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The Patricians are just different from us! CNN's disgraced and fired President to get $10 million payoff to keep his mouth shut

The Patricians just aren’t like you and me. If you get canned for some reason — I’m retired now, so I’m beyond the ability of anyone to fire — you might, might! be able able to get a few hundred bucks a week in unemployment benefits. If you are terminated for cause, such as an inappropriate sexual relationship with a subordinate, something which could expose your company to a sexual harassment claim, you might not be able to get even unemployment compensation.

But life is different for the elites. From Le*gal In*sur*rec*tion:

Former CNN Chief Jeff Zucker to Get $10 Million Settlement, Agrees Not to Sue

“if WarnerMedia keeps their side of the deal, in the next week to 10 days, Zucker will receive a one-time payment of around $10 million”

Posted by Mike LaChance | Thursday, March 10, 2022 | 1:00 PM EST

CNN’s former president Jeff Zucker is getting a major golden parachute from his former employer, with the agreement not to sue them.

It’s a pretty good deal for a man who basically destroyed the network’s ratings and brand.

FOX News reports:

Ex-CNN chief Jeff Zucker to receive roughly $10 million from WarnerMedia, won’t sue: report

Former CNN boss Jeff Zucker has reportedly agreed to a deal with CNN parent company WarnerMedia over his swift exit from the network that will award him roughly $10 million in exchange for not suing after being forced to resign last month.

“Details of the confidential package are obviously being kept close to the vest, but sources tell us Zucker made the decision several weeks ago to accept what had been put on the table by his old bosses at the time of his cable news exit. What we do know is that, if WarnerMedia keeps their side of the deal, in the next week to 10 days, Zucker will receive a one-time payment of around $10 million,” Deadline’s Dominic Patten and Ted Johnson wrote, citing “sources.”

It seems that Mr Zucker’s girlfriend, who was not initially fired forced to resign, but quit a couple of weeks later, is also getting a golden parachute of a cool million.

As we have noted previously, Mr Zucker had a net worth of $60 million, plus an annual base salary of $6.3 million, before any bonuses — and how he could ever qualify for a bonus the way CNN’s ratings tanked is beyond me, but he certainly did get them — and Miss Gollust wasn’t exactly living paycheck-to-paycheck herself, with an estimated net worth of $5 million.

It seems that CNN has some dirty laundry the network wants desperately to keep out of the public’s sight. Given that the relationship between the two has been reported, by multiple sources, as an “open secret,” it has to be asked why CNN forced them out over that, rather than the ratings disaster the network had become.

Remember: the excuse for the resignation given was that Mr Zucker and Miss Gollust, both of whom are divorced, failed to report the relationship. But the head of human resources for CNN, Lisa Greene, is also an Executive Vice President, as was Miss Gollust, and the idea that someone who hobnobs with the network’s top brass didn’t know the “open secret” everyone else did is pretty difficult to swallow.

So, what does Mr Zucker know that CNN is so desperate to keep quiet?

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Neither the rules nor honesty apply at CNN If we can't expect CNN to follow its own internal rules, how can we trust their reporting?

As we learned on Wednesday, Jeff Zucker, who was fired resigned as President of the Cable News Network and the chairman of WarnerMedia’s news and sports division over a “romantic relationship with another senior executive at CNN”, said:

As part of the investigation into Chris Cuomo’s tenure at CNN, I was asked about a consensual relationship with my closest colleague, someone I have worked with for more than 20 years. I acknowledged the relationship evolved in recent years. I was required to disclose it when it began but I didn’t. I was wrong.

CNN, of course, wanted to hold Donald Trump’s feet to the fire, and had now-disgraced attorney Michael Avenetti on the boob tube at least 122 times when he was representing Stormy Daniels, to attack our 45th President. As Robert Stacy McCain noted, MSNBC had Mr Avenetti on at least 108 times as well.

Mr McCain also noted the New York Post’s story:

Rumors about Zucker, 56, and (CNN’s Executive Vice President and chief marketing officer Allison) Gollust’s affair have been circulating in the media world for years, but the pair have repeatedly, and vehemently, denied they were in a relationship when asked numerous times by Page Six.

Zucker was allegedly so brazen about his relationship with Gollust, he moved her into the same Upper East Side building where he lived with his then-wife of 21 years Caryn Zucker before the two divorced, sources said.

So, the President of CNN, and an Executive Vice President, who had the whole network incessantly pounding on President Trump over his honesty, were themselves dishonest about a relationship they were required to report. Mr Zucker, who should have been canned years ago over CNN’s lousy ratings, was finally shown the door over an affair.

But what about other people at CNN?

Female employees at CNN are furious that chief spokesperson Allison Gollust is keeping her job after “lying” about her affair with newly resigned CEO Jeff Zucker “for years,” sources told The Post.

