It’s been a week for the staff at CNN. Jeff Zucker, their admired leader, was forced to resign on Wednesday and, in the days since, no one from AT&T or WarnerMedia has provided them with satisfactory answers for why he was so abruptly and mercilessly defenestrated. In the view of dozens of CNN insiders that I’ve spoken with, the love and loyalty between Zucker and his comms chief, Allison Gollust, were well known. The two were genuinely best friends, work spouses, and intimately close advisers, who spent nearly every minute together, even on weekends, and if you called him she might be the one to answer his phone. Was the fact that Zucker had failed to disclose their Covid-era evolution to a more-than-platonic relationship really grounds for an immediate termination, many have wondered aloud, both in the newsroom and on-air? 

Throughout a number of conversations, CNN staffers were aghast at how bungled the exit had been. Did Zucker effectively have to be perp-walked out of the joint for a consensual relationship, some wondered rhetorically? Doing so made CNN the biggest story in the industry. And surely, others wondered, there could have been a more elegant way to transfer power in the midst of the pending merger of the WarnerMedia assets with Discovery. Couldn’t Zucker at least have been given some time to set up a transition—and, after all, wouldn’t that have been better for the now suddenly rudderless CNN?