CNN Had a Problem. Donald Trump Solved It.
t 3:58 on a recent Wednesday afternoon in Washington, CNN’s largest control room was mostly empty but for a handful of producers hunched over control panels and, hovering behind them, a short, barrel-shaped, restless-looking man in a dark pinstriped suit and open white dress shirt: the president of CNN Worldwide, Jeff Zucker.
Zucker had spent most of the day holed up in a conference room, prepping two anchors who would be moderating a CNN Town Hall on Obamacare that night. Right now, though, his mind was elsewhere. It was two minutes until airtime for “The Lead With Jake Tapper,” and Tapper’s featured guest was the President Trump counselor and noted CNN adversary Kellyanne Conway.
Conway’s last interview on CNN, about a month earlier, had generated fireworks; she and Anderson Cooper spent nearly 25 minutes arguing about CNN’s report on the secret dossier of Trump’s ties to Russia. (Conway: “I know CNN is feeling the heat today, but I’m gracious enough to come —” Cooper: “I think you guys are feeling the heat.”) The tension between Conway and the network had since become a kind of B story in the larger narrative of Trump’s ongoing war with CNN, which the president had taken to characterizing as “fake news.” In response to calls for media outlets to boycott her, Conway told The Hollywood Reporter that she could “put my shoes and pantyhose back on and go on any show at any time.” And yet, when the White House offered Conway for Tapper’s Sunday morning talk show, CNN declined, questioning her credibility.
But that was a few days ago.
“She looks shiny to me,” one of the producers said as Conway’s face appeared on a feed from the South Lawn of the White House. “Do they have powder out there?”
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“Don’t worry about it,” Zucker assured him. “She looks fine.”
The monitor next to Conway’s featured a close shot of Tapper, starting his show in the studio down the hall. His opening line, a lightly self-deprecating reference to Trump’s latest howler — “President Trump says the media doesn’t report terrorist attacks. Wait, I thought he watched a lot of cable news?” — brought a smile to Zucker’s face. He was soon chuckling and then laughing out loud as Tapper unspooled a few more one-liners before introducing the main event: “Joining me now live from the White House, counselor to the president, Kellyanne Conway.”
Zucker, now 51, became the executive producer of NBC’s “Today” show at the almost unheard-of age of 26 and eventually took over the entire network. Along the way, he survived two bouts of colon cancer and Bell’s palsy, was blamed for killing quality television and has been accused of enabling the rise of Donald Trump. But he still loves TV. And he especially loves the adrenaline rush of producing live television. It’s a job that demands a unique kind of situational awareness: You are guiding the unscripted scene unfolding on the bank of monitors in front of you, shaping the event in real time to maximize the emotional impact of the moment.
“Stay on your doubles!” Zucker said to the director. “Stay, stay.”
Tapper had just shown a montage of various CNN correspondents covering a number of the very terrorist attacks that Trump claimed the media hadn’t reported and had asked Conway to explain the contradiction. Zucker didn’t want the director to abandon the split screen and zoom in on Conway — and thus miss Tapper’s facial expressions as she tried to respond. While Conway spoke, CNN trolled the Trump administration with a chyron: “CNN EXTENSIVELY COVERED MANY ATTACKS ON WH LIST.”
As Tapper cross-examined Conway — “the White House is waging war on people who are providing information” — Zucker paced behind the show’s production team like a coach on the sidelines, his hands alternately stuffed into his pockets, pressed up against the sides of his bald head, then squeezing the shoulder of one of the producers seated in front of him.
CNN’s Washington bureau chief, Sam Feist, told Zucker that the interview had been going for six minutes, the length they agreed to with the White House.
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“Fine,” Zucker said. “Go 12.”
The director was again preparing to cut away from Tapper to focus on Conway, this time as she explained that the administration had “a very high respect for the truth.”
“Hey, doubles!” Zucker said. “Doubles.”
Zucker prodded a producer to pass along a question to Tapper through his earpiece: “Have you guys ever made any mistakes?”
Tapper obliged, with a slight rephrase: “Have you or President Trump ever said anything incorrect?”
Feist, meanwhile, was staring at his phone, looking agitated. He was receiving unhappy texts from a CNN producer at the White House.
“The White House wants her to stop,” he said.
“She wants to talk,” Zucker answered. “Let him finish.”
