CNN’s really, really dumb messages

CNN’s Alex Marquardt sent a message to a colleague: “We gonna nail this Zachary Young mf–er.” There were no dashes in the original.

Matthew Philips, an editor at CNN, replied, “Gonna hold you to that one cowboy!”

That exchange, from November 2021, is among the mainstays of an ongoing defamation trial, Young v. CNN, playing out in a state courtroom in Bay County, on the Florida panhandle. Zachary Young, a Navy veteran and security contractor who resides in Austria, sued the network over a story about Afghans struggling to exit the country following the frenetic and controversial U.S. pullout in August 2021. Young offered his services as a contractor to assist companies with extracting their people from the upheaval — and he objected to the story’s framing, which suggested shady or illegal dealings. A chyron that ran alongside the piece read, “AFGHANS TRYING TO FLEE TALIBAN FACE BLACK MARKETS, EXORBITANT FEES, NO GUARANTEE OF SAFETY OR SUCCESS.”