NEW YORK – CNN has banned conservative writer Ryan Gidursky from the network after he told panelist Mehdi Hasan, “I hope your pager doesn't go off,” in a controversial televised exchange.

“Did you just say I should die?” Hasan said, responding to Gidursky’s apparent reference to the September attack in which pagers used by hundreds of Hezbollah members in Lebanon and Syria exploded simultaneously. The attack was widely believed to have been carried out by Israel.

Hasan and Gidursky took part in a panel discussion on “News Night” Monday night and discussed Donald Trump's rally at Madison Square Garden, where speakers made various racist comments and called Puerto Rico a “floating island of trash.” The panel discussion descended into a back-and-forth after Gidursky told Hasan, a commentator and founder of the media company Zeteo, “You have been called an anti-Semitic more than anyone else at this table.”

Host Abby Phillip said Gidursky's bleep comment was “completely out of his own pocket” and apologized. But after a commercial break he was gone.

Philip apologized to Hasan and the viewers. She said Gidursky, author of the book “They're Not Listening: How the Elites Created the National Populist Revolution,” had crossed a line.

CNN conducted a heated discussion of the Trump rally, where the racist and other demeaning remarks were a sign of escalating tensions just a week before the hard-fought and contentious Election Day that reflects the country's political and cultural circumstances Cracks appear when boiling.

Despite this fragmentation, Phillip said that “we can have conversations about what's happening in this country without resorting to the lowest … kind of discourse.”

CNN said there was “no room for racism or bigotry at CNN or on our show” and said Gidursky should not be reinstated to the network.

Gidursky responded in a post on

___

David Bauder writes about media for the AP. Follow him at http://x.com/dbauder.