Has President Trump’s ‘Fake News’ Criticism Made a Shambles of CNN? Turmoil at the network could spell the end for CEO Jeff Zucker.by Sarah Ellison

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/07/has-trump-turned-cnn-into-a-house-of-existential-dread

After relentless attacks from Trump and his allies, a series of journalistic problems, and in the shadow of a possible merger, the network’s C.E.O., Jeff Zucker, is feeling the heat. “I think there’s a real chance that Zucker is being forced out,” said one employee. “That’s going to blow up this organization like nothing in the history of CNN.”

CNN regularly welcomes members of the Donald Trump White House to appear on New Day, its morning show. When the administration sent word last Monday evening that White House adviser Sebastian Gorka was available the following morning to discuss the retaking of Mosul from ISIS, CNN producers readied the script. New Day co-anchor Alisyn Camerota handled the interview, and spent the first portion of the conversation on the scheduled topic. But when the discussion inevitably turned to Donald Trump Jr.’s recently revealed “I love it” e-mail to the Russian attorney, Gorka had his opening to change the topic. He made CNN, and its coverage of the Russia investigation, the story. Gorka scoffed at Camerota, deriding “the amount of time you spend in desperation on a topic that has plummeted you to 13th place in viewership ranking across America.”

“More people watch Nick at Night cartoons than CNN today,” Gorka continued, before suggesting that his appearance was revenge for a long, contentious interview the previous day between Camerota’s co-host Chris Cuomo and Kellyanne Conway.They called us to offer that he come on the show,” Camerota told me, regarding her interaction with Gorka. “Why do they do that if he doesn’t think anyone watches us and that we don’t practice good journalism? It makes no sense.” The tactic nevertheless played very well with its most important audience. “Did you see Gorka?,” Trump reportedly told his advisers. “So great, I mean really, truly great.” It’s a tactic that CNN’s own anchors have grown accustomed to. “When the light goes on, to me, it’s like hearing the bell sound the beginning of a round,” Cuomo told me later. “When the show starts, it is ding ding ding, who is coming at me and with what kind of weapon today? Is it a personal insult? Is it questioning our reporting? Is it a false narrative? Is it whataboutism?”

This is the strange theater of Donald Trump’s battle with the media, often making for riveting television, and fantastic for ratings, but operating on multiple levels. It’s more than just theater, however, and CNN is at the center of it. The president has targeted the network more vocally than even The New York Times and The Washington Post, the outlets that have delivered the most harmful journalistic blows to his administration. Partly, this is because, with CNN, it’s personal. The network’s president Jeff Zucker greenlit the Apprentice back when he was running NBC, and the two were friendly before they found themselves as bitter adversaries after the election.

And for Zucker and CNN, the circus is already having dangerous consequences. Despite all his flaws and unpreparedness for office, Trump is good at one thing: throwing people off their game. His war with the media has kept him afloat politically while he and his family have been dogged by increasingly damaging information about their connections to Russia. As the Republicans’ latest stab at a health-care bill falters, and the Trump administration fails to rack up a single significant legislative achievement, the president has thrown much of his public commentary into trashing CNN. He rewards surrogates, such as Gorka and Conway, who denigrate CNN on its own airways, even as the network pays other Trump surrogates, such as Jeffrey Lord and Kayleigh McEnany, to defend the administration’s talking points. “He’s gone full war with the media, no doubt about that,” said one editor with close ties to the White House. “It is full-on full-scale warfare with CNN.”

The struggle is coming at a time when there are backstage pressures. Zucker’s bosses at Time Warner are now preparing to merge into telecom behemoth AT&T, a deal that requires regulatory approval from the Department of Justice, and a deal Trump has said he doesn’t like.

For both Zucker and CNN, the pressure is distorting. “We may look back in five years and find that CNN was fundamentally changed because of Trump,” one CNN employee told me. “Maybe it will turn out that Trump changed the brand” through his battle with the network. “We think we’re the middle. What if there is no middle anymore?” (A CNN executive told me that the network has conducted extensive research on its brand, which has “found zero diminution in the brand as a result of the attacks on us.”)

