Jeff Zucker, the chief of the basement-rated CNN, was caught making a sex joke about Alisyn Camerota, who co-hosts his failed morning show New Day.

At some awards thing where the media celebrate one another, Zucker said of  Camerota, “I was gonna say that I love waking up WITH YOU every morning, but I want to say that I love waking up TO YOU every morning.”

This is par for the course for Zucker, who has been credibly accused of looking the other way as his close friend and colleague at NBC, Matt Lauer, allegedly spent years preying on female staffers and subordinates.

In his various positions at NBC News, including as network president, there doesn’t appear to be any question Zucker knew what was going on with Lauer. According to the New York Post, Zucker found Lauer’s adventurous and adulterous sex life hilarious. Back in 2008, at another one of those awards ceremonies where the media celebrate each other, everyone at NBC, including Zucker, laughed uproariously as Lauer told the room that his colleague Ann Curry knows “how big my dick really is.”

Curry would later claim no one at NBC would listen to her complaints about a pervasive climate of sexual harassment. Presumably, this included Zucker, who is now making public sex jokes about the female co-host of his disastrous morning show, a woman in a vulnerable position in a news business that doesn’t have a lot of patience with middle-age females, especially those with the lowest-rated show in all of cable news.

Though no one can fault her, Camerota, who regularly lashes out at Trump as a sexist and accused her former Fox News boss, Roger Ailes, of harassment, cowered when she was asked about Zucker’s inappropriate joke.

Rather than call the man out who reduced her to a sex object in front of her colleagues, she did what so many vulnerable, aging women are forced to do when confronted with sexual harassment from someone with power over them: she made excuses for her harasser, saying, “That isn’t harassment, in my opinion, and I didn’t find it tone deaf, either.”

But what else is a woman on the darkside of 50, who has aged out of her chosen field, who cannot attract more than a few hundred thousand viewers, who has never once won her timeslot, supposed to do other than to allow the boss to figuratively pat her on the fanny once in a while?

Obviously, the hypocrisy at work here is as predictable as it is shameless.

If Tucker Carlson had told this same joke about a female Fox News colleague, the far-left CNN and the rest of the media would be on a 24/7 scalp hunt.

Can you imagine Mr. Decency himself, Jake Tapper, had Sean Hannity told this joke? Naturally, Tapper has not said anything critical about Zucker’s public objectification of Camerota. But Mr. Decency is in a much-weakened position himself. When you are barely attracting 600,000 viewers at the 4 p.m. hour, that can sap beta male’s moral courage pretty quick.

It’s been obvious for some time, especially with the serial lies, the encouragement of political violence, and the conspiracy theories CNN regularly traffics in, that things are toxic at the fake news outlet — that, as CNN’s continue to bottom out, a lot of people are violating their own conscience and sense of ethics to hold on to their jobs. Zucker’s brazen act of verbal leering, this revelation he’s a sex pest, goes a long way towards cementing that perception.

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.