While former President Donald Trump and former CNN President Jeff Zucker may be at odds today when it comes to “fake news,” the pair have benefited from each other for years.
Trump applauded Zucker’s Wednesday decision to resign over having an undisclosed relationship with a fellow executive, declaring it a chance to “put Fake News in the backseat.”
“Jeff Zucker, a world-class sleazebag who has headed ratings and real-news-challenged CNN for far too long, has been terminated for numerous reasons, but predominantly because CNN has lost its way with viewers and everybody else,” Trump said in a statement on Wednesday. However, Trump ignores how Zucker gave him his big shot at television stardom and the integral role Zucker had in making him the president.
CNN PRESIDENT JEFF ZUCKER RESIGNING OVER UNDISCLOSED RELATIONSHIP WITH EMPLOYEE
Zucker served as the president of NBC Entertainment, which oversaw NBC and its media divisions, beginning in 2000. This included signing Trump for his reality show, The Apprentice, which premiered in 2004. While Trump had made national headlines before, The Apprentice offered Trump name recognition nationwide.
While the CNN executive initially dismissed Trump as a “sideshow” in 2015, Zucker later changed his message and gave Trump significant coverage during the 2016 election. The network would often give considerable face time to Trump rallies, even livestreaming footage of an empty stage while Hillary Clinton spoke elsewhere. Zucker was even accused of giving Trump an excessive amount of face time on CNN, a decision that drew ire from other candidates’ aides, reported the New York Times.
When asked about his approach to covering politicians like Trump, Zucker compared the coverage to ESPN’s sports coverage. “The idea that politics is sport is undeniable, and we understood that and approached it that way,” Zucker told the New York Times. That idea, mixed with the ratings gold rush of the Trump administration for CNN, meant that Trump was a source of significant profit for the news network, with record-high numbers reported during election week 2020 and on Jan. 7.
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“[Zucker’s] a rating whore,” former NBC executive Preston Beckman told the New York Times’s Ben Smith in a September interview. “And I’m telling you that as a ratings whore. 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.”
Despite this attention, CNN was often a target of criticism and derision from Trump’s campaign, with the former president claiming on Twitter that CNN had “total (100%) support of Hillary Clinton” despite the network’s constant coverage of him. The president and news network clashed several times during his administration, with Trump regularly declaring CNN “fake news.” It provided the president a target to criticize whenever his administration struggled.
CNN’s coverage was regularly negative or critical of the Trump campaign and administration. A 2017 Harvard study found that 93% of CNN coverage of Trump was negative.