Last year, Zucker signed a long-term deal to extend his contract. “It was a relief to a lot of anchors,” the CNN employee told me. Zucker proceeded to subsequently renew a lot of those anchors’ contracts, a sign that if he were staying, they were too. So it was worrying to some in the CNN newsroom when Trump tweeted, on June 27, 2017, that “Fake News CNN is looking at big management changes.” Later that evening, Emily Smith at the New York Post reported that the “specter of a $100 million libel suit scared CNN into retracting” its story linking Trump ally Anthony Scaramucci to a Russian investment fund. In the wake of the retraction, and the resignation of the three journalists responsible for the piece, Fox News’s Sean Hannity and Trump’s elder son, Donald Trump Jr., both called for Zucker’s resignation. A few days later, Trump Sr. appeared at his first big re-election fundraiser, at the Trump Hotel in D.C., where he attacked CNN and Zucker by name. “These are really dishonest people,” he said, according to a recording of his speech that night released by the Intercept. Trump mused to the crowd about whether he should sue CNN. Then, he got personal. “Jeff Zucker, I hear he’s going to resign at some point pretty soon. I mean, these are horrible human beings.”

Some CNN staffers, who worried that this was more than the usual Trump bluster, pointed to a meeting at the White House roughly a week before the fundraiser, when Trump hosted technology and telecom C.E.O.s as part of the much-overlooked Technology Week, organized by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Seated beside Trump at the meeting was none other than AT&T C.E.O. Randall Stephenson, whose company is in the process of trying to buy Time Warner, CNN’s parent company. “I think there’s a real chance that Zucker is being forced out,” said another employee. “That’s going to blow up this organization like nothing in the history of CNN.”

Trump has complained about Zucker and CNN in front of Stephenson, but the two have never had a conversation about the Time Warner deal, Zucker, or CNN, according to a person familiar with the interactions between Stephenson and Trump. This person also added that most anyone who has been in a room with the president has heard him complain about CNN and Zucker, and Stephenson is no exception. An AT&T spokesman told me that “Randall Stephenson and President Trump have never discussed our acquisition of Time Warner, CNN, or Jeff Zucker.” But that doesn’t necessarily mean Zucker has no reason to worry. When I asked the spokesman if Stephenson had given Zucker any assurances that his job was safe should the deal go through, the spokesman said, “No, because Randall and Jeff have hardly spoken since the deal was announced.” (CBS C.E.O. Les Moonves’s recent comment that CNN, if it ever came up for sale, would “enhance” CBS, seemed to signal that there is a potential buyer if things don’t work out with AT&T.) Within Time Warner, CNN’s coverage of the Trump administration has attracted attention. A Time Warner executive told an associate that the company worried that the storm surrounding CNN’s reporting on the infamous dossier compiled by a former British intelligence officer regarding Trump’s Russian involvements could have implications for the merger.

And, in the merger, CNN may be surprisingly vulnerable. “I know the AT&T people. CNN is not why they did this deal,” said one longtime media consultant in Washington. “They would spin him off in a minute,” this person added, referring to Zucker. “They don’t care about him.” Media analysts call the proposed merger a “vertical” deal since it integrates programming and distribution into one shop. Current antitrust law doesn’t give much scrutiny to such deals, provided they do not dampen competition in the market. So it may have been harder, say for 21st Century Fox’s offer for Time Warner to get approval than for AT&T’s, according to multiple industry experts. Regarding the proposed AT&T-Time Warner deal, “I don’t think anyone with clout is opposing this deal,” the media consultant added.