“Why is she allowed to keep her job?” a CNN insider railed.

“CNN is supposed to be a transparent news network. How does she get away with lying about their affair for so long?”

Early Wednesday, Zucker sent a memo to colleagues announcing he’d be retiring after his relationship with Gollust came to light during CNN’s probe into Chris Cuomo. He called the relationship “consensual” and told staff that he wished he’d disclosed it sooner.

Gollust released a statement shortly after saying that she and Zucker had been professional colleagues for over 20 years but their relationship “changed during COVID.”

One insider called the comments “a total lie.”

“They’ve been together for years,” the source dished.

Katie Couric in her memoir Going There, had said that Mr Zucker and Mrs Gollust “were joined at the hip,” while Mr Zucker was at NBC, which he left nine years ago.

If this was such a widely-known ‘secret,’ why didn’t anyone say anything? For Mr Zucker and Mrs Gollust to have been required to report the relationship when it began, there had to have been human resources regulations on the subject. Did no one in human resources know about this, or did no one in human resources care about this? How many people were in on this “open secret”, and why did no one say anything until an outside party investigation of Chris Cuomo lead to the discovery of Mr Zucker’s and Mrs Gollust’s relationship?

If Mr Zucker and Mrs Gollust had reported the relationship, as they were required to do, what would have happened? CNN would have had to set up certain restrictions on responsibility, presumably taking Mrs Gollust out of a direct reporting line to Mr Zucker. Since we cannot assume that neither Mr Zucker nor Mrs Gollust was unaware that the relationship needed to be reported, the only reasonable consideration for not doing so was that it could have changed the professional relationship between the two, and neither wanted for Mrs Gollust to cease being Mr Zucker’s closest business confidant.

Remember NBC’s Matt Lauer, and the infamous ‘secret button’ which locked the door to his office so the targets of his affection couldn’t escape? If it existed — Mr Lauer claims that it didn’t — who installed it? Did Mr Lauer have the technical skills to do it himself? Ronan Farrow, who discovered and reported Harvey Weinstein’s sexual misconduct, claimed that Mr Lauer’s behavior toward women was an “open secret” at NBC.

At some point it has to be asked: if all of these people knew about the behavior of these media big wigs, why did no one ever report it? And why should the public trust the reporting of people who have not been honest themselves?

The New York Post reported, “Three top CNN executives will form an interim leadership team at the network and assume Zucker’s duties until WarnerMedia’s pending merger with Discovery is complete,” but that ignores the obvious question: who among those three were aware of the affair, of this supposed ‘open secret,’ and tolerated it anyway?

If CNN cannot be trusted to follow and enforce its own rules, and this only came to light, allegedly, after Chris Cuomo’s lawyer went scorched earth on the network, just how can news consumers trust anything CNN reports, ever? As Mary McCarthy famously said about writer Lillian Hellman, “Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.” That is how we should regard CNN.

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What does it say when CNN is getting beat out by the Hallmark Channel and the Food Network? In any sane business environment, Jeff Zucker and his minions would have been fired years ago

The Cable News Network, or CNN, was launched on June 1, 1980, by Ted Turner and Reese Schonfeld, the world’s first 24-hour news network. Now a part of WarnerMedia, it’s being spun off by parent AT&T T: (%). From The Wall Street Journal:

    AT&T Sets WarnerMedia Spinoff Plan and Lowers Its Dividend

    Shareholders will get 0.24 shares in new media company and reduced annual dividend of $1.11 a share

    by Drew FitzGerald | Tuesday, February 1, 2022 | 6:07 PM EST

    AT&T Inc. said it would roughly halve its dividend payout and divest itself of its WarnerMedia division through a spinoff that would give shareholders 0.24 share for each AT&T share they own, a move that would complete its retreat from the entertainment business.

    The spinoff is part of AT&T’s planned deal to combine WarnerMedia with Discovery Inc., DISCB: (%) a merger that is expected to close in the second quarter. AT&T plans to use the transaction to refocus its remaining assets on its core telecom operations.

    After the spinoff, AT&T said it expects to pay an annual per-share dividend of about $1.11, down from its most recent $2.08 level. The new payout would cost the company just under $8 billion a year, down from the roughly $15 billion it paid out in 2021.

    AT&T is one of the most widely held U.S. stocks, and the company has historically offered one of the largest regular dividend payouts on the market. Based on Tuesday’s closing price, it had an 8.52% dividend yield. By comparison, rival Verizon Communications Inc. VZ: (%) had a dividend yield of 4.81% based on Tuesday’s prices.