CNN’s communications director, Lauren Pratapas, who happened to be in the control room, had an idea. She fed it to Zucker, who instantly repeated it to the producer: “Does she consider us fake news?”
“Are we fake news, Kellyanne?” Tapper asked seconds later. “Is CNN fake news?”
“I don’t think CNN is fake news,” Conway replied.
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A new chyron soon appeared on-screen: “CONWAY: I DON’T THINK CNN IS FAKE NEWS.”
Zucker’s instincts about Tapper’s facial expressions were right: His look of wry disbelief instantly became an internet meme. Tapper talked about the interview — “The Tapper-Conway Interview You Need to See,” the lead headline on CNN’s home page read — the following night on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.” It even inspired a skit on “Saturday Night Live,” a play on “Fatal Attraction” in which Conway was reimagined as the Glenn Close character. “I don’t do this for me,” the Conway character said. “I do it for you. You need me.”
“We blew up commercials for that,” the real Tapper told the real Conway after finally wrapping up the 25-minute interview.
“Thanks, Jake,” Conway replied, as a producer moved in to detach the microphone from the lapel of her cream-colored coat. “That was great.”
CNN made its debut on June 1, 1980, and has been continuously transmitting news pretty much every minute of every day since then. The network’s riveting coverage of the gulf war in 1991, beginning with a live broadcast from the Al-Rasheed Hotel — as the first American smart bombs exploded in the background — established the potential power and immediacy of 24-hour news, and elevated CNN to a cultural institution in the process. By the end of the ’90s, though, it had lost its monopoly on the cable-news business. CNN’s original mission was to “make the news the star,” but this was not enough to guarantee an audience now that Fox News, with its decidedly nonneutral take, was an option. CNN needed an identity. Fox was the hearth, keeping the homes of conservatives warm; MSNBC would eventually become the consoling voice of perpetual liberal outrage. But what was CNN?
As the network groped for an answer to this question, its increasingly desperate attempts to attract viewers, to turn news into BREAKING NEWS, transformed it into something of a late-night punch line. CNN still made plenty of money; the majority of its revenue comes not from advertising but from the fees cable providers pay to include it in their basic packages. And every now and then, a real breaking news event — a war, a natural disaster — would boost the network’s ratings and justify its continued presence in the bundle. But an existential threat was looming. In a world where cable cutters were consuming their news in bite-size portions on their phones and streaming free video over the internet, how much longer would anyone be willing to pay for expensive cable packages? Real breaking-news events happened only every so often, and people lost interest in them quickly; more quickly than ever, in fact, now that there was so much else to distract them.
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But then along came a presidential candidate who was a human breaking-news event. Trump provided drama and conflict every time he opened his mouth. So too did his growing band of surrogates, who were paid by either the campaign or the network, and in one case both, to defend his statements. Indeed, it often seemed disconcertingly as though Trump had built his entire campaign around nothing so much as his singular ability to fill cable news’s endless demand for engaging content.
Had Trump lost the election, CNN would probably have returned to its previously scheduled struggle for survival. Instead, it has become more central to the national conversation than at any point in the network’s history since the first gulf war. And the man who is presiding over this historic moment at CNN happens to be the same one who was in some part responsible for Donald Trump’s political career. It was Zucker who, as president of NBC Entertainment, broadcast “The Apprentice” at a time when Trump was little more than an overextended real estate promoter with a failing casino business. That show, more than anything, reversed Trump’s fortunes, recasting a local tabloid villain as the people’s prime-time billionaire. And it was Zucker who, as president of CNN, broadcast the procession of made-for-TV events — the always news-making interviews; the rallies; debates; the “major policy addresses” that never really were — that helped turn Trump into the Republican front-runner at a time when few others took his candidacy seriously.
CNN was hardly the only news organization to provide saturation coverage of the Trump campaign. The media-measurement firm mediaQuant calculated that Trump received the equivalent of $5.8 billion in free media — known as “earned media,” as opposed to paid advertising — over the course of the election, $2.9 billion more than Hillary Clinton. Nor is CNN the only cable-news network that has benefited from Trump’s incarnation as a politician. MSNBC and Fox News each had a surge in ratings during the election that has shown no signs of slowing since then. Fox, the president’s preferred outlet, is coming off the best quarter in the history of 24-hour cable news. MSNBC, the network of the resistance, has been thriving, too, often even beating CNN during prime time.
