Jeff Zucker, Trump’s Cable News Nemesis

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- On Sept. 28, Zucker got into bed at home and settled in to watch the season premiere of Saturday Night Live. It didn’t take long for the show to mention CNN, the cable news network he’s run since 2013. The opening bit featured a phone call between Rudy Giuliani (Kate McKinnon) and President Trump (Alec Baldwin) about covering up the Ukraine scandal. “Rudy, where are you right now?” Trump asked. “I’m on CNN,” Giuliani responded. Later, the show devoted a sketch to a CNN “Impeachment Town Hall.” “Good evening,” said anchor Erin Burnett (Cecily Strong). “The Democratic candidates have united together and decided to handle the impeachment the only way they know how—with a muddled, 10-person town hall debate.”

In real life, Giuliani’s wild-eyed CNN interviews, in which he’s jawboned with the likes of anchors Jake Tapper and Chris Cuomo, have been one of 2019’s most fascinating, spittle-flying sideshows. And the network’s town halls have given practically every candidate an opportunity—and some, multiple opportunities—for an extended Q&A with potential voters uninterrupted by rivals. SNL’s portrayals acknowledged the “great impact” CNN has played in a loony year in politics and its “part in the popular culture,” Zucker says a few days later in his office on the 17th floor of CNN’s new Manhattan headquarters.

The idea for the sessions can be traced to the 2016 Republican primary. At the time, critics hammered CNN and the other networks for devoting hours to Trump’s campaign rallies while denying other members of the field similar airtime. Zucker says the criticism was valid: “We were conscious of those who rightly criticized television in the last election for not spending enough time on the issues and for not digging deeper into where each candidate stood on them.”

The town hall format is simple: A candidate stands center stage inside a theater packed with potential voters while a moderator solicits questions from them about topics such as foreign policy, health care, and the economy. (CNN has also hosted a handful of topic-driven town halls in which multiple candidates debate a single issue, including climate change and LGBTQ concerns.) On March 10, South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg turned in a sharp performance at his town hall in Austin. He talked about his husband (“I married a teacher, so I married up”), spoke movingly about losing his father to cancer a few weeks earlier, and took aim at Vice President Mike Pence, the former governor of Buttigieg’s home state.

According to Nielsen Co., Buttigieg drew an average of 546,000 total viewers. In the next 24 hours, he raised over $600,000 from more than 22,200 donations. “It was a game changer for our campaign,” says communications adviser Lis Smith. “It is hard to imagine how a long-shot, unknown candidate like Pete Buttigieg could have taken off in this race without that one hour of free airtime.”

Since AT&T Inc. completed its $85 billion acquisition of CNN parent company Time Warner Inc. in 2018, the renamed Warner Media LLC has seen an exodus of top executives. Zucker not only stayed on but also expanded his role—in March he was named chairman of Warner Media News & Sports. In September, NBC News reported that Zucker was the leading candidate to become Warner Media’s next CEO, which would put him in charge of all the company’s entertainment assets, including Warner Bros., HBO, TNT, and TBS. (Zucker declined to comment on the report.) While CNN trails rival Fox News in the ratings, it continues to thrive financially. The network is on pace to exceed $1 billion in profit for the third straight year—a run of good fortune that coincides, as Zucker well knows, with Trump’s time in office. It also comes as CNN has caused the occasional self-inflicted wound, often involving Trump surrogates with dubious commitments to the truth. In September, Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s former campaign manager and a onetime CNN commentator, testified to Congress, “I have no obligation to be honest with the media.”

It feels like yesterday that Zucker was Trump’s boss. In 2004, while Zucker oversaw programming at NBC, the network began airing The Apprentice, the reality show that returned Trump to cultural prominence. As Trump dove into politics and Zucker moved to CNN, their relationship curdled because Trump wasn’t getting fawning coverage. CNN has emerged as a frequent target of the president’s haymakers against the free press.

In Zucker’s office, on a shelf filled with mementos such as a personal note from the late political analyst Tim Russert, he keeps a customized nameplate that reads “Little Jeff Zuker.” It’s drawn from one of Trump’s Twitter attacks, of course, in which he misspelled Zucker’s name. “Check out the fact that you can’t get a job at ratings challenged @CNN unless you state that you are totally anti-Trump?” he tweeted in April 2018. “Little Jeff Zuker, whose job is in jeopardy, is not having much fun lately.” In April, Trump retweeted an article from the Daily Caller knocking the ratings for CNN town halls. In October one of his lawyers sent a letter to Zucker and Randall Stephenson, the CEO of AT&T, bewailing CNN’s coverage and threatening legal action. (“Nothing more than a desperate PR stunt,” said a CNN spokesperson.)

The president’s vitriol has helped inspire everything from chants of “CNN sucks!” at political rallies to death threats against CNN journalists to a foiled plot to bomb the network. “We’ve talked to his people, but I don’t think they have any control over him,” says Zucker. “It’s because he knows it matters what CNN reports. He’s got Fox News in the bag. He doesn’t think the people who watch MSNBC are ever going to be persuadable voters. That’s why he is always obsessed with what CNN is reporting.”

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Bret Begun at bbegun@bloomberg.net, Jeremy Keehn

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