On Tuesday, comedian Kathy Griffin published a photo of herself holding a pretend replica of Donald Trump’s head as if it had just been severed. It was a graphic image that seemed to endorse extreme political violence, and it was roundly condemned. Griffin has for several years co-hosted CNN’s New Year’s Eve coverage, but the network announced Wednesday that she’s been canned:

CNN has terminated our agreement with Kathy Griffin to appear on our New Year's Eve program.

— CNN Communications (@CNNPR) May 31, 2017

While understandable, the move could set a dangerous precedent for CNN, which has now established firing as an appropriate punishment for promoting one’s own interests by acting like an ass in public.

What do they do now if—hypothetically—one of their ostensibly objective campaign analysts, who’s been on their network for weeks defending every idiotic utterance of the most embarrassing presidential candidate in American history, turns out to have been getting paid by that same candidate the whole time? What if two of CNN’s contributors were to create new careers for themselves by doing things like insisting that there’s no way to know whether admitted serial groper Donald Trump had ever groped a woman? What if one of those same contributors later went on to claim that Trump is “the Martin Luther King of health care”? And what would the network do with a climate change denier who compared the Paris Agreement to the appeasement of Hitler? There should be a lot of soul-searching happening down at CNN headquarters Wednesday night, it seems like.

• CNN

（作者：汽车音响）