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 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, 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 sme 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.
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 – 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. 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.
via The Guardian
Why is trust in media plummeting? Just look at what’s happening at CNN
By Arwa Mahdawi / Courtesy of Guardian News & Media Ltd
