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Two days after the current head of CNN received a highly-unflattering profile in The Atlantic, his predecessor got hit with some bad press of his own.
A feature on former CNN chief Jeff Zucker ran in Sunday’s New York Times with the print headline “Jeff Zucker Just Won’t Let CNN Go Already.” Though the online headline was far more diplomatic (“Could Jeff Zucker Fix CNN? He Seems to Think So.”), the story paints a portrait of an ousted executive who believes he got a raw deal, and thinks he could do a far better job atop the network than the man who replaced him.
Notably, a top ally of David Zaslav — the CEO of Warner Brothers Discovery, CNN’s parent company — trashed Zucker in the Times article, and accused him of being fixated on the network more than a year after his dismissal.
“This is all very sad for Jeff,” Kenneth Lerer, co-founder of HuffPost and former chairman of BuzzFeed, told the Times. “He should move on with his life. It’s disheartening to see.”
Times writer Benjamin Mullin called Zucker a “grievance switchboard” for current and former CNN employees. He reports that Zucker’s attacks on CNN have hit a nerve inside company headquarters:
Mr. Zucker’s criticism has rankled executives of Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN, according to people familiar with their thinking. They suspect Mr. Zucker has leaked unflattering information about the network’s operations to the press.
He has also been candid about what he sees as the missteps of CNN’s former parent company, AT&T, and its leaders, including the former WarnerMedia chief executive Jason Kilar, many industry acquaintances who have spoken with Mr. Zucker in recent months say.
Executives at Warner Bros. Discovery believe Mr. Zucker is waging a proxy war against Mr. Licht, undermining his leadership from afar, according to three people familiar with their thinking.
Risa Heller, a spokesperson for Zucker, did not attempt to hide the former chief’s current feelings about the network.
“It is wholly unsurprising that Jeff Zucker, the architect of CNN’s unprecedented success, would have deep misgivings about the direction the network has taken since he left,” Heller said, adding it’s no surprise “that he gets asked a lot, publicly and privately, and regularly from former colleagues, about what he thinks of CNN now.”
Zucker, who was ousted for failing to disclose his relationship with former CNN executive Allison Gollust, believes that was merely — according to Mullin — “pretext” for his dismissal.
“I gave them a gun, and they shot me with it,” Zucker said, during an April seminar at Yale.
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