But CNN was the first major news organization to give Trump’s campaign prolonged and sustained attention. He was a regular guest in the network’s studios from the earliest days of the Republican primaries, often at Zucker’s suggestion. (For a while, according to the MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, Trump referred to Zucker as his “personal booker.”) When Trump preferred not to appear in person, he frequently called in. Nor did CNN ever miss an opportunity to broadcast a Trump rally or speech, building the suspense with live footage of an empty lectern and breathless chyrons: “DONALD TRUMP EXPECTED TO SPEAK ANY MINUTE.” Kalev Leetaru, a data scientist, using information obtained from the TV News Archive, calculated that CNN mentioned Trump’s name nearly eight times more frequently than that of the second-place finisher, Ted Cruz, during the primaries.
It’s hard to imagine that either Trump or Zucker would be where he is today without the other. Trump’s foray into reality TV gave Zucker a prime-time hit when he badly needed one; now, Trump’s foray into politics has given Zucker a big story when he badly needed one. It’s a symbiotic relationship that could only thrive in the world of television, where the borders between news and entertainment, and even fantasy and reality, have grown increasingly murky.
In a sense, no one is better suited to navigate the terra incognita of Trump’s America than Zucker. He made his name in television by turning an ailing “Today” show into a $450-million-a-year juggernaut with a mix of news and stunts, like staging weddings in Rockefeller Center and putting Matt Lauer in a copy of the Versace dress that Jennifer Lopez wore to the Grammys. At NBC Entertainment, he helped usher in the age of reality TV, first with the gross-out show “Fear Factor” and then with “The Apprentice.” Now he’s running CNN at a moment when straight news has also become a form of entertainment.
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Zucker likes to quote an early mentor at NBC, the late Tim Russert, considered by many the dean of the Sunday morning talk shows: “The primary responsibility of media is the accountability of government.” But Zucker is also using the power of his medium in a very different way than the network has used it in the past. CNN’s defining moments have historically involved another one of the responsibilities of journalism: bearing witness. The network’s cameras have illuminated the darkest corners of the world, recording history as it was being made, whether it was in Iraq, Tiananmen Square or flood-ravaged New Orleans.
What Zucker is creating now is a new kind of must-see TV — produced almost entirely in CNN’s studios — an unending loop of dramatic moments, conflicts and confrontations. “I’ve always been interested in the news, but I’ve always been interested in what’s popular,” Zucker says. “I’ve always had a little bit of a populist take on things. Which I know is interesting when you talk about Donald Trump.”
Zucker wakes up every day at 5:15 a.m., without the help of an alarm clock or coffee. When I met him outside his Upper East Side apartment building early one morning in late February, he had been up for a couple of hours, watching the morning shows and reading the papers online. Even when he was working in Hollywood, Zucker was a news junkie; former colleagues at NBC remember him keeping one eye on cable news during pitch meetings, a habit that didn’t always endear him to agents and writers.
That night, Trump would be delivering his first address to Congress. As we rode through Central Park in the back of a black Escalade toward CNN’s offices, Zucker told me he was worried that CNN wasn’t giving the event the attention it deserved. He showed me an email that he wrote to his morning and daytime hosts and producers at 6:41 a.m. “I think we are underplaying how big a day this is from Trump,” it concluded. “Gets another shot to start again.”
Zucker’s predecessor was a CNN lifer named Jim Walton, who worked out of the network’s longtime home in Atlanta. Walton was more businessman than newsman; employees and former employees don’t recall him having a hand in editorial decisions. Zucker’s fingerprints are on almost everything CNN does. Over the course of the weeks I spent with him, he was constantly thumbing his Blackberry, emailing producers and correspondents with suggestions and feedback. Walton rarely attended the daily 9 a.m. news meeting; Zucker presides over it. As the network’s different departments and shows run through their preliminary plans for the day, he makes it clear which stories he wants them to play up and which ones he doesn’t.
When we arrived at CNN’s offices on the Upper West Side, the daytime set — built right in the middle of the newsroom, to give the broadcast a vérité feel — was still dark. “It’s quiet now, but it won’t be for long,” Zucker said. “Come on, let’s go upstairs.” In a studio two floors up, Chris Cuomo and Alisyn Camerota, the hosts of “New Day,” were broadcasting live from a set designed to look like a living room. Cuomo was grilling Representative Steve King, the Iowa Republican, who was inside the Capitol, about the repeal of Obamacare.
