While the rest of CNN pretended to be shocked that Jeff Zucker carried on an affair with the network’s EVP and CMO Allison Gollust, a plucky handful openly lamented the news of their (now former) boss’s rushed resignation.
“This was an incredible loss,” anchor Alisyn Camerota said on air. “Jeff is a remarkable person and an incredible leader. He has this uncanny ability to make every one of us feel special and valuable. It is so regrettable how it happened. These are two consenting adults who are both executives, that they can’t have a private relationship? It feels wrong.”
Well, it’s interesting that Camerota, a former Fox News anchor who has refused to shut up about how much she loathes her onetime employer, doesn’t understand how clandestine workplace sexual favors introduce perverse incentive structures. To put it in a more crass way, screwing your boss screws over the rest of your colleagues.
Since Camerota clearly doesn’t remember her own ordeal with the late sex pest Roger Ailes, here’s the idiot’s guide to why sleeping with a subordinate is bad.
For starters, subordinates secretly offering sex to a superior or a superior secretly soliciting sex from a subordinate distorts the playing field in the workplace. A legitimate workplace relationship operates with the assumption that internal conflicts of interest must be set aside to avoid an appearance of impropriety. But even a supposedly consensual affair like Gollust’s allows the Zuckers of the world to pass over women who don’t offer the same sexual favors. Just as producers like Harvey Weinstein could ruin actresses’ careers when they refused him and others didn’t, the presence of transactional sex in any workplace rigs the game against those who refuse to play it.
Of course, all of this ignores the layers upon layers of professional and journalistic conflicts of interest involved in an affair in a national newsroom, as well as the resultant occasions for blackmail. In CNN’s case, it’s like a Russian nesting doll of creepy behavior. Chris Cuomo was ethically and journalistically compromised because he was helping cover for his brother Andrew’s alleged sexual misconduct. Zucker, in turn, was ethically and journalistically compromised because he was helping to cover for Chris’s alleged sexual misconduct.
And of course, the only reason Zucker had an investment here was that Chris knew about the Gollust affair, which he evidently did reveal upon his final exit from CNN. To borrow a term CNN hasn’t been able to shut up about for the last five years, I believe the term for that is kompromat.
