CNN President Jeff Zucker Faces Wrath of Media Critics Over Audio of Call With Michael Cohen

CNN President Jeff Zucker has faced intense criticism after Fox News host Tucker Carlson released audio of a friendly phone call between him and Michael Cohen in March 2016.

The audio featured Zucker offering Cohen debate tips for his client, then-presidential candidate Donald Trump. Zucker also floated a weekly show on CNN to be hosted by Trump, and claimed, “You cannot be elected President of the United States without CNN. FOX and MSNBC are irrelevant — irrelevant — in electing a general election candidate.”

Despite receiving minimal coverage in the news this week, some media critics were scathing in their assessments.

Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple called Zucker’s debate tips for Trump “dumb,” and dinged the “ethical depravity” of the call.

“CNN makes a big deal of its journalistic purity, its standards and practices, its protection of sources. Here was a clear violation from a the man who supervises the network’s 3,000 employees at 36 ‘editorial operations’ around the world,” Wemple wrote. “Any of those folks could have told Zucker not to pass along tips to a presidential campaign.”

(Wemple also pointed out the silliness of a Fox News host who advises the president making hay about CNN’s president advising Trump’s lawyer.)

NBC News senior media reporter Dylan Byers, writing in his daily newsletter, called the revelation of the call “either morally reprehensible or merely unfortunate depending on who you ask,” though noted that Zucker has never denied being a business-focused executive.

“No one needed a private recording to know that Zucker is relentlessly focused on the business side of the news,” Byers wrote. “What the recording does show, however, is that in March of 2016, after nine months of Trump’s divisive rhetoric about minorities, immigrants, women and the media — rhetoric that CNN now claims to abhor — Zucker was still willing to float the idea of giving Trump his own CNN show.”

“Maybe you think that’s depraved. Maybe you think it’s just savvy, or cutthroat,” they concluded. “As for what Jeff Zucker thinks, I don’t know. He didn’t respond to a request for comment.”

CNN did not return Mediate’s request for comment either.

Matt Stieb of New York Magazine wrote that the transcript of the discussion is “just the latest document in the long, strange relationship between Zucker and the billionaire he picked to star in The Apprentice in 2004, launching Trump into another level of stardom,” while Tommy Vietor, a former spokesman for President Barack Obama and the founder of Crooked Media commented, “No one should be surprised that the 2016 coverage of Trump was broken and terrible when you have people like Jeff Zucker in charge.”

Rolling Stone contributing editor Matt Taibbi called the news “a pretty significant media story that hasn’t been picked up much, for obvious reasons,” and Greta Van Susteren, a former anchor for CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC tweeted, “OK..this is weird…CNN’s Jeff Zucker and Michael Cohen have a conversation that is recorded..how did Tucker Carlson get this recording?”

“It sure makes Zucker look BAD so I doubt he gave it to him…did Cohen give it to him? And why would he?” she questioned.

Upon the release of the first recording by Carlson, Cohen wrote on Twitter that the only people in possession of the recordings were him, the Justice Department, the president, and the Trump Organization.

“I did not give this recording or authorization for its use to @FoxNews or anyone,” he wrote.