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Zucker’s last TV job, as president and chief executive of NBC Universal, came with a huge corner office atop Rockefeller Center. At CNN, his setup is comparatively modest but seems to suit his metabolism and inclination toward micromanagement: His small office opens onto the newsroom, his desk positioned to face a wall of 11 television screens, so he can constantly monitor his network and its competitors. Zucker was met with a mixture of enthusiasm and wariness when he arrived at CNN in 2013. He had a reputation for intensity and competitiveness, which were both in short supply at CNN. But he was also known for being obsessed with ratings. “You could feel the ground shaking,” one former CNN producer told me. “This iconic television producer was coming.”
Zucker’s tenure at CNN started inauspiciously. He talked about the need to “broaden the definition of news” and joked about replacing a pillow in one executive’s office that said “CNN = Politics” with one that read “CNN > Politics.” There were several short-lived experiments in programming, including the return of a warmed-over “Crossfire,” starring Newt Gingrich. Zucker’s news judgment was publicly and repeatedly called into question: In 2015, Jon Stewart devoted a large part of “The Daily Show” to mocking CNN for broadcasting the White House Correspondents Dinner rather than covering the protests after a black man, Freddie Gray, died in the custody of the Baltimore Police.
Absent a war or a natural disaster, Zucker cast around for an event that might capture the national attention. For 24 hours, the network went all-in on a cruise ship that was adrift with a broken sewage system and then devoted weeks to the mysterious disappearance of a Malaysian airplane. Don Lemon interviewed a llama in prime time.
The era of searching is over. Zucker has found a story to ride, “the biggest story we could ever imagine,” he says. And as it turns out, the only thing better than having Donald Trump on your network is having him attack it. Far from hurting CNN, Trump’s war against it has amounted to a form of product placement — “earned media,” you could say — giving its anchors and correspondents starring roles in the ongoing political drama, turning them into camera-ready warriors for the First Amendment. Zucker has not shied away from the conflict, which has been reassuring, even inspiring, to his staff. “I hate to sound like a fanboy, but he’s the best boss I’ve ever had,” Tapper, a former senior White House correspondent at ABC News, told me. It has also been good for business. Last year, CNN’s average daytime audience was up more than 50 percent, and its prime-time audience 70 percent. The network earned nearly $1 billion; it was the most profitable year in CNN’s history. Ratings are up again this year, which is expected to be more profitable still. And CNN’s newfound relevance may not be fully monetized until a few years from now, when its parent company, Turner Broadcasting System, renegotiates subscription fees with a variety of cable providers.
In his early months on the job, Zucker laid off journalists. Lately, he has been on a hiring spree, in particular for CNN’s digital operation. He brought on the veteran investigative reporters Carl Bernstein and James Steele to write for CNN’s website and appear on TV and poached BuzzFeed’s four-person investigative political-research team, “K-File,” led by Andrew Kaczynski. CNN.com has scored some big scoops in recent months. It was the first to report that U.S. intelligence officials briefed Trump about claims that Russia was in possession of compromising information on him, and it broke the story that the White House had asked the F.B.I. to publicly reject media reports that people close to Trump were in contact with the Russians during the campaign. Not only do stories like these generate traffic for CNN’s website, but they provide news for its hosts to discuss on-air. And while the numbers are dwarfed by those on the TV side, the network’s digital operation has become a revenue generator in its own right, bringing in $300 million in 2016.
Perched on the window sill of Zucker’s office, among the pictures of his family, is a framed cartoon of him shaking hands with Trump. “Another Trump stooge on the payroll, Don Don!” a plump-looking Zucker says. “Big league move, Zucker,” Trump replies. It was drawn by the political cartoonist Sean Corcoran last summer, when CNN hired the former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski as a contributor just days after he was fired by the campaign. I was surprised to find it in Zucker’s office. His critics saw the hiring of Lewandowski — who was accused of assaulting a female reporter and was still getting paychecks from the campaign during his five-month stint at CNN — as emblematic of everything that was wrong with Zucker and CNN. Namely, that he was more interested in staging fights and creating spectacles than in producing journalism. But Zucker doesn’t engage in second-guessing, let alone soul-searching.
“I don’t like that cartoon,” said CNN’s chief marketing officer, Allison Gollust, who was in Zucker’s office when I asked about it. “I don’t know why you framed it.”
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“I like it,” Zucker replied. “I think it’s funny.”
