Brian Stelter Defends CNN Chief Jeff Zucker Over Column on CNN: ‘Just Trying to Cover’ Trump ‘as Accurately as Possible’

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CNN’s Brian Stelter defended his network on Tuesday, writing in response to a New York Times piece that CNN’s aggressive coverage of President Donald Trump was an effort to cover him “accurately.”

“Ben Smith’s Monday media column is about Trump and CNN boss Jeff Zucker,”  Stelter wrote in his Tuesday newsletter. “For what it’s worth, I think Smith missed the simplest explanation of CNN in the Trump age: Anchors and reporters are just trying to cover the biggest story in the world as accurately as possible.”

Stelter’s assertion followed Smith’s column on Monday, which recounted Zucker’s roll in promoting Trump on The Apprentice from 2004 until his 2016 presidential campaign. “In December 2015, after the demagoguery of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign became clear, I asked CNN’s president, Jeff Zucker, if he regretted his role in Mr. Trump’s rise,” Smith wrote. “First Mr. Zucker — who put The Apprentice on NBC in 2004 and made Mr. Trump a household name — laughed uproariously, if a bit nervously. Then he said, ‘I have no regrets about the part that I played in his career.'”

The column casts Trump as a Frankenstein monster, created by Zucker with the launch of The Apprentice, and fed by CNN’s promotion of Trump the presidential candidate in 2016. In Smith’s telling, “the story of Mr. Trump and Mr. Zucker is a kind of Frankenstein tale for the late television age, about a brilliant TV executive who lost control of his creation.”

Zucker has faced criticism recently after Fox News host Tucker Carlson released audio recordings of Zucker giving advice to Trump’s former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, in 2015, and telling him that he was interesting in giving Trump a weekly show.

The cozy nature of the mid-campaign call is in stark contrast with CNN’s current, often hostile coverage of the Trump administration.

CNN hosts including Stelter have aggressively defended their network against claims of bias. Stelter acknowledged in August that he had become more opinionated in the Trump era, calling the alternative a “both-sides trap.”

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