When a journalist tells the story, it almost always ends in tears. Just ask Jeff Zucker, the American media boss who is leading Abu Dhabi’s highly controversial bid to take control of the Daily Telegraph.
Just last year, the 58-year-old was preparing to celebrate a decade as head of CNN, the hallowed, ongoing news channel where power and influence comes with a reported annual salary of $6 million (£4.8 million) and his bonus, which could be accompanied by the same thing again.
In the drawing rooms of Manhattan, his New York liberals viewed Zucker as something of a hero who helped drive Donald Trump from office by turning his once proudly nonpartisan television network into a highly partisan mouthpiece for Joe Biden’s campaign in the run-up to the 2020 election Presidential election.
Even though CNN’s ratings weren’t great – it had actually slipped to third place in the cable news rankings – its record as one of the entertainment industry’s biggest sleazeballs had never been higher.
Then everything went wrong. A high-profile #MeToo scandal involving allegations of sleaze, nepotism and journalistic misconduct (more on that later) led to Zucker being forced out of office in February last year.
For a while the fallen Mogul disappeared from view. But in July rumors emerged that he wanted to make a bold return to the news business.
In the spotlight: Jeff Zucker with Donald and Melania Trump at a party
Specifically, the Hollywood newspaper Variety claimed that Zucker traveled the world with a virtual begging bowl to find rich and in many cases highly dubious backers who could help him finance a takeover of his former employer CNN.
The show said he reached out to everyone from Amazon boss Jeff Bezos to Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple founder Steve, to a number of Gulf sheikhs and the sanctioned Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich.
Zucker strongly rejected the report, calling it “blatantly and aggressively false.” But while the following months yielded no concrete evidence of a conspiracy to take over CNN, we can now say with certainty that he broke bread with at least one group of very wealthy Arabs.
That’s because last week it was announced that Zucker had partnered with Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, whose brother is the Emir of Abu Dhabi, to take over the Telegraph newspaper as well as its Sunday sister paper and the Spectator magazine to try.
And Zucker is due to fly to London this week to hold meetings with “key stakeholders”, just days after pledging to protect newspapers’ editorial independence.
The proposed deal is highly controversial as it will effectively place one of Britain’s most influential news publishers under the control of an undemocratic foreign state that appears significantly less familiar with real journalism. As critics have pointed out, the concept of freedom of the press is completely alien to this absolute monarchy.
Allison Gollust, with whom Zucker had an affair
Donald Trump and Jeff Zucker attend the Donald Trump Friars Club Roast Luncheon at the New York Hilton on October 15, 2004
The advocacy group Reporters Without Borders ranks Abu Dhabi 145th in its global ranking of countries where journalists can work without restrictions. No wonder six prominent MPs wrote an open letter last week calling for regulators to review the deal, saying it “represents a threat to press freedom in this country”.
In response, Zucker hit back, claiming in an interview with the Financial Times that critics of the Abu Dhabi offer were “slinging mud and throwing darts.”
But after Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer wrote to RedBird IMI last Wednesday, the fund set up to carry out the takeover said it was prepared to issue a public interest intervention notice and initiate a regulatory review of the offer and its potential impact on the UK media landscape. By visiting London, Zucker clearly decided it was time to step out of the shadows. In addition to having doubts about Zucker’s immensely wealthy paymasters in the Middle East, the stakeholders he will meet with may also have concerns about his track record at CNN.
His ill-fated reign there, which began in 2013, certainly resulted in the supposedly high-end broadcaster gaining an unwelcome reputation for dumbing down.
Miami-born, Harvard-educated Zucker’s career has been rapid so far and there is no doubt that he is extremely talented. After graduating, he moved to major network NBC and, at the age of 26, was hired to host the breakfast news program Today.
A workaholic who once told an interviewer that he never took a vacation, he turned the show into a major commercial hit before moving on to parent company NBC Universal, where he produced the U.S. version of The in the mid-2000s Apprentice, in which he starred Donald Trump and was CEO until 2011.
Jeff Zucker poses in the control room of NBC’s Today Show on January 21, 1993
Jeff Zucker is seen in Los Angeles on October 11, 2019
Jeff Zucker during the NBC All-Star Casino Night Reception in Hollywood in 2003
When Zucker took over CNN, the network was struggling to attract viewers due to its (perhaps unfair) reputation for reliable but sometimes boring programming.
Despite its well-regarded coverage of international affairs, which had brought it to prominence during the first Gulf War, the highly nonpartisan network lost viewers to more partisan competitors such as the right-leaning Fox News and the left-leaning MSNBC. To halt the decline, his initial strategy was to flood the airwaves with human interest stories and limit CNN’s coverage of world news.
