During his tenure at NBC News, Jeff Zucker received “complaints” (plural) about Matt Lauer’s sexual misconduct, a NBC News insider told the New York Post. Currently, Zucker is president of the left-wing cable news network CNN.
On Thursday, Zucker said, “I’ve known Matt for 25 years and I didn’t know this Matt,” and added, “There was never a complaint about Matt. There was never a suggestion of that kind of deviant or predatory behavior. There was never even a whisper of it.”
Zucker’s tenure at NBC began in 1989 as a field producer for the Today Show. He would go on to become its executive producer in 1992 until 2000. Until 2010, Zucker would remain at NBC as CEO.
Matt Lauer joined the Today Show full-time in 1994.
Zucker’s denial directly contradicts what the Post has learned. “Previous NBC News chiefs Jeff Zucker and Steve Capus ‘got the complaints,'” per this NBC insider.
The Post report not only paints a picture of the Today Show being a “boys club” where everybody “at NBC knew about Matt Lauer’s sexually inappropriate behavior — and knew not to talk about it,” it also comports perfectly with a Wednesday report from Variety.
“Lauer’s conduct was not a secret among other employees,” Variety reported. “At least one of the anchors would gossip about stories she had heard, spreading them among the staff.“ A former NBC reporter added, “Management sucks there. They protected the s— out of Matt Lauer.”
Further adding to Zucker’s problems is a statement released by NBC News Wednesday. that read, “We can say unequivocally that, prior to Monday night, current NBC News management was never made aware of any complaints about Matt Lauer’s conduct.”
The part about “current” NBC News management is raising a lot of eyebrows. “When you have statements [from NBC] that are evolving, you want to ask, ‘Why the change?’” a former prosecutor told the left-wing Politico. “It does seem as if they’re [now] focusing on the current employees in a way the first statement doesn’t.”
The Post further reports that Steve Capus, president of NBC News from 2005 to 2013, was also aware of the complaints surrounding Lauer’s alleged sexual abuse of female subordinates.
The question now is what does the media do? With current and former NBC insiders claiming everyone knew, including CNN chief Jeff Zucker, will there be calls for a full-scale investigation? How will CNN’s left-wing media journalist Brian Stelter react to the news that his boss has been fingered as an enabler of Lauer’s alleged serial predations?
Since joining the last place CNN, Stelter has puffed himself as everything that is good and noble about journalism, as a relentless critic of Fox News and that network’s own harassment scandals.
CNN itself has been obsessed with investigating Fox. But there is little doubt CNN will show anywhere near the same zeal towards NBC. To begin with, like CNN, NBC News is a left-wing outlet every bit as committed to publishing fake news as means to destroy President Trump.
The fact that Zucker himself could be implicated in any serious NBC investigation, makes it almost certain that CNN will memory-hole any reporting around this issue, if it has not already.
There is already reason to believe CNN is in a cover up mode.
Teddy Davis, the executive producer of Jake Tapper’s State of the Union, was fired this week over numerous harassment allegations. Nevertheless, on CNN’s own website, a good faith search found only one story about this powerful producer, a story that is laughably written as though Davis worked for another network that did not want to share any information.
One thing is for certain, although all of the mainstream media relentlessly beat up on Fox News for its coverage of its own scandals, neither NBC nor CNN will hold itself to that standard, nor will any other news outlets.
It is all one big incestuous club. And the victims are women; dozens, perhaps even hundreds of them.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.