CNN Boss Jeff Zucker Calls Out Faux News As a Front For the repugican cabal

CNN head Jeff Zucker didn't mince words when talking to the media recently. Zucker said that Faux News is a front for the repugican cabal

CNN head Jeff Zucker didn’t mince words when talking to the media recently. Zucker said that Faux News is a front for the repugican cabal and that the repugican cabal is being run out of Faux. Jeff Zucker took the opportunity presented by the upcoming release of Richard Sherman’s biography of Roger Ailes to unload on Faux News, “Clearly all I can say at this point, without having read it, is from what I understand it confirms, basically, what we’ve known all along, which is that the repugican cabal is being run out of News Corp headquarters, masquerading as a cable channel.”
Zucker hit Ailes for doing an interview with The Hollywood Reporter on the same week that the book is coming out, “[Ailes] doesn’t do an interview in a long time and then does it the week that the book comes out? He’s trying to deflect attention. Clearly there’s probably no other network in American television that is covering news in such a substantial and serious way than CNN.”
Zucker’s statement seems like a Captain Obvious moment, but consider that one of the reasons why Faux News is able to get away with as much as it does is that the mainstream media largely takes FNC’s side and treats them like a real news organization.
Back in 2010, the media flipped out when President Obama spoke the truth about Faux News in a Rolling Stone interview, “Look, as president, I swore to uphold the Constitution, and part of that Constitution is a free press. We’ve got a tradition in this country of a press that oftentimes is opinionated. The golden age of an objective press was a pretty narrow span of time in our history. Before that, you had folks like Hearst who used their newspapers very intentionally to promote their viewpoints. I think Faux is part of that tradition — it is part of the tradition that has a very clear, undeniable point of view. It’s a point of view that I disagree with. It’s a point of view that I think is ultimately destructive for the long-term growth of a country that has a vibrant middle class and is competitive in the world. But as an economic enterprise, it’s been wildly successful. And I suspect that if you ask Mr. Murdoch what his number-one concern is, it’s that Faux is very successful.”
After that interview, mainstream media television networks ran to the defense of Faux News. Mainstream outlets that are desperate to follow the money making model of Faux have more times than not defended the network as a real outlet for journalism, so Zucker’s comments are a big deal.
CNN has a multitude of problems. One of which is a bias towards repugicans that makes the network much less of a straight shooter than Zucker claims. I think Al Jazeera America would disagree with Zucker’s statement that no other American network is covering the news as substantially as CNN. Plus it is ironic that Zucker would talk about substance at CNN after he brought back the completely empty Crossfire, and has loaded up his weekend primetime lineup with non-news programming.
If more network heads would speak out against Faux News, the truth might set journalism free. The mainstream media, including CNN, still foolishly believe that America is a wingnut country and their path to huge profits is to copy Faux. Until this changes, the sorry pro-repugican state of corporate media won’t be transformed anytime soon.