The Leaked Photo on Jeff Zucker

Some of Jeff Zucker’s pet people at CNN got the chance to bitch to WarnerMedia boss Jason Kilar about the fact that he fired Zucker.

At one point Jake Tapper said this:

TAPPER: If you could address the perception, because we're all going to be asked about this. The perception that Chris Cuomo gets fired by CNN. Chris Cuomo hires a high-powered lawyer who has a scorched-earth policy, who then makes it very clear to the world that unless Jeff gives Chris Cuomo his money, they're going to blow the place up. Stuff starts getting leaked to gossip websites about Jeff and Allison, including a photograph supposedly of the two of them at a Billy Joel concert, although if you look closely you can also see Fareed Zakaria and Don Lemon at that same concert. Then weeks later, Jeff comes forward, discloses this and resigns, not willingly. An outside observer might say, 'Well, looks like Chris Cuomo succeeded. He threatened. Jeff said, we don't negotiate with terrorists, and Chris blew the place up.' How do we get past that perception that this is the bad guy winning?

So, let’s talk about that “leaked photo” which wasn’t leaked at all.

The photo first went wide when FTVLive published a story way back on Nov. 18th of 2021. We drew a red circle around Zucker and CNN communications boss Allison Gollust.

That photo of Zucker and his girlfriend Gollust was taken at a Billy Joel concert by a young man named Jack Elbaum.

Elbaum was at the concert and writes this:

“Only a few minutes after sitting down prior to the concert starting, I noticed three people I recognized to my left. These were not people I knew personally, but rather some of the most well-known names at CNN: primetime anchor Don Lemon, Sunday show host Fareed Zakaria, and the president of the network, Jeff Zucker.

One thing that stuck out to me instantly was the fact none of them were wearing masks.”

What Elbaum didn’t know was that on Zucker’s left was Gollust. He wrote the story about the CNN crew not wearing masks.

He didn’t realize at the time that the bigger story was the happy couple in the middle of the picture.

FTVLive was sent the photo, we put the red circle around Zucker and Gollust and made the two together as the focus of our story, which was picked up and stolen by (Radar) a number of other media outlets.

Tapper said in his whining to Kilar, “although if you look closely you can also see Fareed Zakaria and Don Lemon at that same concert.”

You didn’t have to look closely, FTVLive mentioned that in our original story.

Here is a screenshot of a portion of the story that Tapper is talking about.

Tapper makes it sound like a sinister plan launched by WarnerMedia to leak a photo to FTVLive and bring Jeff Zucker down.

In fact, it was a young man that went to a concert, spotted the CNN people, and didn’t even know that the bigger story was about whom Zucker was sitting next to.

If this is how Jake Tapper vets his stories, I’m not sure I would trust him very much.

Just saying….