CBS on Monday fired an executive on its legal team after she wrote on Facebook about how she did not care about the people dead in a mass shooting at a Las Vegas country music festival because they were most likely Republican and owned guns.
Hayley Geftman-Gold, a vice president in the strategic transactions department at CBS, appeared to reference the deadly shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 in a Facebook comment earlier Monday. She said she had little faith that Congress would act on gun-control legislation because Republicans didn’t support a background-check bill following that shooting, in which 20 children were killed.
She also wrote that she did not feel sympathetic to the 58 people who died in the shooting in Las Vegas on Sunday because, she said, country music fans are often Republicans and own guns.
“If they wouldn’t do anything when children were murdered I have no hope that the Repugs will ever do the right thing,” she wrote. “I’m actually not even sympathetic bc country music fans often are republican gun toters.”
CBS announced in a statement that it had fired Geftman-Gold, who had made her Twitter account private by midday.
“This individual, who was with us for approximately one year, violated the standards of our company, and is no longer an employee of CBS,” a representative said. “Her views as expressed on social media are deeply unacceptable to all of us at CBS. Our hearts go out to the victims in Las Vegas and their families.”
Geftman-Gold’s comments sparked widespread condemnation. They also quickly became a talking point on the right, as many commentators and pundits used her words as an example of media bias against Republicans and gun owners.
In a rant against politicizing shootings, the Fox News host Sean Hannity mentioned the executive’s departure to his radio audience. The story got top billing on Fox News’ website and the far-right news site Breitbart.
Geftman-Gold did not respond to Business Insider’s request for comment.
