CNN head Jeff Zucker wants to have it both ways.
Unable to fully accept responsibility for what was a logical programming decision at the time, he is once again apologizing for having his network air President Trump’s 2016 campaign rallies. Yet he’s also defending the decision.
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Zucker expressed his regret (in other words, caved to criticism from his liberal media friends) in a new interview with David Axelrod, the White House adviser to former president Obama.
“I do not believe that’s why he’s president of the United States,” Zucker said of airing the rallies. “But I do think we made a mistake.”
He said the same thing just before the 2016 election. “We probably did put on too many of the campaign rallies in the early months unedited,” he said at an event in October that year. “[I]n hindsight we probably shouldn’t have done that as much.”
And yet, even while inexplicably admitting fault, he defended the decision. “We put them on because we never knew what he was going to say,” he said. “They did also attract quite a bit of an audience.”
It’s impossible to come away from these sorry-not-sorry apology-nonapologies without the impression that Zucker’s only real regret is that his friends in the business don’t like what he did. CNN covered Trump for the novelty, impact and general public interest generated by his events. In Zucker’s own words, “We never knew what [Trump] was going to say.” That’s novelty. He was running for the Republican presidential nomination. That’s impact. And Trump, by every metric, drew the highest interest during the campaign and continues to drive ratings, web traffic and subscriptions for every major news organization.
Probably most important was Trump’s grasp of what fuels the biggest news stories in politics: conflict.
“Low-energy” Jeb Bush, “Little Marco” Rubio, “Lyin’ Ted” Cruz, “Crooked Hillary” Clinton. A mild insult makes all the difference.
No one alive today had ever seen anything like Trump’s campaign for president, so CNN covered it. And now Jeff Zucker is apologizing (sort of) on behalf of CNN for doing what news organizations are supposed to do.
Zucker is also kidding himself to suggest that the average voter sat in front of their TVs with CNN on for hours waiting for a Trump rally so that they could watch it from beginning to end. He may not want to offend his liberal friends who want him to repent. But he can stop fearfully apologizing for doing standard journalism.