But the Trump administration may change that equation. White House advisers have reportedly talked about CNN’s negative coverage as a possible strike against the deal. The Daily Caller recently reported that “the White House does not support the pending merger between CNN’s parent company Time Warner and AT&T if Jeff Zucker remains president of CNN.” In response to those reports, Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, who is the ranking member of the subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights, recently expressed her concern in a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, in which she outlined that the deal should not be “leveraged for political gain.”

Inside CNN, the attacks from Trump are consuming, especially for the anchors who are tasked with inserting skepticism into the panels that pit Trump surrogates against Democratic operatives. Zucker offered paid gigs to contributors in order to supercharge panel discussions, which are becoming ever more a feature of cable news. He hired Trump’s initial campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, shortly after he was fired, a move that stoked internal dissent among CNN staffers over the use of paid surrogates. “Jeffrey [Lord] and Kayleigh [McEnany] are symptoms of the disease,” said one CNN employee.”If those voters are anti-intellectual and not rational, I guess you could argue that we shouldn’t have those people on television, but they reflect the base.” The presence of those individuals on panels, what one rival executive called a staged “WWE match,” put pressure on the anchors to challenge the guests.

One former employee was not as generous in the assessment of CNN’s use of a certain kind of Trump surrogate on air, and suggested that the panels undercut Zucker’s posture as a newsman. “The Jeffrey Lords of CNN not only degrade the conversation, they inject falsehoods into it. They are paid to say whatever Trump wants them to say,” the former staffer told me. “It is offensive. It is not news.” The former staffer added that neither The New York Times nor The Washington Post would give a platform to such a voice. “Would they employ Corey Lewandowski or Jeffrey Lord?” A CNN executive defended the use of panels, saying that they were a trademark of CNN partly because no other network made an effort to consistently include voices from both sides of the political spectrum.

The recipe for successful television, however, may not always work so well as journalism. “They care about buzz and ratings and winning, especially under Zucker, and as many digital reporters that they have hired, they are not constructed in the same way as a print news organization,” said one former CNN staffer. CNN has recently cut ties to comedian Kathy Griffin and commentator Reza Aslan, after they both insulted President Trump in vulgar terms. Another CNN reporter and the editor of KFile, Andrew Kaczynski, was targeted by Trump surrogates and alt-right media outlets after he wrote a story on the blogger who created the video depicting Trump pummeling a CNN logo.

One former CNN staffer laid these errors at Zucker’s feet, and suggested that for the written investigative pieces that CNN has tackled under Zucker, the skill set was not right for the chosen medium. “He’s a TV news guy,” the former staffer told me. “Everyone has their formative years that define them.” Zucker has made efforts to reassure journalists and on-air talent that the mission of CNN, to conduct journalism and hold the administration accountable, has never been more clear. He took a recent trip to the D.C. bureau to reiterate to staffers that there should be no chilling effect on their reporting as a result of the attacks from the administration, according to one person who was present.

The resignation of the three CNN journalists over the Scaramucci story has raised questions about CNN’s response to the retracted story. Some commentators praised CNN for taking such decisive action after a journalistic error. Trump himself has dined out on the story for weeks. But some former CNN staffers feel that Zucker may have overreacted, and sacrificed his journalists because of the heightened attention on CNN. “There’s a morning call every day. Jeff is on it every day and on every detail that bubbles up, be it about the Pentagon or Capitol Hill,” said the former staffer, “especially on the Russia stuff. This nugget [on Scaramucci] had been percolating for several days and was put online for a while and then removed. The idea that Jeff and [other CNN news executives] didn’t know that this was out there is stunning to me,” the former staffer concluded. (A CNN executive denies that Zucker knew of the details of the story before it was published.)

One CNN staffer told me that in the reporting ranks, the war with the White House doesn’t feature in determining what to cover, and that the tension between on-air personalities and Trump surrogates plays out almost entirely on air. Cuomo bolstered that notion when he told me, “your ability to do the job is tested not by people who want to make a case. They want to undercut your ability to do that job so they don’t have to be tested.” For Cuomo, Trump “has politicized truth.”

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