Sarah Ellison reports at Vanity Fair that, although CNN President Jeff Zucker signed a long-term contract with the network last year, there is lots of chatter — both in and around the company — that he could end up on the chopping block for the sake of parent company Time Warner’s merger with AT&T.
From Vanity Fair:
Zucker’s bosses at Time Warner are now preparing to merge into telecom behemoth AT&T, a deal that requires regulatory approval from the Department of Justice, and a deal Trump has said he doesn’t like.
For both Zucker and CNN, the pressure is distorting. “We may look back in five years and find that CNN was fundamentally changed because of Trump,” one CNN employee told me. “Maybe it will turn out that Trump changed the brand” through his battle with the network. “We think we’re the middle. What if there is no middle anymore?” (A CNN executive told me that the network has conducted extensive research on its brand, which has “found zero diminution in the brand as a result of the attacks on us.”)
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Some CNN staffers, who worried that this was more than the usual Trump bluster, pointed to a meeting at the White House roughly a week before the fundraiser, when Trump hosted technology and telecom C.E.O.s as part of the much-overlooked Technology Week, organized by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Seated beside Trump at the meeting was none other than AT&T C.E.O. Randall Stephenson, whose company is in the process of trying to buy Time Warner, CNN’s parent company. “I think there’s a real chance that Zucker is being forced out,” said another employee. “That’s going to blow up this organization like nothing in the history of CNN.”
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“I know the AT&T people. CNN is not why they did this deal,” said one longtime media consultant in Washington. “They would spin him off in a minute,” this person added, referring to Zucker. “They don’t care about him.”
Read the rest of the story here.