Jeff Zucker, the impish CNN honcho, resigned yesterday after it turned out he was keeping his affair with Allison Golust, the network’s chief marketing officer, a secret. When Zucker first joined CNN nine years ago, he was a new kind of newsman, closer to a Walt Disney or a David Stern than to a Dean Baquet. He was a world-builder, a moulder of his reality — someone who didn’t merely capture events but who dragged his industry and his society where he wanted to take it.

One of Zucker’s early masterstrokes was “The Plane” — Malaysian Airlines flight 370, which CNN treated as a sensational mystery that only it could solve. Gone was the pretence that CNN was the television equivalent of the New York Times. With the channel all but ignoring the outbreak of war in Ukraine, the likes of Richard Quest would now spend hours on-air, hunched over the controls of a 777 simulator and issuing insane theories about the aircraft’s fate. The Plane was a smash hit, practically doubling CNN’s ratings for the first few weeks of this mostly fake crisis. None of it had anything to do with news, per se, and none of it would have happened without Zucker.

Of course his biggest ‘success’ was Donald Trump. Zucker’s CNN infamously broke into its regular coverage whenever Trump held a rally, a service it extended to no other 2016 presidential contender. Once Trump was elected, CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta became the #Resistance’s avenging angel. Soon even the staid Jake Tapper was sermonising on almost a nightly basis. 

CNN’s political coverage, which replaced just about all other coverage, consisted of cosplaying Republican “strategists”— including the swindlers at the Lincoln Project — vehemently agreeing with various, slightly less-fake professional Democrats. The network committed grievous errors of fact in its efforts to create a sense of constant national crisis, like when it falsely reported that Wikileaks offered Donald Trump, Jr an advance look at emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee. Quality didn’t matter, though. The stridently partisan Zucker regime oversaw a ratings bonanza.

It would be simplistic to say that Zucker turned CNN into a centre-Left version of Fox News. What made Zucker a visionary is that he saw the potential for a centrist-branded panic industry and knew how to repurpose a legacy outlet in order to dominate this unexploited market. Before Zucker, aversion to Fox-style anger porn was a core aspect of American centre-Left identity. Consumers of legacy media insisted they weren’t as vulgar and emotional as those people. Zucker knew they were lying to themselves. 

Centrists were no less angry and no less vulnerable to television-induced radicalisation — which is addictive and perhaps even sickly enjoyable for the radicalised — than any other group of people. Zucker’s coverage choices reflected this dark but in retrospect very obvious psychological insight, namely that those who prided themselves on their membership in polite society were every bit as titillated by panic and outrage as the yokels and Trumpists they increasingly despised. 

And they were just as hypnotised by celebrity, too. It was Zucker’s CNN that turned photogenic #Resistance grifter Michael Avenatti into a nationally prominent figure and that boosted his absurd presidential aspirations. Last winter, CNN’s highest rated programme was a Stanley Tucci-hosted culinary tour through Italy, an exemplar of the soft-focus quasi-reality programming that Zucker pushed through the lineup. When it ran out of actual famous and beautiful people to shove onscreen, Zucker’s CNN pioneered the practice of treating random people as if they were important — the network was one of the outlets that settled with Nick Sandmann, the high schooler whose life the national media tried to ruin in early 2020. 

Fittingly enough, it was Zucker’s promotion of cheap celebrity that helped end his run at CNN. Zucker’s hidden relationship was discovered through an internal investigation of former prime-time anchor Chris Cuomo, brother of disgraced former New York governor Andrew Cuomo. The Cuomos memorably and nauseatingly interviewed each other on air several times during the early days of the coronavirus, when the network uncritically lauded the governor as a national hero, the latest in its series of anti-Trumps. 

The Cuomos were a union of centre-Left media and political starpower, catnip for Zucker and the audience he owned. But the governor took a number of people down with him when his career imploded last year, including his brother, who was caught giving him advice about how to handle his unfolding sexual harassment scandal — and maybe including Golust, Zucker’s lover, who had served as Andrew Cuomo’s communications director in 2012, around the time of some of his alleged wrongdoing. 

The Zuckerian view of American media ended up boomeranging on its inventor, though for him the consequences will probably be temporary. Like visionaries ranging from Napoleon to Donald Trump, Zucker left his work in ruins: With a new president in office CNN’s ratings plunged 90% in the year before January of 2022. But a man of Zucker’s special and horrible talents doesn’t stay unemployed for long. It’s the rest of us who will have to live with a news industry that he degraded, within a country that he’s done as much as just about anyone to worsen.