Paul Sancya/AP Photo
Jeff Zucker listens in the spin room after the first of two Democratic presidential primary debates hosted by CNN, July 30, 2019, in the Fox Theatre in Detroit.
I have to say I’m amused by all the crocodile tears being shed for Jeff Zucker’s forced resignation from CNN. Obviously, he is gone for reasons other than the ones being given; that was a slap-on-the-wrist sort of violation for a network president. (My out-of-the-bleachers guess would be that it is directly related to Chris Cuomo’s suit against CNN.) CNN whiners should be ashamed of themselves for defending him. Yes, he’s not as bad as the criminal whorehouse operator, Roger Ailes. (That’s how they get you: “Defining Deviancy Down” …) But his reign at CNN had one crucial world historical impact: the promotion of Donald Trump and his brand of entertaining fascism to the U.S. and the world. As for CNN, it was the network’s refusal to distinguish between what its journalists know to be true and what they know to be a lie for the benefit of those who depend on it for news.
The following is drawn from my 2020 book Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie—and Why Trump Is Worse:
Trump’s fame was mostly confined to Manhattan-based gossip writers and broadcasters until 2004, when he teamed up with the television producer Mark Burnett to create The Apprentice. Jeff Zucker, an NBC executive who later moved on to CNN in time for the 2016 campaign, gave the program the green light. … “The show was built as a virtually nonstop advertisement for the Trump empire and lifestyle,” according to a 2016 Trump biography. Naturally, it was a lie from start to finish. The Apprentice was filmed in his offices in Trump Tower, but, as one of the show’s producers told a reporter from The New Yorker, “We walked through the offices and saw chipped furniture. We saw a crumbling empire at every turn. Our job was to make it seem otherwise.” According to a supervising editor on the show, the producers’ “first priority on every episode … was to reverse-engineer the show to make it look like his judgment had some basis in reality.”
Trump entered the presidential race in 2015 at a moment when the always-tenuous line between “entertainment” and politics was rapidly and purposely being erased. And it was around this time that Jeff Zucker, a fan of televised sports and the profits they earned, landed the top job at CNN. “The idea that politics is sport is undeniable, and we understood that and approached it that way,” he told a reporter. And just as sports broadcasters hire hosts who can make boring games sound interesting, and keep the audience entertained regardless of their level of expertise, so, too, Zucker chose pundits with no discernible qualifications whatsoever, save their willingness to sing the praises of Donald Trump. Zucker hired Jeffrey Lord, a journeyman conservative author who repeatedly compared Trump to Martin Luther King Jr., and Kayleigh McEnany, an attractive young law student who consistently argued that Trump “doesn’t lie,” but that instead, “the press lies.” (McEnany was rewarded for these arguments with an appointment in 2017 as the Republican National Committee spokesperson, and, two years later, for the same position in Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign [before becoming Trump’s presidential press secretary, also in 2020].) According to Zucker’s preferred metric, these hires were more than justified. “Everybody says, ‘Oh, I can’t believe you have Jeffrey Lord or Kayleigh McEnany,’” he said. “But you know what? They know who Jeffrey Lord and Kayleigh McEnany are”—as if this somehow justified their lies and the lunatic conspiracy theories they passed along to viewers. Zucker even proved willing to hire Trump’s former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, in June 2016, not long after an incident in which Lewandowski was charged with misdemeanor battery following his physical attack against a female reporter whose question he did not like. (The charges were later dropped, though not before Lewandowski was accused by another Trump supporter of sexual assault.) Lewandowski had lost an internal power struggle within the Trump campaign, and with it his job. Such a hire would not normally be considered unusual in the incestuous world of cable TV commentary, but in this case, Lewandowski had signed a nondisclosure agreement that contained a nondisparagement clause before leaving the campaign. That meant he was legally enjoined from saying anything that might reflect badly on Trump—even if it was truthful. Zucker did not care. Truth was not the metric: ratings were. (In September 2019, Lewandowski testified before the House Judiciary Committee investigating impeachment and admitted, “I have no obligation to be honest to the media because they’re just as dishonest as anybody else.” He was booked on CNN that same night.)
Owing to the strong ratings that Trump-themed programming earned the network during the election season, Zucker constantly pressured his staff to keep the focus on his campaign. CNN was happy to broadcast the candidate’s lies unmediated and uninterrupted, whether they were offered on the phone, in live interviews, or during rallies. According to the nonpartisan fact-checking site PolitiFact, which investigated 158 statements Trump had made on the campaign trail before June 2016, 78 percent of those statements were false, mostly false, or “pants on fire.” Only about 3 percent of the statements it investigated were judged to be entirely true. The other 19 percent were half-true or mostly true.
