Back when Donald Trump was a washed-up businessman, with a checkered history of bankruptcies, racism and failed real estate projects, it was Jeff Zucker, then the president of NBC Entertainment, who decided to resurrect him from the ash heap of history and reinvent him. He became the ‘brilliant’ billionaire host of The Apprentice, his confident bluster made him a natural on television.
The rise of Donald Trump had begun.
“The show was built as a virtually nonstop advertisement for the Trump empire and lifestyle,” Washington Post journalists Marc Fisher and Michael Kranish wrote in their 2016 book, “Trump Revealed.”
Zucker created Trump the TV sensation, which was the necessary foundation for Trump the candidate. Years later, after moving from NBC to CNN, Zucker recollected very well that Trump was a self-proclaimed “ratings machine”
Then, a decade later, it was Zucker, then the head of CNN, who did more than any other network to turn his celebrity creation into a president.
Time for a little walk down memory lane. Recall, it was CNN under Zucker, not Fox News, that replaced qualified conservative commentators on air, not just with Trump sycophants, but with Trump sycophants whom Trump himself had suggested the network hire.
Zucker hired not only Trump’s nominee, Jeffrey Lord, but also his future press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, from total obscurity. In 2016, CNN hired Corey Lewandowski to be a political commentator shortly after he’d been fired as Trump’s campaign manager.
Lewandowski was hired to talk politics – when he was still collecting severance from Trump and had signed a contract prohibiting him from disparaging Trump! Even worse: in 2019, after being accused of sexual assault and boasting that he has “no obligation to be honest with the media”, CNN put him back on air.
CNN infamously took Trump’s campaign speeches live, sometimes going so far as to broadcast images of an empty lectern with embarrassing chyrons such as “Breaking News: Standing By for Trump to Speak.” You can’t buy that kind of media.
The same motivation cropped up in 2020, early in the pandemic, when CNN’s prime-time star Chris Cuomo was driving audience numbers via his cozy chats with his older brother, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. That was an unwise break with the policy that had been in place since the younger Cuomo arrived from ABC News: He would not be allowed to cover his politician brother.
But, again, how could Zucker say no to those ratings?
However, it’s important to be reminded that many news outlets also said no to journalistic ethics, and trust in news media became but a dump in the dustbin of history. When Trump became the Republican nominee for president and started trashing Zucker’s network and staff with invective about its “fake news,” it was too late for second thoughts. By then, the standard had been set.
Every Trump utterance became breaking news, and CNN, like many other news organizations, never figured out how to responsibly cover Trump throughout his democracy-damaging presidency.
Jeff Zucker’s ill-advised decisions about Cuomo and Trump have only backfired.
Compiled from news stories and opinion pieces at:
Washington Examiner Washington Post The Guardian
Too Much, Too Little, Too Late / Johnny Mathis and Deniece Williams