CNN CEO Jeff Zucker conceded in a recent interview that his network has traditionally leaned to the left.
The cable news mogul’s remarks appeared in a Wall Street Journal report detailing the ratings boom that CNN has enjoyed since the start of 2016 presidential election. Zucker mused that there is much more to be gained by playing it down the middle with news coverage, as opposed to skewing to the left or right.
In the past, he conceded, CNN has strayed to the left.
“I think it was a legitimate criticism of CNN that it was a little too liberal,” he said.
Since the start of the 2016 election, CNN’s audience has nearly tripled in size, which is due largely to its wall-to-wall coverage of billionaire businessman Donald Trump.
Its current ratings put it just behind Fox News, the cable news leaders, and way ahead of MSNBC, according to the Journal.
Though Trump has proved a ratings bonanza for newsrooms everywhere, few have followed his campaign as closely as Zucker’s network.
CNN’s coverage of the casino tycoon’s campaign has come at the expense of the other 2016 candidates, who have struggled to get the kind of media attention that Trump has enjoyed, according to Internet Archive data rounded up by the GDELT Project.
However, Zucker maintains CNN isn’t giving Trump an inordinate amount of coverage, and he said they’re not just chasing ratings. He claims they’re covering him as they would any presidential front-runner.
“We are covering the story, and he’s been the Republican front-runner for almost a year now,” Zucker told the Guardian last month. “I only wish that CNN had that much power to be able to create a front-runner on either side.”
He explained later in his talk with the Journal that CNN’s ratings boost isn’t just because the network follows Trump’s every move, but because those at the top have also realigned the network so that it doesn’t take as much as an ideological position with the news of the day.
“We have added many more middle-of-the-road conservative voices to an already strong stable of liberal voices. And I think that we are a much more-balanced network and, as a result, a much more inviting network to a segment of the audience that might not have otherwise been willing to come here,” Zucker said.
In response to the Journal report, and as a direct jab at CNN’s newfound ratings success, Fox News released a statement that read, “A spokesperson for Fox News released the following statement in response, saying, “It only took them 35 years to realize there’s actually another point of view in this country.”
