CNN stars clueless about how Jeff Zucker wrecked U.S. | Will Bunch Newsletter

How do you measure a year in a life? For me, the question posed by Broadway’s Rent is best answered by Super Bowl Sunday. I only remember so much about my first few years, but on January 15, 1967, I sat in a linoleum family room and watched the Packers win Super Bowl I on our new color console. I was seven years old. Since then, I have never once missed “the big game.”

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A TV viewer never forgets the sad glint in an anchor’s eyes reporting a great tragedy — Walter Cronkite removing his glasses to confirm that JFK had been killed, or the buildup before ABC’s Jim McKay said of 1972′s doomed Israeli Olympic athletes, “They’re all gone.” In that sense, it was a little unnerving watching a teary CNN anchor Don Lemon mist up on Friday night as he talked about a much less momentous departure — the ouster of his boss, network chief Jeff Zucker.

“The truth is we’re all heartbroken because we lost our leader here,” Lemon told CNN viewers, calling the 56-year-old Zucker — whose abrupt departure as president of CNN Worldwide was tied to his consensual affair with a top executive at the pioneering TV network — “the backbone, the glue, and the spirit of this company.” And certainly Lemon, an ex-Philly newsman elevated by Zucker as the first openly gay Black primetime anchor, had personal reasons to express his gratitude.

But Lemon was hardly alone in his public outpouring of grief during a weird national spectacle in which TV personalities who get paid millions for their steely-eyed rendering of Middle East car bombings or mass shootings in the American heartland struggled to contain their emotions over the dismissal of Zucker — who only lost his job, not his reported net worth of $60 million.

Clarissa Ward, one of the last U.S. reporters covering the chaos last summer as the Taliban retook Kabul, described Zucker as a mentor and called news of his departure “devastating.” A publication called Puck wrote that anchor and Philly native Jake Tapper “hosted a shiva-like get together at his home in Washington for bereaved colleagues.” Lemon ended his eulogy by thanking Zucker not just for what he’d done for CNN but “for what you’ve done to the whole country.”

To which the whole country responded, “Huh?”

There are many layers to the Zucker saga that one has to peel away before reaching what I see as the crux of the matter: the stunning disconnect between what really matters to the cloistered community of careerist six-figure elites who went to the same Ivy League schools and dine at the same D.C. steakhouses, and what their angry, resentful viewers actually care about. It’s clear that CNN’s on-air stars are seriously confused about the difference between a great boss — who mentored their promotion or let them cry on his shoulder in a personal crisis — and a great American.

I have no real interest in going deep on the somewhat mysterious circumstances around Zucker’s sudden departure — including his tangled web involving his reported paramour, CNN executive Allison Gollust; Gollust’s boss in her past life, ex-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, and his brother the former CNN anchor Chris Cuomo, who was ousted by the Zucker regime amid allegations of sexual misconduct. I do hope someone investigates whether these weird overlapping ties have anything to do with CNN’s fawning coverage of now-disgraced Andrew Cuomo during the worst of the pandemic. But the reality is that Zucker’s worst sins against the republic had already occurred well before 2020.

CNN was not in a particularly good place when Zucker — a one-time “boy wonder” whom critics accused of running NBC into the ground during a stint that included throwing a sinking Donald Trump the lifeline of The Apprentice — took over in January 2013. Trapped between right-wing Fox, sort-of liberal MSNBC, and a seeming lack of news in Barack Obama’s second term, Zucker’s Big Idea for saving CNN was less about reporting hard news and more about telling stories.

But Zucker’s initial vision of offering TV viewers what he called “attitude and a take” only went as far as what the world of news had to offer: a missing Malaysian jet that Zucker turned into a mini-series, a “cruise from hell” or skipping the news altogether for shows like “The History of Comedy.” Then came June 16, 2015, the day that The Donald cruised down the elevator at Trump Tower, and a nation and its media descended with him.