This soon met with criticism. In the first weeks of its reign, the channel provided extensive coverage of the so-called Poop Cruise, a Carnival cruise ship that was stranded in the Gulf of Mexico with 4,200 passengers on board and whose plumbing system had begun to leak raw sewage.
During the Arab Spring, he decided to limit coverage of the events in Egypt’s Tahrir Square to a “mini box” in the bottom corner of the screen so that viewers could watch a thrilling murder trial instead. Towards the end of his time there
The most popular show was a travel show in which actor Stanley Tucci went on a culinary tour of Italy.
Whether similarly unsophisticated news values would infect the Telegraph should Zucker succeed in taking control remains to be seen. But at the breakfast tables of England’s counties, his track record at CNN is sure to raise fears that the title – a bastion of liberal conservatism for decades – will not only dumb down but also swing dramatically to the left.
NBC President Jeff Zucker and Harvey Weinstein attend a dinner hosted by Miramax in honor of Whoopi Goldberg in 2004
Jeff Zucker and actress Ellen DeGeneres meet during the Governor’s Ball in September 2003
To understand why, we need only look at Zucker’s leadership of CNN during the Trump years, when the company became known for launching highly partisan attacks on his administration through a bevy of anchors who were vulnerable to what critics called Called “Trump confusion syndrome”. Some of CNN’s reports were factually inaccurate.
In June 2017, it had to retract a story that falsely claimed that a presidential aide had met with the head of a Russian investment fund. Three reporters responsible for the error resigned. Later that same year, a report was released that falsely claimed that WikiLeaks had passed hacked information to Donald Trump Junior. And in the run-up to the 2020 election, Zucker refused to cover a controversy over Joe Biden’s ties to his son Hunter’s fraudulent business career.
Donald Trump, who called the CNN channel “fake news,” was not the only critic. Other commentators lambasted the overbearing reporters, while David Zaslav, who succeeded Zucker after Zucker’s departure, publicly admitted that there was “a period of time” when the network became “an advocacy network.”
It was in the final days of Zucker’s reign that one of his star anchors, Chris Cuomo, the brother of former Democratic New York Gov. Andrew, became mired in controversy. His appointment by Zucker, a personal friend, had angered critics dissatisfied with the television network’s increasing partisanship.
But that was nothing compared to the uproar that ensued after three women variously accused Cuomo of groping, sexual assault and threatening workplace behavior. An investigation into the claims by lawyers (which Cuomo denies) led to the firing of Zucker’s pal. But the investigation also uncovered evidence that Zucker was involved in a long-term workplace affair with subordinate Allison Gollust, whom he brought to CNN shortly after joining as a senior public relations executive.
Comedian Jay Leno on stage with Jeff Zucker at the Hollywood Radio and Television Society’s first annual roast in his honor in 2004
Jeff Zucker arrives at NATPE Miami 2020 – 17th Annual Brandon Tartikoff Legacy Awards at the Fontainebleau Hotel on January 22, 2020
The duo had a long history: he had originally met the brunette Ms. Gollust when they worked together at NBC in the 1990s. Although both were married and had children, they had maintained a close personal and professional relationship ever since.
At some point in the 2010s, Gollust even moved her family into an apartment directly above Zucker’s family apartment in a Manhattan apartment complex called “The Verona,” after the Italian city where “Romeo and Juliet” is set. This strange domestic state of affairs continued long after Zucker hired Gollust as a contributor to CNN, reportedly requiring the building’s bouncers to occasionally intervene to prevent Gollust and Zucker’s then-wife Caryn from having to share the elevator. In fact, it only ended in 2018 when Zucker divorced Caryn, with whom he has three sons and a daughter.
Throughout the romantic entanglement, Zucker not only promoted his mistress and approved her compensation, but also frequently traveled with her to corporate events and meetings abroad. The whole thing pushed a coachman and horses through CNN’s strict labor relations rules. After it showed up, sugar was awesome.
When Zucker was forced out last February, he apologized for the infidelity in a memo to staff. “I had to disclose it [the affair] when it started, but I didn’t do it. “I was wrong,” he said.
His old sparring partner Donald Trump, for his part, issued a very different PR statement: “A world-class scumbag who led the ratings for far too long and challenged CNN with real news has been terminated for numerous reasons, but most importantly because “CNN has lost,” it said.
The former president was, as Zucker likes to say, “slinging mud and throwing darts.” But whether this controversial American can convince key stakeholders that he is the person to protect the Telegraph’s editorial independence remains to be seen.