Stop whining, CNNers …
Mainstream-media discussion on the topic of “cancel culture” is a near perfect reflection of its coverage of general politics. Reporters and editors are well aware that the vast majority of recent attempts to shut down freedom of expression and impose intellectually unsupportable (and often purposefully dishonest) versions of the truth come from the right wing. But with just a few honorable exceptions, they feel compelled to hide this fact and treat “both sides” as equally guilty. They do this for a series of interlocking reasons that have frequently been—and will continue to be, alas, also frequently—enumerated in this space. Among these:
- They wish to appear “objective” (emphasis on the word “appear”).
- They fear the wrath of right-wing attackers; the fruits of the “working of the refs.”
- They don’t want to get their sources angry at them, lest they lose “access.”
- They don’t want to insult the intelligence of stupid potential readers, listeners, and viewers.
- They literally cannot believe how stupid and/or dishonest the right wing under Trump has become, and so they treat its complaints as having far greater cogency and respect for democratic traditions than they actually do.
All the above contribute to a false picture of reality as presented by the MSM, one in which its members are constantly running interference for those who would destroy democracy and happily lead the country on the road to fascism.
The cancel culprits in almost every recent example were pretty much always conservatives seeking not only to protect their right to pass on a false version of American history to America’s schoolchildren and to delegitimize the lives and contributions made to it by people of color, gays, immigrants, and others, but also to whitewash virtually all the crimes committed in America’s name. Even more shocking—and sadly revealing—many of them want to do the same thing with the Nazi Holocaust. And we are expected to read and hear about these actions as if they are totally within the realm of reason—at least insofar as reason has ever applied to American politics.
Here is one particularly crappy version of that sort of piece from The New York Both Sides Times, which gives no indication that the effort is almost entirely a politics-driven, right-wing Republican project. And here, from Axios, is one that, like the Times, tells the story as a “both sides” issue, but pathetically—and I guess, lacking the “both sides” resources of the Times—cannot come up with even a single example to back up its bullshit.
If you want to see what it would look like for a mainstream news service to simply tell the truth about what’s going on, try this excellent rundown by Mike Hixenbaugh for NBC News. The subhed “School libraries in Texas have become battlegrounds in an unprecedented campaign by parents and conservative politicians to ban books dealing with race, sexuality and gender” captures the story, but I suggest reading the whole thing.
What’s going on? There was the 10-0 decision by a Tennessee county school board that removed Art Spiegelman’s masterpiece Maus, a Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, from an eighth grade curriculum, allegedly owing to its profanity, as if eighth graders were unfamiliar with profanity. (Here’s more on why Maus matters.) A Missouri school district banned four books by Toni Morrison. Georgia’s board of education resolved to ban “divisive ideologies” in schools. They want to ban books like these. In Florida, a Ron DeSantis crusade seeks to prevent, by law, any school or private business from engaging in instruction or training that makes anyone “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress” on account of their race. Legislation making its way through Missouri’s state legislature includes a bill that demands that teachers “promote an overall positive” history of the United States and another one that “prohibits teachers from advocating for or compelling students to adopt or affirm certain ideas related to race, sex, and related categories.” In New Hampshire, Joe McCarthy is being resurrected in the form of a proposed bill entitled An Act Relative to Teachers’ Loyalty, now advancing in the state legislature, which deserves renewed scrutiny. It would ban the advocacy of any “doctrine” or “theory” promoting a “negative” account of U.S. history, including the notion that the United States was “founded on racism.” The bill also, according to New Hampshire Public Radio, “updates a piece of Cold War-era law that bans educators from advocating for communism in schools, and adds additional bans on advocating for socialism and Marxism.”
We already knew that the Republican governor of Virginia debuted a mechanism for parents to narc on their kids’ teachers. Now, “Iowa Republicans have introduced a bill that would put government-installed cameras in every single classroom to livestream school activities for parents to spy on teachers and children at all times of the day.” And guess what? “More than half of teachers are looking for the exits, a poll says.”
Finally, here’s a wonderful piece by Viet Thanh Nguyen on one reason this is all so stupid.
Sorry, no music today; I ran long yet again.
