When I read the headline, I said to myself, “Good! That Cimbalo guy has it coming, for penning that tastelessly nasty piece fantasizing about amorous encounters with ten prominent female conservative commentators.”
Imagine my surprise when I read on and discovered AOL didn’t fire Cimbalo. They fired this other guy, some liberal writer named Tommy Christopher, for trying to report on the brouhaha over the Cimbalo sleaze piece on AOL’s Politics Daily.
It was this posting, entitled Bad Bunny, which was deleted by some AOL editor, then Christopher was let go.
Caleb Howe, another writer for Politics Daily told Newsbusters:
“His coverage of the Playboy “hate f***” list must have had a lot to do with Tommy being fired, if not everything to do with it” Howe told NewsBusters. “It would be absurd to think the timing is coincidental” referring to the fact that Christopher was fired three days after his original Playboy story and only hours after pitching a new story on the same topic. Further allegations of AOL censoring coverage of the Playboy controversy came to light when Christopher and Howe appeared on Media Lizzy’s show this afternoon.
At the 74:50 mark of the show Media Lizzy (Elizabeth Blackney) claimed that her editor, Michael Kraskin, sent her an email regarding a question she submitted for the AOL Hot Seat Poll. Her original question was going to be “does Playboy empower or exploit women”. In his response email Media Lizzy claimed that Kraskin asked for a different question and said “This Playboy story is something we have internally decided not to address”. …
NewsBusters contacted Politics Daily’s editor in chief, Melinda Henneberger who both deleted Tommy Christopher’s original story and fired him, for comment but she never returned our email.
The old saying “AOL Sucks” is clearly truer than ever.
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