CNN’s Camerota Mourns Zucker: “This Feels Wrong”

CLAY: This is pretty crazy to me. They actually had a segment on air discussing Zucker leaving CNN. I want to play this cut for you of one of their anchors — I believe her name is Alisyn Camerota — saying it feels wrong that two consenting adults can’t have a private relationship. Listen to this.

CAMEROTA: I feel it deeply personally, but also, I think I speak for all of us and our colleagues. This is an incredible loss. It’s an incredible loss. Zeff is a remarkable person and an incredible leader. He has this uncanny ability to make, I think, every one of us feel special and valuable in our own way, even though he is managing an international news organization of thousands of people.

VOICE: Mmmfph!

CAMEROTA: I just know that he had this unique ability to make us feel special and I don’t think that that comes around all the time, and I think again it’s an incredible loss, and I just think it’s so regrettable how it happened.

VOICE: Mmmfph!

CAMEROTA: If — if what you’re reporting is true, these are two consenting adults who are both executives.

VOICE: Mmm!

CAMEROTA: That th-th-th-they (sputters) can’t have a private relationship feels wrong.

CLAY: That’s not wrong at all. Okay, I did labor and employment law for a fairly decent amount of time, Buck. I would actually investigate sexual harassment claims inside of companies, and so I would go interview everybody. I would interview potential witnesses. I would try to determine what happened inside of a company. So that CNN would go on and have this saying “it feels wrong”?

Look, you have the guy who was in charge of everybody’s salary, of everybody’s employment at CNN. He doesn’t have the ability to elevate a woman that he’s sleeping with without having other corporate executives aware of what’s going on, and have a secret relationship with her. I mean, this is not permissible. Now, if he wanted to say, “Hey, we’re in a relationship, we’re disclosing it,” I’m all in favor of it, he specifically lied about this and chose not to do it.

And, Buck, I think the evidence is gonna show that he actually hired her from Andrew Cuomo’s office to come work at CNN after they were already in a relationship, which means he hired his girlfriend. What if you were trying to get one of these jobs that she got instead? You had absolutely no ability to compete for this.

So the fact that they would trot out anchors who would say, “Oh, this feels wrong to me,” when you lie… When you run a company and you lie about people who work for you, that you are in a relationship with, you are destroying any element of trust that could exist as it pertains to your ability to fairly judge that woman or that man if it were in reverse. We’re not talking about somebody who’s a PA on a show, some 23-year-old who doesn’t have a lot of power. We’re talking about the person who runs the network, Buck, the guy who decides whether or not people get hired and fired.

BUCK: Jeff Zucker, if he wanted you to have a show at CNN, you had a show. If he wanted you to make $3 million a year, that’s what you made. If he wanted you to make $7 million a year, that’s what you made or whatever the case may be. And so when you have that level of power inside an institution of that kind of reach and such as we can sit around, and should, make fun of how…

CNN’s American domestic audience is tiny. Unfortunately, it’s still a very large global brand. One of the things that angers me the most about CNN is when I was in Beijing a couple of years ago, remember the only English-language channel I could get in the hotel room was CNN International. It is like the Chinese Communist Party set up an anti-American propaganda channel.

“Trump about to start a war in Iran! Trump about to start a war in North Korea!” This is during the Trump presidency, obviously, and what CNN International pushes all over the world is effectively anti-Americanism which is appalling but they do it — and then CNN.com is also, unfortunately, still a big site. So this got a lot of reach, a lot of funding.

And because we’re just waking up now on the right to the difference in how, you know, brand association — you know, Mercedes-Benz, you know, Google, you know, whatever — they’ll advertise on CNN, but, oh, conservative media, that’s too… You know, that’s toxic, that’s dangerous for us; so CNN also gets a premium.

So it’s a very wealthy, very influential media company despite the fact that it sucks and is bad at everything and is dishonest. And so I just think that now as you see this, you realize the rot was from the top, as is so often the case in places like this, and when other news organizations have come under fire, other situations like this, CNN, if it’s not Democrats, they’re very smug about it, very high and mighty.

They were frauds. This was going on for years, years, Clay, years and year and, by the way, everyone who knows this building — and I’m gonna start reaching out to some of my sources. I’m a little busy in Miami right now but I’ll reach out to people this weekend. This is the tip of the iceberg, folks. When Jeff Zucker is doing something like this what do you think other guys who are trying to leverage or women, by the way, leverage their position, too, to elevate themselves professionally inside that institution. All kinds of shenanigans were happening there. Get ready for some big lawsuits.

CLAY: Not only that, Buck — and I think this goes for people out there listening, like, “Why does this matter?” I think the biggest power nowadays when it comes to institutions like CNN, the New York Times, Washington Post, also MSNBC. Their leadership — and Jeff Zucker was leader at CNN — they get to decide which stories matter.

Remember there was a story, I think it was from Project Veritas, about how Zucker had the morning meeting to discuss what the news of the day was, and he effectively just said, “This Hunter Biden story is not news. We’re not going to cover it.” They ignored it because they knew it hurt Joe Biden and they wanted Joe Biden to be elected president. That’s an incredible amount of power to bring to bear in a situation like that.