CNN Editor Fired Over Tweet Praising Hezbollah Mentor

It took less than 140 characters for Octavia Nasr to end her 20-year career with CNN. And those characters weren't anything along the lines of "I quit." Slate reports that,

the senior editor for Middle Eastern affairs tweeted about how she respected Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, who died on Sunday. Fadlallah supported suicide bombings against Israel and was a critic of both Israel and the United States. Nasr apologized for the tweet and even wrote a blog post on Tuesday night about the issue. In it, she wrote that when she tweeted about respecting the cleric, she was referring to his attitude toward women's rights: Fadlallah gave women the right to hit their husbands if they were attacked first. "Not the kind of life to be commenting about in a brief tweet," Nasr wrote on her blog. "It's something I deeply regret." By Wednesday she was unemployed. In a leaked internal memo, Parida Khosravi, the senior vice president for CNN International Newsgathering, wrote, "At this point, we believe that [Nasr's] credibility in her position as senior editor for Middle Eastern affairs has been compromised going forward," according to New York magazine's Daily Intel blog.

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