Dan Abrams Says Jeff Zucker And Chris Cuomo Should Not Have Been Fired by CNN: People Aren’t Being ‘Intellectually Honest’
Dan Abrams blasted partisan hypocrisy in the media on Monday, and argued there would be less outrage by scandals involving high-profile people if everyone were honest about the role politics plays in media.
Abrams, who is the founder of Mediaite, used both Chris Cuomo and Jeff Zucker as examples on Sirius XM’s The Dan Abrams Show.
“I find it interesting, and I think that people aren’t being, in my view, intellectually honest about the real story, and that is about Jeff Zucker being forced out at CNN,” Abrams said. He added,
It is, I think, a really important story because people are allowing their own personal views of CNN to infect the decision on whether to let him go. And there’s probably no one else in the country. Maybe, who has a platform, apart from me, who will say the following, which is: Chris Cuomo shouldn’t have been fired, and Jeff Zucker shouldn’t have been fired.
Abrams added that people on the right were thrilled to see both men fired within just a couple of months of each other. He also noted that a majority of those on left wished to see Cuomo gone.
He further commented on the loyalty to Zucker inside the company.
“And Zucker is very popular within CNN, and so they don’t want to see him gone,” Abrams added. “So most of the people who defend Zucker are people who are happy to see Chris Cuomo out. And then there are those of us, and I will describe myself as a tiny minority who just want to apply the same standards across the board.”
The host argued that both Zucker and Allison Gollust were senior-level consenting adults while commenting on their affair.
He equated their workplace romance to a “misdemeanor,” and not a “felony” between the two top CNN personalities.
“But in the world we live in, every sin is magnified because all the people who hate Zucker want to see him out,” Abrams said.
He continued:
So then it comes all full circle to the Cuomos. Meaning, Jeff Zucker got ousted as part of an investigation into Chris Cuomo. Who, Jeff, ultimately let go after defending him for a while. And again, let me be clear, I think that Jeff had done the right thing by not letting Cuomo go. I told him, I told Jeff Zucker that at the time. This is before the the next wave of stuff had come out.
Abrams hit the left for being glued to an adherence to zero tolerance policies, such as the one that presumably saw Zucker shown the door at CNN. He also argued that Zucker had not done himself any favors by refusing to own that CNN is a partisan network.
Per Abrams, Zucker reportedly helped secure interviews on the network between Chris Cuomo and his brother, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY).
Abrams argued the outrage from the scandals could have been mitigated, had the people involved in them simply been honest about their political leanings:
CNN was a left leaning-network, and therein lies the biggest problem with CNN. They can’t just own the fact that there are left-leaning network, the notion that Roger Ailes wasn’t talking to and advising senior Republican leaders, are you kidding me? Of course he was. Of course he was. Sean Hannity admits he does it. We know Laura Ingraham was doing it from the text messages.
He concluded, “This self-righteousness is the problem, this holier than thou, this is what gets these media folks in so much trouble.”
Listen above, via SiriusXM.
