A Newsletter With An Eye On Political Media from The American Prospect
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A NEWSLETTER WITH AN EYE ON POLITICAL MEDIA

Shed No Tears for Jeff Zucker, Trump's Great Enabler

At NBC and CNN, Zucker was key to Trump's rise

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 paragraph 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 November 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 the same
Jeff Zucker 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 save their willingness to sing the
praises of Donald Trump. He 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
re-election 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 don't 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 on 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 Trump's 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 ...

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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.

See you next week.

~ ERIC ALTERMAN

Become A Member of The American Prospect Today!

Eric Alterman is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn
College, an award-winning journalist, and the author of 11 books, most
recently Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie-and Why Trump Is Worse
(Basic, 2020). Previously, he wrote The Nation's "Liberal Media"
column for 25 years. Follow him on Twitter @eric_alterman

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