in journalism except for copy editors, whose idea of a controversy is a misplaced comma. (Ba dum bum ... )

The firing of CNN's Nasr is the second case in the last two weeks of an edit side staffer from a news organization being unceremoniously canned because digital media exists. The other was Dave Weigel, who had a blog on The Washington Post covering the conservative movement. His firing was much more egregious; he got canned over some comments he made within the confines of an email list -- mostly before he was even hired. (On a lesser note, the HuffPo is reporting that Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas has been temporarily banned from second home MSNBC because he criticized MSNBC host Joe Scarborough on his blog.)

It's not cool to call a Ron Paul follower a "Paultard" as Weigel did, nor is it the height of good judgment to think you can show respect for a Hezbollah leader -- and put your comment in context -- all in 140 characters. Both Weigel and Nasr would have been better off showing a little restraint, not because it might have saved them from being fired, but because it's too easy for comments like that to spread.

But the news organizations are also extremely misguided in thinking that in the social media age, sharing an opinion through a digital channel is a fire-able offense. The only difference between now, and decades ago, is that technology lets opinions that have always been there surface. But it also should be noted that technology also gives these people the platform to clarify their remarks -- just read Nasr's post explaining her tweet. Digital media reveals journalists to be people instead of report-bots who have no real feelings beneath the byline, and that should be OK.