Florence Snyder
Jeff Zucker is past due for a Lifetime #FloridaMan Achievement Award.
Zucker, the big cheese at Childish News Network (CNN), made news himself this week when he trashed “commentator” and Democratic political operative Donna Brazile as “unethical” for her “disgusting”-ness in passing presidential debate questions to her cronies in the Hillary Clinton camp.
Zucker, as much as anybody and more than most, is responsible for purging real reporters from once-respected broadcast news organizations, and replacing them with a disgraceful deluge of political hacks with egregious conflicts of interest.
When not being paid big bucks to shout talking points at each other on Channel All Politics, All the Time, these “analysts” are peddling their cozy relationships with The Media to clients who pay bigger bucks.
Zucker’s not disgusted by Brazile’s “betrayal” of CNN. He’s not even surprised.
Unlike most of his fellow Florida Men, Zucker is not an underemployed and barely literate loser in the lottery of life. The son of a cardiologist and a schoolteacher, Zucker was a BMOC at North Miami Senior High, where he was a top-ranked tennis player, a stringer for the Miami Herald, and a successful campus politico, winning three terms as class president.
Zucker landed a starter job as a researcher for NBC’s 1988 Olympics reporting team. Five years later, he was executive producer of “Today,” where he dazzled stockholders with a genuine genius for spinning nothing-burger “news” into mountains of money.
By 2000, he had reached his level of incompetence as head of the network, and he’s been failing up ever since.
The mile markers are visible in a profile written by The Washington Post’s Paul Farhi in 2013, when Zucker became president of CNN. Farhi, a superb media critic, pronounced Zucker’s tenure running NBC a “calamity.”
Under Zucker, Farhi wrote, “The network tumbled from its ‘must-see TV’ golden era to its ‘Fear Factor’ nadir.” It went from first in the ratings to fourth, and often fifth place behind Univision’s Spanish-language programs and popular cable fare.
In a score-settling book published last year, Warren Littlefield, Zucker’s predecessor, wrote: “The Zuckerization of NBC in recent years has been marked by the belief that viewers exist to be manipulated rather than nourished.”
Zucker’s boldest move as NBC’s top executive was to install Jay Leno as the host of a nightly variety show at 10 p.m. and his old Harvard classmate, Conan O’Brien, as host of “The Tonight Show.” The host switch lasted seven months in 2009 and early 2010, becoming perhaps the greatest public-relations debacle in TV history. Zucker departed with more than $30 million in severance payments in 2010.
Zucker can take comfort in the wisdom of “Gone With the Wind” hero Rhett Butler, who observed that if you have enough money, you can do without a reputation.
As for Brazile, well, being called unethical by a #FloridaMan is like being called ugly by a frog.