The drama of not knowing what this unscripted political apprentice would say next was the story, the attitude that Zucker had spent two years looking for. Soon, CNN was spurning other candidates in the 2016 race to show Trump’s plane sitting on a tarmac or running breathless chyrons like “DONALD TRUMP EXPECTED TO SPEAK ANY MINUTE” under an empty podium. Researchers found that CNN and its rivals mentioned Trump eight times as often as GOP primary runner-up Sen. Ted Cruz, and that all the airtime equaled $5.8 billion in free advertising. This was enough advertising, it turned out, to elect a president who would be impeached twice, attempt a coup to thwart the peaceful transition of power, and still threaten democracy six years later.

Zucker was the apostle to fulfill the tragically brilliant 1985 prophecy of media critic Neil Postman, who tried to warn America in Amusing Ourselves to Death that one day the values of TV entertainment would crush civic discourse. Yet CNN’s anchors only seemed to notice that their ratings, their public profile, and presumably their paychecks rose in the years when the reigns of Zucker and Trump overlapped.

Completely lost on Zucker’s acolytes was the irony of delivering such impassioned tributes to their ex-boss in the same news hour they were reporting that Trump — the monster that CNN helped create under that boss — has been destroying documents, dangling pardons for those who aided his January 6 coup attempt, and threatening a racially charged civil war.

The saddest irony is that not only did Zucker’s ratings triumph collapse the moment Trump left the White House, but that ratings can’t buy you love ... outside of the CNN newsroom anyway. Most progressives never forgave the O.J.-white-Bronco-style coverage that Trump received in 2015 and 2016, and yet the Trumpists who captured the White House after all that empty-podium coverage hate Zucker and CNN even more. They still see CNN as a bastion of out-of-touch coastal elites who look down on them with disdain — and, honestly, are they wrong? In his wake, the worst fears about Zucker’s ouster are now the same as those surrounding Trumpism: That the next guy might be even worse.

Question: How big a story is Trump’s destruction and concealing of White House documents? Is the media giving it proper framing and proper attention? — Via John Sheehan (@John16280) on Twitter

Answer: John, it ought to be a huge story. I’d note that I’m old enough to remember Rose Mary Woods (allegedly) creating the “18-minute gap” that was considered an evidence-destruction “bombshell” during Richard Nixon’s Watergate, but, heck, I’m old enough to remember Hillary’s emails. The point is that laws requiring the preservation of government records — particularly in the White House — are a vital part of an open democracy that need to be taken seriously. It’s a bit gob-smacking that the authors of the post-Watergate 1978 Presidential Records Act didn’t include real enforcement teeth — apparently never expecting a serial violator like Donald Trump. But it’s also likely that the 45th president’s shredding, burning, and hiding of documents is part of a pattern of obstruction of justice around January 6. The Justice Department must act!

On one level, the right-wing caterwauling over President Biden’s plan to keep his 2020 campaign promise and appoint the first-ever Black woman to the U.S. Supreme Court to replace retiring Justice Stephen Breyer is more than a tad ridiculous. Race or gender has always been a political factor, and rightfully so, for a High Court that only seated white men until 1967. Ronald Reagan’s 1980 pledge to name the first woman justice (Sandra Day O’Connor) is a fitting precedent. But nearly lost in the hoopla of noisy GOP complaints over “affirmative action” in Biden’s plan is the one thing that matters even more than picking a female African American: Picking the right one.

With little fanfare, there’s been some controversy among generally pro-Biden progressives over a name reportedly near, if not at, the top of his SCOTUS wish list: U.S. District Court Judge J. Michelle Childs of South Carolina. Childs, whom Biden had just nominated for a promotion to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals (now on hold because of the High Court deliberations), has a lot going for her. She has the all-in backing of her home state’s powerful Democratic Rep. James Clyburn — whom many pundits think saved Biden’s 2020 campaign from going down the tubes — and a compelling blue-collar background in contrast to Ivy League pedigree of the current Supremes. But some researchers say not so fast: Childs’ background also includes a stint with a law firm representing management in disputes with their workers, and several “tough-on-crime” rulings in criminal-justice matters that were overturned on appeal. Those aren’t automatic disqualifiers, but it’s a reminder that Biden needs to better balance the court not just on race and gender — but also against its current pro-corporate leanings. True diversity needs to include diversity of opinion.