CNN Had a Problem. Donald Trump Solved It
At 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?”
“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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.”
Source:- https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/04/magazine/cnn-had-a-problem-donald-trump-solved-it.html?_r=0
