Blame Jeff Zucker for Donald Trump
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If you're looking for someone to blame for Donald Trump, the Washington Post says you can look to CNN's boss Jeff Zucker.
The Post writes that it was Zucker, after all, who as the new head of NBC Entertainment gave Trump his start in reality TV with “The Apprentice” and then milked the real estate developer’s uncanny knack for success for all it was worth in ratings and profits.
Zucker rode the Trump steed hard. When the reality-TV star was preparing to marry Melania Knauss in 2005, Zucker wanted to broadcast the wedding live. (Trump, uncharacteristically, declined.)
But make no mistake: There would be no Trump-the-politician without Trump-the-TV-star. One begot the other.
Ten years later, it was Zucker, now the head of CNN, who gave Trump astonishing amounts of free exposure in the Republican presidential primary on the cable network, continually blasting out his speeches and rallies — often unfiltered and without critical fact-checking.
“It’s a not-unfair knock on CNN to say that they went all in on Trump and helped him enormously,” Ken Lerer, co-founder of the Huffington Post and BuzzFeed, said in a recent onstage interview at City University of New York’s journalism school. “I think it was a strategy, a programming strategy.”
Of course, CNN was hardly alone. Fox News, too, has been a megaphone for Trump for many months. And nearly every news outlet has played a part — from newspaper front pages to NPR to the network nightly news.
Despite the fact that CNN sucked up to Trump at every turn, the orange guy still turned on Zucker.
He called CNN "unwatchable" and Zucker a "failure".
Under Zucker, FTVLive agress with Trump and the fact that CNN's coverage often has become unwatchable.
Zucker hooked his wagon to Donald Trump and he didn't seem to care that this very unqualified might become the next President. Zucker didn't care about the country, he just cared about ratings.
As Trump would say....SAD!
