Good evening.

Welcome back to In The Room, and our ongoing coverage of Jeff Zucker‘s surprise ouster from CNN. Last night, we addressed the myriad conspiracy theories about WarnerMedia’s decision as it closed its case on Zucker. (If there is another shoe to drop, WarnerMedia is not going to be the one dropping it.) 

Today, we turn our attention to the anger, fear, and disillusionment inside CNN—and look at what’s at play for David Zaslav as he inherits a network in flux.

Inside CNN: From Anger to Fear

After a head-spinning 72 hours, CNN staffers are coming to terms with the Zucker news in their own ways. Some are seeing it as the end of an era for the industry. Others are mired in conspiracy theories. And pretty much everyone is pissed at Cuomo and Kilar—and wondering what Zaz is going to do.

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?

In meetings with staff, WarnerMedia C.E.O. Jason Kilar didn’t offer a comprehensive explanation and merely asked staff to have faith in his judgment. In a Friday morning interview with CNBC, AT&T C.E.O. John Stankey practically refused to address the matter, though he did make the false claim that “the decision to resign was Jeff’s decision.” Whatever small shred of truth there is to that statement can be found in the fact, relayed to me by sources with direct knowledge of the matter, that Stankey and Kilar told Zucker that if he didn’t resign they were going to fire him for cause. 

And so, in lieu of any better explanation, speculation has run wild. Hell hath no fury like a game of telephone inside a cable news company. Was Zucker guilty of some other sin? Was Kilar exacting revenge on Zucker for all the bad blood that had festered between them in recent years? More conspiratorial, still: Was the powerful Discovery shareholder John Malone, a vocal critic of CNN’s #resistance-era rebranding, secretly pulling strings from behind the scenes in an effort to oust the CNN chief before the WarnerMedia-Discovery deal closed?

Conspiracy theories abound, evidence is hard to come by, and as I reported yesterday, WarnerMedia has closed the case on Zucker. They don’t have another shoe to drop. 

But it’s safe to say that nearly 72 hours after Zucker’s undignified exit, none of his loyalists at CNN feel any less angry or upset about the circumstances than they did before. Many have directed their anger toward Kilar, for pulling the trigger on their boss. Even more are angry at Chris Cuomo who, in an effort to get the severance denied him by CNN, hired lawyer Bryan Freedman and launched the scorched-earth campaign that brought about the inquiry into Zucker and Gollust’s relationship in the first place. (Freedman has declined to comment on this matter.) A few take some solace in knowing that, with Zucker gone, Cuomo probably just jettisoned any chance of earning his desired severance. A Daily Mail report today claims that he is now seeking $9 million from CNN, instead of the initial $18 million he wanted. You should read that as an attempt by Cuomo’s side to say they’re willing to come to the negotiating table and ask for less. Many close to the situation think that AT&T and WarnerMedia won’t budge. 

Inside CNN, the sense of loss is seismic, the effect devastating. I’m not exaggerating when I say that the people I spoke to are talking and thinking as if they’ve just witnessed a shape-shifting historical event. In conversations with colleagues, lead Washington anchor Jake Tapper has likened Zucker’s departure to the day Ben Bradlee retired from The Washington Post. Ken Jautz, one of the three interim leaders put in place after Zucker’s exit, has called his former boss the most consequential executive in CNN’s history, after founder Ted Turner. The near-unanimous sentiment is that a once-in-a-generation leader is gone. 

As CNN employees enter the weekend, new emotions are surfacing, too. Some insiders describe a state of fear—fear over their futures now that Zucker isn’t there to lead them, fight for them and, as importantly, rationalize their paychecks. Will CNN’s next boss want or try to convince Warner Bros. Discovery that the host of an afternoon show deserves a multi-million dollar paycheck, even if that show barely clears 100,000 viewers in the demo? What if that new leader has a different idea than Zucker of what looks good on CNN airwaves, and what if it doesn’t include them?

In the wake of Kilar’s contentious meeting with CNN staff in D.C., which laid bare the anger and frustration among some of CNN’s most notable talents, someone put a bug in my ear that the talent might stage a walkout demanding Zucker’s reinstatement. I put that question to some of those talents. “We’re not eighth graders,” one of them told me. “We’re pissed, but we’re going to do our jobs.”

That idea may have been fanciful, but few also have the leverage or the desire to go anywhere else. The American television news landscape is extremely limited: broadcast news is losing its relevance, and facing its own existential crises. Talent and executives are boxed in. Fox News is too far to the right for almost anyone at CNN. MSNBC is too far to the left in primetime for most, and it too is beset by its own internal troubles, as I outlined last week. While most of the on-air talent I spoke with are grieving over the loss of Zucker, they still feel an enormous amount of pride for the CNN brand and faith in its ability to endure. Oh, and: Most of them are still under contract. As sources familiar with the matter told me this week, there is no “key man” clause in those contracts that would allow them to exit early because Zucker is no longer their boss.

In a matter of months, when the WarnerMedia-Discovery deal closes, the questions about CNN’s future and its future leader will fall on the desk of David Zaslav, who is with Stankey in Pebble Beach this weekend for the annual PGA Pro-Am. Zaslav is inheriting an enormous media machine, of which CNN is just a relatively small piece. But as my partner Bill Cohan has reported, Zaz also made his bones as a young GE executive by helping found both CNBC and MSNBC. His preternatural instinct for programming basic cable—the lifeblood of the Discovery assets—will likely allow him to come to the issue with strong instincts of his own. After all, the future of CNN is CNN+, which is likely to be a platform devoted as much to news as news-adjacent lifestyle content that populates Discovery’s portfolio. (Kilar repeatedly told CNN staff this week that CNN+ would one day account for the majority of the network’s business.)

With Zucker’s resignation, an era that has been quietly ending for some time now appears to have concluded with a bang, not a whimper. On some level, the emotions expressed within CNN all point toward one inchoate but undeniable reality. Zucker was the last of a breed of network news honchos—a larger than life figure and descendant in the line of Roone Arledge, Don Hewitt, Andy Lack. As the action moves from broadcast and cable to streaming, television news has been humbled and network chiefs are now more like magazine editors, inheritors of diminished, belt-tightened fiefdoms.

Part of the sadness inside CNN undoubtedly stems from the fact that Zucker’s force of nature and stature not only fended off the corporate overlords, but his presence also conferred an old school media titan dignity to the joint. Under his tenure, CNN may have become more politicized, with mixed results from a ratings perspective, but it was also restored to its perch as a blue chip brand—and not just a business unit in a $100 billion media conglomerate. It’s too early to know how Zaslav will shape the future of CNN, but it seems clear inside the building that many know, for the first time in years, that they are on their own.

FOUR STORIES WE’RE TALKING ABOUT