(New York) The emblematic president of CNN Jeff Zucker, who symbolized the repositioning of the chain in self-proclaimed counter-power against Donald Trump, announced his resignation on Wednesday, after the revelation of a hidden affair with a colleague.
Posted at 12:26 p.m.
Updated at 1:26 p.m.
56-year-old Jeff Zucker, who had been head of CNN since 2013, said he was “wrong” to silence this relationship with the channel’s marketing director.
Former President Donald Trump, of whom CNN has been a favorite target for years, hailed the departure of a “world-class scrapper”.
Jeff Zucker, whose successor has not yet been named, said he admitted to the existence of this affair during a recent internal investigation unrelated to him, devoted to journalist Chris Cuomo, recently dismissed.
“I was asked about a consensual relationship with my closest colleague, with whom I have worked for more than twenty years,” the leader said in an internal memo published by CNN.
“I recognized that this relationship had evolved in recent years,” the official continued. “I should have mentioned it when it started, but I didn’t. I was wrong. As a result, I am leaving my post today. »
In another internal memo, marketing director Allison Gollust, who the channel said she would keep her job, also expressed regret for not reporting the affair, which she said began during the pandemic, to her employer. .
Jeff Zucker has been estranged from his wife, Caryn, since 2018.
Charismatic, voluble, the man with a shaved head repositioned the CNN channel, a little frozen in the face of its big competitor Fox News, and took advantage of the aspiration following Donald Trump’s entry into politics in 2015.
The original Floridian has a complex relationship with the real estate developer, a mixture of attraction and repulsion.
In the early 2000s, Jeff Zucker offered him a launch pad by airing the reality show “The Apprentice” when he was at the helm of NBC, but has since distanced himself from the former president.
“fake news”
During Donald Trump’s two campaigns as well as during his tenure, CNN presented itself as the channel for factual information, which was often opposed to what its reporters saw as false allegations or lies by the Trump team. .
Jeff Zucker “was fired for many reasons, but mostly because CNN got lost, along with its viewers and everyone else,” Donald Trump responded in a statement.
“The opportunity arises to store false information”, or “fake news”, continued the former head of state, who regularly criticized CNN for distorting reality or even inventing information about him.
The channel had a bad time after Trump, recording a 38% decline in its audiences in 2021, more than Fox News but also its other competitor, MSNBC, which has firmly established itself in second position, ahead of CNN.
A pure television man, Jeffrey Adam Zucker, by his full name, started in the industry at just 21 years old, at the bottom of the hierarchical pyramid, as a documentary filmmaker for the major national channel NBC.
Endowed with a sense of production and information well above average, he quickly rose through the ranks, before becoming, in 2007, CEO of the giant NBC Universal.
Thanked in 2010 after the acquisition of the group by the cable operator Comcast, Jeff Zucker then bounced back to CNN in 2013.
In addition to CNN, Jeff Zucker was also president of WarnerMedia News and Sports, an entity of the WarnerMedia group devoted to information and sports, since 2019.
The departure of the leader is a blow for WarnerMedia, which is preparing the launch in the spring of a subscription video service around information, called CNN +, as well as the absorption of the group by the television giant Discovery , scheduled for next June.
After acquiring the Time Warner group (now WarnerMedia) in 2019 for 85 billion dollars, the telephone operator AT & T decided last year to get rid of it, preferring to bet on the mobile phone and 5G rather than on content.