Jake Tapper Blamed Chris Cuomo for Zucker Ouster in Tense Meeting With Warner Boss Jason Kilar: ‘The Bad Guy is Winning’
Details are emerging from a remarkably tense meeting between WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar — the man responsible for demanding the resignation of Jeff Zucker — and senior staff and talent at CNN’s D.C. Bureau Wednesday night.
Based on conversations with CNN insiders, morale at the network seems to be at an all-time low after Zucker, who has led CNN since 2013, was forced out over an undisclosed relationship with a senior executive.
The romantic relationship in question is with CNN chief marketing officer Allison Gollust, who has worked closely alongside Zucker for more than a decade. Both are divorced, and the relationship is consensual, but WarnerMedia corporate policy holds that any employee must disclose such a relationship with a direct report.
The feeling at CNN can best be described by Dana Bash who, according to the Reliable Sources newsletter, said at the meeting with Kilar: “the punishment didn’t fit the crime.” Brian Stelter added that “Internally, there is a lot of confusion about why this happened.”
Multiple sources have confirmed to Mediate the general tenor of the meeting was anger from staff who feel that Zucker was treated remarkably unfairly, particularly in light of the network’s handling of former anchor Chris Cuomo.
Cuomo was fired from CNN, where he served as anchor of the 9 p.m. hour, after an investigation into his role advising his brother, former Governor Andrew Cuomo, during his sexual harassment scandal. A legal battle over outstanding payments has followed — Chris Cuomo wants the $18 million that remains on his contract, and CNN doesn’t want to give it to him — and Mediaite has learned from sources close to the story that he is “going to the mats” to get what he feels is due justice.
It’s in this context that anchor Jake Tapper pointedly called out Kilar’s handling of the Zucker ouster in an exchange at the meeting reported by the Wall Street Journal’s Benjamin Mullen:
During the question-and-answer session, anchor Jake Tapper said that Mr. Cuomo hired a lawyer who seemed eager to leak damaging information about Mr. Zucker unless they gave Mr. Cuomo severance.
“An outside observer might say, ‘Well, it looks like Chris Cuomo succeeded,’” Mr. Tapper said. “He threatened Jeff. Jeff said we don’t negotiate with terrorists. And Chris blew the place up. How do we get past that perception that this is the bad guy winning?”
A spokesman for Mr. Cuomo declined to comment. A spokeswoman for WarnerMedia said that the company doesn’t comment on investigations.
Other senior-level staffers and on-air talent shared similar concerns as Tapper and Bash with Mediaite.
There is, of course, more to this story, which has as much to do with the Cuomo saga as it does the almost Shakespearean relationship between Kilar and Zucker. The WarnerMedia CEO stripped Zucker of some of his responsibilities in 2020, a move that reportedly left the CNN chief fuming. In January of 2021, Zucker announced that he would not renew his contract, but would see it through to the end.
CNN was the top-rated cable news network a year ago, in large part due to massive news stories like the Jan. 6 riot, the second impeachment of former President Donald Trump, and of course, the Covid pandemic. Since then, ratings have fallen precipitously (CNN still managed to notch its second-best year of ratings ever in 2021.)
But Zucker appeared to outmaneuver Kilar when AT&T announced it was spinning off WarnerMedia assets and partnering with Discovery, the CEO of which, David Zaslav, is a close friend of Zucker’s. At the time it appeared that Kilar would be out, but that did not end up being the case.
The corporate maneuvering between Kilar and Zucker is probably the clearest reason for why CNN has lost its CEO, who seems genuinely beloved within the news network. It also seems clear that Kilar completely missed how Zucker’s ousting would play within CNN. Now, he has a rather enormous mess — of his own making — to clean up.
