Last spring, as the pandemic was wreaking havoc on finances throughout the media industry, Jeff Zucker was informed that some cuts would be necessary at CNN. The 55-year-old network president was on a video call with company brass, including John Stankey, who was in the midst of being promoted to CEO of AT&T, the parent company of CNN’s parent company, WarnerMedia. Budgets were tight, Zucker was told, and savings would be required across the WarnerMedia portfolio, which also includes Warner Bros., HBO, and the former Turner Broadcasting networks.
Zucker pushed back hard, according to several people familiar with the meeting. It didn’t make any sense to trim CNN considering its numbers were so strong, he argued. (Annual profits are said to be just north of $1 billion.) Zucker also pulled out the trump card, as it were: How would it look if there were budget cuts at CNN in the middle of an election year, with Donald Trump and his supporters attacking the channel nonstop?
One of my sources familiar with the meeting emphasized that the discussion was about corporate overhead and not news-gathering positions, but nevertheless, the call became “common knowledge” internally and “was talked about everywhere,” another source told me. The anecdote is a good illustration of why lots of CNN employees don’t want to see Zucker go—people there “feel like he has their back, and I don’t know if anyone else can replicate that sense of support,” one CNN journalist told me. “In 40 years of CNN, the place has never been defined by its leader like it is right now. It’s like Roger Ailes without the sexual abuse and hush money.”
There’s a widespread changing of the guard throughout the journalism world, with leadership in flux both at establishment titans, like The Washington Post, Reuters, and ABC News, and newer digital players, like HuffPost and Vox. Zucker leaving CNN would arguably be the most seismic turnover of them all, which accounts for the intense curiosity regarding his future there. Zucker is widely respected within the network (although there is at least a certain contingent that complains of him being a “micromanager,” as The Wall Street Journal put it, and getting a little too involved in the minutiae of day-to-day news coverage). Are his days at CNN numbered, or will he stay on at least through the end of his current contract, which has about a year left on it? Staffers apparently won’t have to wait much longer to hear from Zucker with an answer to that question. “It will be very soon,” someone close to him told me.
Speculation has been sizzling since the fall, both inside CNN and out. Zucker told staffers in October that he was weighing whether or not to stay in his job and wouldn’t make a decision until after the election. Right before Thanksgiving, a knowledgeable source told me that some people high up at WarnerMedia were saying Zucker was expected to leave in the first quarter of 2021, sometime after the inauguration. The Trump saga, in which CNN played a starring role, would be over by then, and this was also on the heels of a significant clash between Zucker and Jason Kilar, who succeeded Stankey as WarnerMedia’s CEO after Stankey was bumped upstairs.
Since then, Kilar has praised Zucker effusively. “The two best things that ever happened to CNN were Ted Turner and Jeff Zucker,” Kilar said on Kara Swisher’s New York Times podcast in December, when Swisher asked flat out if Zucker was leaving. “I think it would be great for Jeff to be here for the next 50 years.” (Swisher also noted, in her no-bullshit style, that Kilar hadn’t answered the question directly.)
Another development is CNN’s triumphant resurgence in the cable-news-ratings wars long dominated by Fox News. Zucker had already delivered an audience revival for CNN, which was in dire straits before his coronation as network president in 2013 following a long career at NBC. (He was of course aided by the ever-bonkers Trump news cycle, and he still receives criticism for giving Trump too much free media in the run-up to the 2016 election.) But the unprecedented fireworks of the Trump–Biden transition, from Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell’s unhinged election-fraud crusade to the deadly insurrection at the Capitol, catapulted CNN to a place it hadn’t been for some time: number one. Monday marked the network’s 90th day beating Fox News and MSNBC in the coveted 25-54 age bracket that matters most for advertisers. CNN has had a run of first-place wins in total daily viewers as well, although Fox News has lately been regaining some ground, particularly in prime time. Programming on the day of the Capitol riots was the most-watched in CNN’s history, with a total of roughly 5.2 million viewers (compared to 4 million for MSNBC and 2.99 million for Fox). CNN topped the monthly ratings in January, with MSNBC in second, marking the first time in two decades that Fox News placed behind its two main cable news rivals.