What gets you fired — or celebrated — on cable news?

Matthew Dowd got fired last week, within hours of the political analyst’s suggesting on MSNBC that maybe there was some connection between Charlie Kirk’s murder and his divisive rhetoric.

Here’s what the political analyst said, in part: “I always go back to, hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions … And that’s the unfortunate environment we’re in.” He had referred to Kirk, the far-right provocateur who had been shot to death that day in Utah, as one of the most “divisive younger figures … who is constantly sort of pushing this sort of hate speech … aimed at certain groups.”

I’m not sure why the cable network, which is supposedly progressive, found the need to ditch Dowd over that, though they made explanations about inappropriateness and insensitivity. And Dowd himself publicly copped to that; but he was tossed overboard before the end of the day.

The analyst’s comments needed no fact-checking, since Kirk was indeed famous for saying demeaning things about Black people, trans people, Muslims, women, immigrants and others.

Just one example of many: “We need to have a Nuremberg-style trial for every gender-affirming clinic doctor. We need it immediately.” Here’s another: “Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America.” And one more: “Happening all the time in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact. It’s happening more and more.” He also said that if the situation arose, he would force his 10-year-old daughter to carry a fetus to term if she had been raped, and he told Taylor Swift to submit to her soon-to-be husband, counseling her that she’s “not in charge.” Here’s a fuller list.

Was it “too soon” — in the familiar phrase — for Matthew Dowd to say, in essence, “live by the sword, die by the sword”? Maybe so, but he was on the air, after all, trying to make sense of what had happened; which, as it turned out, he did. Call it a misjudgment, given the timing, but hardly a firing offense.

Seems to me that MSNBC brass, even if they had authentic reservations and were under attack from the vociferous right (and perhaps from advertisers), could have ridden this out without offering Dowd’s hide to the critics. Maybe they even could have recalled what Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee did when the Post was under vicious criticism for one errant piece of their overall stellar Watergate reporting.

As Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein would tell it later, Bradlee was upset about their “stupid, rookie mistake,” at a time when “the stakes were enormous,” but after interrogating the reporters, he didn’t fire them or take them off the story. Quite the contrary: “He spun in his chair, put paper in his old manual typewriter and began to type. After a few false starts, he issued his statement: ‘We stand by our story.’” Here’s a gift version of the Post reporters’ retelling, written shortly after Bradlee’s death.

Or maybe MSNBC could have simply done nothing, except for a word of caution behind the scenes with Dowd, and waited for the outrage to simmer down.

Over on Fox, around the same time, host Jesse Watters was saying much more outrageous stuff, and getting away with it. To wit: “We’re gonna avenge Charlie’s death.” This assumed that Kirk had been killed because of “the radical left” — even though no shooter or motive had been identified at that moment. The alleged shooter turned out to be a 22-year-old white man from Utah, an unaffiliated voter who grew up in a Republican, pro-gun family. (According to the Utah governor, a Republican, the suspect had a transgender roommate, which of course has become grist for the right-wing mill.)

Watters also said, again, seemingly pointing to Fox’s favorite villains — the elite media and other supposed forces of evil: “Everybody’s accountable. And we’re watching … the politicians, the media and all these rats out there.”

So it’s okay for a pundit to vow revenge on supposed political enemies. But not okay for one to point out that, in a polarized environment, hateful words can lead to hateful actions.

It made me think, too, of CNN’s Trump-defending commentator, Scott Jennings, who shortly after President Jimmy Carter’s death last year ripped into his legacy. He called Carter “a terrible president,” with a “huge ego,” and “even a worse ex-president because of his meddling in U.S. foreign policy, because of his saddling up to dictators around the world, because of his vehement views, anti-Israel views, and more than dabbling in anti-semitism over the years.”

CNN kept him on, despite widespread criticism, and a few days ago, Jennings opined that he’s “not sure it’s safe to be an outspoken conservative anymore.”

It turns out, though, that Fox News does have its limits — mild ones for extreme offenses — since talking head Brian Kilmeade went on the air Sunday morning to apologize for his shocking callousness in advocating “involuntary lethal injections” for homeless people. He had added: “Just kill them.”

Jennings, Watters, and Kilmeade keep their cable-news jobs and continue to be touted as some of the major voices of their networks. On cable, where grievance and outrage rule the day, outrageousness is seldom punished — at most, there is a slap on the wrist. But when it is punished, as with Dowd’s firing, you can be sure that the skill of the right at “working the refs” is a factor.

Those not officially on the right — especially in corporate media and Big Journalism — are often in a defensive crouch, trying to prove how fair and neutral and inclusive they are. Thus, the eulogizing of Charlie Kirk that we’ve seen almost everywhere this week.

Readers, what’s your view of how the media has handled this? What did you think, for example, of Ezra Klein writing in the New York Times that “Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way”?

And where do you think we go from here?

As always, I appreciate your comments, and read them with interest. And I’m grateful for your support. Thank you very much.

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My background: I am a Lackawanna, NY native who started my career as a summer intern at the Buffalo News, my hometown daily. After years as a reporter and editor, I was named the paper’s first woman editor in chief in 1999, and ran the 200-person newsroom for almost 13 years. Starting in 2012, I served as the first woman “public editor” of the New York Times — an internal media critic and reader representative — and later was the media columnist for the Washington Post. These days, I write here on Substack, as well as for the Guardian US, and teach an ethics course at Columbia Journalism School. I’ve also written two books and won a few awards, including three for defending First Amendment principles.

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