No. For starters, flagging is for breaking HN rules, not for disagreeing with the content.
But to the subject of the matter, CNN was interested in him after Trump, currently the President of the United States, tweeted it. If you read r/the_donald regularly, you'd see that everyday CNN-bashing memes are published without apparent care by CNN.
The rest of your comment is a word salad. But yes, you're right, this is all based "in THEIR account of events". But we have some reason to give them some benefit of the doubt. Because as far as we know, and at this point, CNN hasn't publicly identified the Redditor, even though they, or any news org or blogger, could do so given the Redditor's status as a limited-purpose public figure and the Redditor's own posts that apparently reveal his personal details.
Remember that CNN's purported war is not with Reddit trolls, it's with President Trump. And they'd get more play out of identifying the person and republishing all of his ostensibly racist and anti-Semite comment history and arguing that Trump was careless in using a meme from such an allegedly disreputable person.
EDIT - where is that rule posted about changing titles?
> Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or exclamation points, or adding a parenthetical remark saying how great an article is. It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's important...Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait.
Their interest in him was solely because of a GIF that lampooned their organization. They then based their opinion to spare him public identification not on the basis of this GIF, but on - in their terms - taking down "ALL his offending posts" - i.e. everything this reporter deemed so - not just the GIF, over which probably no one would have threatened his personal safety. None of this deletion happened before CNN's investigation. This has the progression of a pressured attrition, not an apology, which "came after CNN's KFile identified the man". CNN then says it will hold power over him to expose him with no indication that the judgment to do so comes from where but inside CNN ... All in THEIR account of events, which expectedly would cast them in the best light on this incident