Media outlets are supposed to report the news not become it. On Wednesday CNN found itself coming afoul of that rule when Jeff Zucker abruptly resigned from his position as network president amid lurid circumstances. In a memo sent to colleagues, Zucker explained he was stepping down after failing to disclose a “consensual relationship” with a close colleague. While Zucker didn’t name the colleague directly, Allison Gollust, CNN’s executive vice-president and chief marketing officer, has confirmed her involvement in a memo to employees.
Hang on a minute. Is a powerful man really resigning from a big job because he had a consensual relationship with a colleague? That’s not the usual way of things; many men have been accused of far worse transgressions and still managed to cling to power. Well here’s some context: Gollust happens to be the former communications director for disgraced former New York governor Andrew Cuomo. And Zucker’s relationship with Gollust came up during an internal investigation into former anchor Chris Cuomo, who was fired from CNN in December after using his job to help his brother, Andrew, combat sexual harassment allegations (leading some commentators to dub CNN the “Cuomo Nepotism Network”.)
Zucker stood by Chris Cuomo for months when his conflict-of-interest scandal first hit but eventually fired him a few days after the anchor was accused of sexual misconduct by a junior colleague at another network. Like his brother, it seems Chris holds a grudge. Two sources told Politico that it was Cuomo’s legal team, which is still negotiating his exit from the network, who flagged the relationship between Zucker and Gollust. A reporter from media startup Puck News has also claimed that CNN received a letter from Cuomo’s lawyers asking for all communications between Zucker, Gollust and Cuomo to be preserved.
While Zucker may not be having a very good week, Donald Trump (whose views on CNN are common knowledge) is having a ball. “Jeff Zucker, a world-class sleazebag who has headed ratings and real-news-challenged CNN for far too long, has been terminated for numerous reasons, but predominantly because CNN has lost its way with viewers,” Trump wrote in a statement.
I hate to say it, but Trump has a point. You don’t have to be a cynic to reckon that CNN’s dismal ratings may factor into Zucker’s sudden departure: CNN had record ratings during the Trump years but has seen viewership plummet recently. The Cuomo scandal certainly hasn’t helped the network’s credibility: during the early days of the pandemic Chris Cuomo repeatedly interviewed his brother on air and it was largely treated like hilarious banter instead of a clear conflict of interest. And that’s hardly been the only embarrassment the network has suffered: last year Jeffrey Toobin, CNN’s chief legal analyst exposed himself on a Zoom call with colleagues. While the New Yorker fired Toobin from his staff writer position, CNN gave him a little tap on the wrist and put him back on the air.
There are lots of brilliant, hard-working, journalists at CNN. However, Zucker has a storied history in reality TV (he green-lit The Apprentice during his time at NBC) and, under his stewardship, CNN has treated politics like entertainment. There have been several instances where the most basic journalistic principles have gone out of the window because “good TV” was more important. In 2016, for example, CNN hired Corey Lewandowski to be a political commentator shortly after he’d been fired as Trump’s campaign manager. They hired Lewandowski to talk about politics when the man was still collecting severance pay from Trump and had signed a contract prohibiting him from disparaging Trump. And it gets worse: in 2019, after being accused of sexual assault and boasting that he has “no obligation to be honest with the media”, CNN invited him back on air.
Trust in media has declined dramatically and the media can’t just blame that on people like Trump shouting “fake news”. There is a revolving door between high-profile jobs in cable news and big jobs in government: the idea that journalists and politicians are part of an overlapping “elite” with aligned interests isn’t entirely misplaced. Take Zucker’s public “feud” with Trump, for example. Rather than being sworn enemies, the two have always had a symbiotic relationship. Back in 2016 Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer, secretly recorded conversations between the two in which Zucker can be heard lavishing praise on Trump, who he refers to as “the boss”. “I have all these proposals for [Trump],” Zucker says at one point in the tapes. “Like, I want to do a weekly show with him and all this stuff.”
Now that Zucker and Trump are both out of jobs, perhaps they’ll finally put that weekly show together. In the meantime the fallout at CNN should be a wakeup call for everyone in media. Trust is hard to win and very easy to lose.