In the 1960s, the vice president for audience measurement at NBC developed the theory of the “least-objectionable program,” which held that most TV watchers were basically passive consumers, looking less for something that they wanted to watch than for something that didn’t offend them. For years, this theory governed programming decisions at all of the networks. But by the time Jeff Zucker left “Today” to take over as president of NBC Entertainment in 2001, it was beginning to feel outdated. People just had too many choices now, with the proliferation of cable channels like HBO, which were producing content of their own. The economics of the business were also changing. The stars of hit shows like “Friends,” the centerpiece of the network’s “Must See TV” lineup, were demanding bigger paychecks, even as the networks’ overall audiences were shrinking. It was becoming too expensive to produce sitcoms and dramas with ensemble casts.
About two years into Zucker’s tenure, the producer Mark Burnett walked into his office on the NBC lot in Burbank, Calif., with a possible solution: A new reality-TV show called “The Apprentice,” in which a group of contestants would compete for a job with Donald Trump. Zucker, who spent the 1990s in New York, knew that Trump would ensure that the show received no shortage of publicity. But Burnett was the real object of his pursuit. A former British paratrooper, Burnett was responsible for “Survivor,” which introduced the reality game-show genre to American television. Zucker was already broadcasting a “Survivor” knockoff, “Fear Factor”; it was one of his few successes since arriving in Los Angeles.
Trump wasn’t at the pitch meeting for “The Apprentice,” and it was unclear if he would even return for the second season. But after watching the rough cuts a few months later, Zucker and his top reality-TV executive, Jeff Gaspin, could see that the scenes of Trump sitting in judgment inside the ersatz boardroom that NBC had built for him inside Trump Tower were the best part of the show. (“Sex sells,” Trump declared at the conclusion of the first episode, after the show’s women fared better than its men at running lemonade stands.) “Everything was just the catalyst for the boardroom,” Gaspin recalls. “The rest of it was pretty standard contestant dynamics, but the boardroom was tense and really engaging.” Gaspin and Zucker asked Burnett to expand these set pieces, and Trump became the star of the show.
Zucker had found his replacement for at least one of NBC’s Thursday-night hits. Instead of watching a charming group of 20-somethings navigate the bumpy transition to adulthood, a large swath of the country now watched a politically incorrect loudmouth berate aspiring entrepreneurs. If there were any lingering doubts, “The Apprentice” proved that the era of the “least-objectionable program” was over. In fact, the one thing audiences didn’t want was neutral programming. They wanted intrigue, cattiness, chaos and Darwinian, winner-take-all battles for success and survival. It didn’t matter what was real and what wasn’t, and the central characters didn’t even need to be likable. They just had to be watchable and, ideally, compulsively watchable.
Before long, Zucker was introducing Trump to advertisers as the man who saved NBC. But Zucker saved Trump, too. He had been through four bankruptcies at this point, with a fifth and sixth around the corner. And yet, in just a few years’ time, Trump would have his own star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame and would be dreaming of leveraging his new celebrity into a bid for the White House.
Zucker would occasionally visit the set and never missed the live season finales. “They were huge events for us,” he says. At the after-parties, his kids posed with Trump at his boardroom table. Zucker half-jokingly tried to persuade Trump to let him televise his wedding to Melania at Mar-a-Lago in 2005. He failed, but attended as a guest and ribbed Trump about the wedding at a Friar’s Club roast beforehand. (There would be a cigar room for Trump’s friends and a bouncy castle for Melania’s, Zucker said.)
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Having Trump as “talent” came with certain obligations. There was the weekly phone call, during which Trump would boast about his latest ratings or complain about the performance of the shows leading into “The Apprentice.” When Trump wanted to create a scripted fictional show called “The Tower” — like “Dynasty,” only about a group of models who live in a Manhattan skyscraper — Zucker instructed his development team to buy the pitch and hire a writer, even though he never intended to put it on TV. (Even before there was a script, Trump had a casting demand: They had to hire real models, not actresses.) When Trump told reporters, incorrectly, that “The Apprentice” was the most popular show on TV, Zucker would roll his eyes and laugh. “Jeff got a kick out of it,” Gaspin says. “It was just television.”
Last spring, as Trump was steaming toward the Republican nomination, Zucker ran into him in the men’s room in the network’s Washington bureau. Trump was powdering his face before an interview.
“You think any of this would have happened without ‘The Apprentice?’ ” Trump asked, as Zucker moved past him.
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