Jeff Zucker Resigns
By Jeff Zucker suddenly resigned as president of CNN today, citing a secret pandemic relationship with one of his employees. So it is fitting that we look back at Ben Smith’s profile of Zucker from Campaign 2020.
In December 2015, after the demagoguery of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign became clear, I asked CNN’s president, Jeff Zucker, if he regretted his role in Mr. Trump’s rise.
First Mr. Zucker — who put “The Apprentice” on NBC in 2004 and made Mr. Trump a household name — laughed uproariously, if a bit nervously. Then he said, “I have no regrets about the part that I played in his career.”
When Mr. Trump ran for president, Mr. Zucker briefly dismissed him as a “sideshow” in an early 2015 email to his political team, according to one of its recipients. But as soon as he saw the ratings his old star could still deliver, he spent 2015 and 2016 turning CNN into a platform for his ambitions. He went so far as to turn the camera to the empty podium before Mr. Trump’s rallies (a chyron read: “DONALD TRUMP EXPECTED TO SPEAK ANY MINUTE”), while other presidential candidates seethed and suspected — accurately, it turns out — that the two men maintained a cozy back channel.
“He’s a ratings whore — and I’m telling you that as a ratings whore,” Mr. Beckman told me. “But it’s one thing to be a ratings whore in prime time and it’s another thing to be a ratings whore when it comes to news.”
Smith also mentions people who described Zucker as fully professional.
Apparently the resignation was a big surprise to everyone at CNN and, from the abruptness of the note and its appearance, to Zucker himself.