While CNN withers amid the biggest journalistic scandal in the network’s history, network president Jeff Zucker has turned to the New York Times for help.
Three senior editorial staffers at CNN—a Pulitzer Prize winning editor, a Pulitzer Prize nominated reporter, and the head of the network’s investigative reporting unit—resigned over a week ago as a result of an embarrassing retraction of a very fake news hit piece on President Donald Trump and his associates.
From there, the network has spiraled into chaos that has lasted nearly two weeks. The chaos is fueled by further mistakes: a lack of transparency from the network’s public relations team and from Zucker, a refusal to course correct away from deep problems with journalistic integrity inside CNN, and by more damning revelations about CNN including from undercover videos of CNN producers and talent published by James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas.
But besides all that, even the appearance of Zucker in the media on this front—it is extraordinarily rare for a chief executive of a television news network to appear in the media during a crisis—has to be worrisome for network investors and corporate leadership. In other words, it is less about what Zucker is actually saying and more about the fact he is even sitting for an interview at all that is mere proof that CNN is burning.
