Zucker’s relationship with exec Allison Gollust has been an open secret in media circles for years — so why did he suddenly resign?
While the gossip mill is churning around whether Cuomo planted a story about Zucker’s romantic relationship with CNN chief marketing officer Allison Gollust in RadarZucker said Wednesday last month that the information was a result of an investigation into Cuomo’s December ouster and a dispute about a $18 million payment to the fired anchor.
“As part of the investigation into Chris Cuomo’s tenure at CNN, I was asked about a consensual relationship with my closest colleague,”Zucker stated this in his statement. “I acknowledged the relationship evolved in recent years. I was required to disclose it when it began, but I didn’t.”
CNN’s representatives and Cuomo’s lawyer have remained mum. Media insiders however have a lot of things to say. “The Cuomo blast radius is incredible,”Ben Smith was a columnist in the New York Times. Tweet.
Cuomo connections run deep. Gollust, who has been working at CNN since 2013, was once the spokesperson for Andrew Cuomo (the brother of the terminated anchor), whose resignation following sexual misconduct allegations last summer also embroiled his brother-anchor.
CNN fired Chris Cuomo in December after he failed to disclose how he had helped his sibling, a politician, with a communication strategy following multiple allegations of sexual harassment by women. Cuomo Has been fuming over the fact that he won’t be getting severance, and has As legal actionYou can claim the $18 Million remaining on your contract.
Zucker discussed Chris Cuomo’s ouster both publicly and privately, telling staffers in a December town hall reviewed by that he was “comfortable”It was shocking to see how the firing went down. He and the company backed Cuomo for months after initial reports of his strategizing surfaced, but once the journalist lost Zucker’s support, he was hastily removed from the network’s primetime lineup.
Media insiders told Wednesday that if Cuomo didn’t deliberately plant the Radar piece, the timing was at least fortuitous as it pressured Zucker just as Cuomo’s lawyer deposed Zucker about the relationship on the record.
In the current climate, CNN’s owner AT&T could not risk having a public relations fiasco as it seeks regulatory approval to spin off WarnerMedia and merge with Discovery in Q2. WarnerMedia’s Standards of Business Conduct, updated after AT&T’s 2016 acquisition, “employees must not hire or
supervise (directly or indirectly) someone with whom they have a personal relationship” — and must “inform the HR department in advance”They should not be allowed to start any relationship with anyone they supervise.
Jon Klein, an ex-president of CNN, said that the stakes were high. “With all the glare of publicity on corporations on sensitive moments when they’re awaiting regulatory approval on mergers, the options in front of executives are very limited,”He said. “Their behavior is constrained by the spotlight, now more than ever. You cannot speak with forked tongue. You have to appear principled. We are not living in the age of nuance anymore.”
Another executive in media pointed out that WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar had a lot to do with Zucker and may not be disappointed to watch him fail. David Zaslav, Discovery CEO, is expected to take over the Warner-Discovery merger later in the year. Zucker is very close to Zaslav. The merger would force Kilar to resign, as he was promoted to WarnerMedia CEO only in May 2020.
While Kilar may not have had a direct role in Zucker’s ouster, he could be a major beneficiary. “This was handed to Kilar, by Cuomo,”The executive stated.
Representatives of Chris Cuomo and Kilar did not respond to requests for comment.
Strangely, however, the media edition “Game of Thrones”Some interesting choices were made during Wednesday’s flurry of news. Gollust claimed that the relationship between the two top executives was due to COVID-19, but the references to them predate the pandemic lockdowns.
“They’ve been together for years and years,”One media executive who is familiar with Zucker and Gollust said.
One former media owner spoke out more forcefully: “They’re lying. I’ve met both of them. The thing is going on for 20 years. It didn’t happen over COVID. They got divorced for this reason.” (The Radar piece, in fact, explored the dissolution of the pair’s respective marriages.) Zucker and Caryn Nathanson his wife Separated in 2018Gollust was later divorcée and divorced her husband William Hult, Tradewell Markets president.
The former media owner noted that top executives must sign documents each year attesting to the fact that they have not breached any company policy and are maintaining ethics, which tracks with Zucker’s explanation that he stepped down because he didn’t disclose the relationship when he should have.
Multiple insiders said that Zucker’s explanation for resigning — a lack of full disclosure that mirrors the rationale for Cuomo’s own firing — has the makings of a revenge plot by the former anchor. “There’s no doubt that Cuomo’s after him,”According to the ex-media owner.
A third former media executive with direct knowledge of CNN’s operations pointed to the fact that Zucker and Gollust have long lived in the same apartment building — something that Katie Couric, an on-air star when Zucker was at NBC prior to CNN, disclosed in her 2021 memoir “Going There” — and that served as “a signal”To everyone who knew them, they were together. According to insiders, Cuomo could have known about the relationship. That former executive, too, believes that Zucker’s forced resignation was the former primetime host’s doing.
However, Zucker could have been expelled for other reasons.
CNN’s ratings have continued to lag behind those of rivals Fox News and MSNBC by a considerable margin during his nine-year tenure, despite numerous lineup revamps. Nielsen Research shows that CNN lost 74% of its total viewers last month, compared to January 2021, and 81% in the advertiser-favored news demographic of 25-54. However, the declines in viewership for other news networks were not as dramatic. MSNBC lost 60% of its total viewership and 74% of its demo viewership — like CNN, it had seen a lift from the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, President Trump’s second impeachment trail and the inauguration of Joe Biden. Fox News, however, lost only 4% of its total viewers year-over-year and 6% of their demo viewership.
The final show Zucker launched was “Democracy in Peril,”A 9 p.m. ET program designed to replace Cuomo’s show, which was consistently the network’s the highest-rated hour despite lagging dramatically behind most of Fox News’ and MSNBC’s programming. In its first week, temporary host Brianna Keilar only pulled in about 556,000 total viewers — which was just a little over what Fox News pulled in at 9 p.m. in the key demo alone.
Gene Del Vecchio, adjunct professor of marketing at the USC Marshall School of Business, said the Gollust relationship may have taken a backseat to the network’s ratings woes. “I suspect that he might have been squeezed out due to the catastrophic ratings decline,”Del Vecchio stated that he believes CNN might have gone “too far left” ahead of WarnerMedia’s impending merger with Discovery. “It is the perfect time to clean house and build a stronger, more middle-of-the-road CNN that will bring back a more mainstream audience.”
SThis story was written by haron WAXMAN
