How to lose your audience
We in the news media are consumed these days with our preferred story of any moment: ourselves.
In case you didn’t hear about it, Jeff Zucker, CNN’s president for the past nine years, resigned about a week ago, citing a relationship with a subordinate employee that he didn’t divulge to management when it began, as required by company policy.
Not that anyone outside the news media cares. To most Americans, the vast majority of whom are not watching CNN, “Zucker” is either a misspelled lollipop or perhaps a brand of German marmalade.
But in Washington, D.C., New York and Los Angeles, “Zucker” was the undisputed king of news, who got his break at NBC’s “Today” show and rose to the top of NBC Universal before taking over CNN, and so this is the news that really matters.
And it was supposedly all the more breathtaking because Zucker just two months earlier had told anchor Chris Cuomo to clean out his desk after it became clear that Cuomo, while working for CNN, had advised his brother, Andrew, then the Democratic governor of New York, about how to handle allegations of sexual harassment by subordinates. Now, Zucker was following him out the door.
Nobody thinks Zucker resigned only because he didn’t report his consensual relationship. Just as likely, he was relieved of his duties to clear the decks for the forthcoming merger of CNN’s parent company, WarnerMedia, and Discovery Inc., whose CEO, David Zaslav, recently called CNN the “leader in news to the left.”
But what unfolded over at CNN as Zucker’s train pulled out was – what else can you call it? – embarrassing. Spare us the near-tearful testimonials of CNN anchors who could barely keep their chins from quivering as, one by one, they told viewers how sad and lost and devastated they were by Zucker’s sudden departure.
Zucker, a longtime TV man, was their leader, their anchor, their cheerleader, their savior, their rudder, their therapist, their news muse and their ATM. It’s soul-crushing – to maybe a Muppet or two – when elites get weepy over losing a bestie while the country is on the verge of collapse from COVID; inflation; worker, food and supply shortages; gun violence; and, not incidentally, the widening gap between rich and poor. Oh, and rising tensions with Russia.
Whatever happened to “no crying in baseball,” the operative emotional principle in newsrooms of my youth and even 10 years ago when I was (briefly) a CNN co-anchor? When I was told that the CNN president who hired me was being fired, I burst into tears (in my office) because I knew in that instant that my own future at the network was doomed. I cried a lot for good reason over the next several months, but I didn’t whimper on TV, for heaven’s sake, the way some did over Zucker.
It was enough to make me wonder what happened to CNN’s spine. I can surmise only that Zucker is what happened. He was certainly beloved by those who prospered on his watch. Maybe he was the best boss anyone ever had. But he also guided the network away from the ramrod-straight, just-the-facts news programming that CNN founder Ted Turner had envisioned and toward a more personalized, interpretive style of reporting that came with a price in a deeply divided nation. Not all CNN shows went this way, I hasten to add, but enough did that the audience kept slipping away. At the start of 2022, CNN averaged 548,000 viewers during the week of Jan. 3, an 80% decline from the same period in 2021.
The Zucker chapter is a reminder of the yawning gap between the way average Americans and the media elite live. It’s a chasm that has been widening for years. There’s not much overlap left. While the great unwashed struggle to survive amid social and economic unrest, anchors and many correspondents are typically comfortable millionaires who live in a pristine bubble, communing with colleagues and other elites, escaping to the Hamptons, Nantucket and other swanky watering holes to avoid germs and attend gatherings where their elbows are unlikely to ever bump into the sort of people who voted for Trump.
Many in my business don’t understand why Joe Rogan’s podcast remains so popular or why Fox News continues to clobber CNN in ratings. But this is how a great outlet loses track of an audience that once ate out of its hand – and is the very last to know.
Kathleen Parker is a columnist for the Washington Post. Her email address is kathleenparker@washpost.com.