    Shares of AT&T fell 4.2% to $24.42 on Tuesday. The stock has lost about one-third of its value since AT&T agreed to buy Time Warner Inc. in October 2016, while the S&P 500 index has doubled during the same period.

There’s more at the original.

Now, with a net worth of $60 million, and an annual base salary of $6.3 million, you’d think that Jeff Zucker, the current president of CNN Worldwide and Chairman of WarnerMedia News, would be a top, top performer; you’d think that CNN would be dominating the ratings in the 24-hour news network business, right? You wouldn’t think that it was getting stomped by Fox News and MSNBC, would you?

Well, it is, and it gets worse: CNN gets beat out by the Hallmark Channel, which shows reruns of Reba and the Golden Girls, along with really cheesy romance movies, and the Food Network, which is basically cooking shows and silly cooking competition games. Home and Garden Television (HGTV), which is 95% reruns, beats CNN.

CNN has had more than just ratings problems. The network took the absolutely brilliant journalistic decision to have its number one host, Chris Cuomo, interviewing his brother, then Governor Andrew Cuomo (D-NY), for the better part of a year over the Governor’s response to COVID-19. Then, when the Governor got in trouble over sexual harassment claims, his younger brother Fredo Chris was giving him advice and access to defend himself, all of which got the younger Mr Cuomo fired. Maybe, just maybe, if CNN had followed responsible journalistic ethics, and not allowed Chris to interview Andy all of those times, this wouldn’t have been a problem.

One of the younger Mr Cuomo’s producers, John Griffin, 44, was then fired after he was indicted for trying to lure minor girls, one only 9 years old, to his home for sexual subservience training. There’s no indication that anyone at CNN knew about Mr Griffin’s alleged activities, but it was another public relations black eye, for a network which has had a lot of them.

Under any sane business plan, Mr Zucker and all of his executive vice presidents would have been fired, and would have been fired several years ago; that they haven’t makes me wonder just what pictures Mr Zucker has of his bosses. There’s really no excuse for the kind of failure that CNN has been.

No wonder AT&T wants to get rid of WarnerMedia!

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Updated! 4:00 PM EST

Looks like I spoke too soon, From The New York Times:

    Jeff Zucker Exits CNN After Relationship With Senior Executive

    The relationship came up during the network’s investigation into the former anchor Chris Cuomo. “I was required to disclose it when it began but I didn’t,” Mr. Zucker wrote in a memo to colleagues.

    by Michael M Grynbaum | Groundhog Day, February 2, 2022

    Jeff Zucker resigned on Wednesday as the president of CNN and the chairman of WarnerMedia’s news and sports division, writing in a memo that he had failed to disclose to the company a romantic relationship with another senior executive at CNN.

    Mr. Zucker, 56, is among the most powerful leaders in the American media and television industries. The abrupt end of his nine-year tenure immediately throws into flux the direction of CNN and its parent company, WarnerMedia, which is expected to be acquired later this year by Discovery Inc. in one of the nation’s largest media mergers.

    In a memo to colleagues that was obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Zucker wrote that his relationship came up during a network investigation into the conduct of Chris Cuomo, the CNN anchor who was fired in December over his involvement in the political affairs of his brother, former Governor Andrew M. Cuomo of New York.

    “As part of the investigation into Chris Cuomo’s tenure at CNN, I was asked about a consensual relationship with my closest colleague, someone I have worked with for more than 20 years,” Mr. Zucker wrote. “I acknowledged the relationship evolved in recent years. I was required to disclose it when it began but I didn’t. I was wrong.”

There’s more at the original.

So, he completely trashed CNN’s brand, but he’s been fired resigned because he was copulating with a subordinate? How much of this was known to AT&T, and did it push the decision to divest from WarnerMedia?

Allison Gollust, CNN’s executive vice president and chief marketing officer, Mr Zucker’s co-copulator, and who kept her job, said:

    Jeff and I have been close friends and professional partners for over 20 years. Recently, our relationship changed during Covid. I regret that we didn’t disclose it at the right time. I’m incredibly proud of my time at CNN and look forward to continuing the great work we do everyday.

So, at a time when a lot of people were locked down, and when all sorts of other improper relationships were publicized, Mr Zucker and Miss Gollust were happily screwing away — both are divorced — and neither of these two highly paid executives thought, ‘hey, maybe we need to do the right thing here, policywise’? They could have disclosed it, obviously knew that they needed to disclose it, but did not until it was discovered during the investigation into the conduct of Chris Cuomo? Does this explain CNN’s wholly unprofessional decision to allow Chris Cuomo to keep having his brother on his show?

Then there’s the obvious question: if this was only discovered during the investigation into Mr Cuomo’s behavior, yet it started “during Covid,” whatever that means, just who else at CNN knew about it, and kept his mouth shut?