On Tuesday, I received a call from a fellow media reporter who wanted my reaction to a feature story that Tatiana Siegel had just published in Variety about CNN—a topic that, admittedly, has been of great interest to me during the last two years. The story, as it was described to me, posited that former CNN president Jeff Zucker, who as everyone knows had been unceremoniously removed from his position some 18 months ago, had been secretly plotting a double-barreled revenge fantasy. 

According to the story, this person told me, Zucker was trying to put together an international syndicate of wealthy investors—Jeff Bezos, George Soros’s son Alex, and the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, among them—to try to acquire the news network from Warner Bros. Discovery while simultaneously waging a shadow campaign holy war to depose his ill-fated successor, Chris Licht. Heavy cake. 

I hadn’t read the piece yet, but the premise struck me as utterly implausible and sophomoric. It also contradicted nearly two years of reporting I’d done on CNN and the aforementioned executives. But, needless to say, I was eager to read it. 

From the opening sentence, however, the story seemed problematic and riddled with factual inaccuracies. It began, to wit, by describing a run-in between Zucker and Warner Bros. Discovery chief executive David Zaslav at a Miami Beach hotel where, the author noted, Zaslav was attending the Saudi-backed FII Institute’s Global Priority Summit. Multiple sources who were at that event told me that Zaslav did not even attend the summit, and a WBD spokesperson confirmed that he was in Miami for a different reason. 

The piece then claimed that Zucker spotted Zaslav at the hotel and approached him “with tears in his eyes,” itself a credulity-straining detail, and complained that Licht “was unfairly maligning him in the press.” In fact, there was no such run-in at the hotel, because the two parties connected by phone beforehand and agreed to meet privately at one of the hotel’s private cabanas. (The WBD spokesperson declined to comment on a private conversation.) 

It soon became clear that the very premise of the piece was similarly hollow. What’s more, it seems like Variety knew it, too, and didn’t seem to care. In many cases, Siegel’s assertions about Zucker’s attempt to court a certain investor would be followed by an on-the-record denial from Zucker’s spokesperson, Risa Heller, categorically refuting that a meeting had ever happened. In one illustrative example, Siegel wrote: “Zucker approached Jeff Bezos, Laurene Powell Jobs and Alex Soros about investing in his CNN bid.” And that sentence was followed by: “‘He has never discussed buying CNN with Jeff Bezos, Laurene Powell Jobs or Alex Soros. Jeff has never met or spoken to Alex Soros,’ Zucker’s spokeswoman says.” Ditto Mário Ferreira, the owner of CNN Portugal; ditto a Turkish bank purporting to represent Zucker in his alleged acquisition; ditto Abramovich, who has been sanctioned by the U.S. government for his ties to Putin. (Heller also represents Puck.)

The Zucker syndicate seemed pretty implausible on every level—not only had he not met with these investors, but he was already engaged with Gerry Cardinale’s RedBird Capital Partners on a separate investment entity. Also, who is to say that he would even want to reconnect with the asset. Recall, of course, that Zucker planned to leave CNN long before his ouster. As the guy who ran the business for the better part of a decade, no one is more aware of its challenges. Meanwhile, smart money doesn’t fuel revenge plays for all the obvious reasons (such as the fact that they are virtually impossible to close). There’s no way in hell that Zaz would ever sell it to a Zucker-backed group—and Zucker, even in an alternate universe where he wanted CNN, would know that better than anyone else. But anyway…

As CNN’s Oliver Darcy recently noted, the veracity of the Variety story quickly came under “heightened scrutiny” from journalists, executives, television agents, and others across the industry for whom it simply does not pass the smell test. But perhaps more curious was the way in which Variety’s editors have chosen to address—or rather, not address—the pushback. 

For instance, the author sought to cast doubt on both my extensive reporting about CNN as well as that of Tim Alberta, who wrote the devastating and defenestrating Licht profile in The Atlantic. Both Alberta and The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, have issued public statements outlining demonstrably false claims about Alberta’s reporting. Puck co-founder and editor-in-chief Jon Kelly also sent an email to the author and the editors of the Variety piece on Tuesday outlining demonstrably false claims about my reporting and seeking corrections. Siegel also asserted that I failed to disclose that Zucker had briefly talked to Puck about a potential investment in the startup—conversations he has also had with other news startups like Punchbowl and Semafor. I was wholly unaware of that conversation until it was reported in the press. (Siegel was told that, too, but did not include it.) As of Wednesday evening, Variety has not corrected any of the errors.

Late Wednesday night, just as I was preparing to publish this column, The Wrap reported that Zucker had formally asked Variety to retract the report.

Breaking the Fourth Wall

Before writing today’s column, I spent a significant amount of time wrestling with whether or not to address the Variety story at all. The industry seems to have already concluded that the story is mostly meritless, and I was reluctant to draw any further attention to it. And yet it also occurred to me that there are some larger issues at play here that go well beyond Zucker and Licht, CNN and WBD, and certainly me and Tim Alberta. (Alas, what is Puck for if not to break the fourth wall.)

On Tuesday afternoon, as my phone was buzzing with texts and calls about the Variety story, I set everything aside for nearly two hours to have coffee with an entertainment industry C.E.O. here in Los Angeles. After mentioning the Variety piece to him, he relayed his own litany of frustrations with media organizations that had published wildly inaccurate claims about him and his company, and that misconstrued the narrative around his industry. 

He didn’t mind criticism, he said. He didn’t even mind it when reporters made mistakes. What did bother him, he said, was the way in which certain reporters and editors had started simply belittling facts that ran counter to their narrative—even when these facts were pointed out to them on the record, and before publication. And because these reporters and editors worked for reputable brands with long histories, their reporting was taken as fact.

This is a complaint I have heard myriad times from C.E.O.s and other industry leaders in Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and New York. Needless to say, it can sometimes be hard to sympathize with the man or woman raking in tens of millions of dollars who is nevertheless perturbed by what they view as unfair treatment in the press. Then again, my own role as a media reporter has made me keenly aware that there are occasions in which their complaints are valid—and, having been on the receiving end of it from time to time, including now, I must say it doesn’t inspire a great deal of confidence.

Variety’s leadership, which offered a statement of support for the story shortly after publication, may not cop to the errors, but I’m guessing they can’t wait for the weekend to close in. The story is virtually impossible to find on its homepage, which has mysteriously led with a Sinead O’Connor obituary for most of the day. 

Now, With That Out of the Way…

If the Variety story achieved anything, it was highlighting CNN’s constant vulnerability to fickle corporate overlords who never seem to know quite what they want to do with the asset. CNN has had three different owners in the last six years, each with varying strategic ambitions. And as I reported last week, it’s quite possible it will have yet another owner one day, should Zaz & Co. determine that they want to offload the asset in order to bring down their $45 billion net debt load. 

This may be easy enough to rationalize in the boardroom, but down in the newsroom the mere putative specter of another sale is a morale killer. “I think from the top down people see a clock,” one CNN staffer told me. “Stabilize and business-as-usual through the election, and that’s the end of any vision or plan because there will be a new owner.” (To be clear, WBD maintains it’s committed to CNN and has no plans to sell.)

Every news organization experiences ups and downs. The Washington Post, which is still reeling from Fred Ryan’s failure to come up with a sustainable business strategy to outlive the Trump bump, is now on pace to lose about $100 million in 2023, per The New York Times. And yet many of the staffers I spoke to this week seem ebullient and hopeful now that Bezos has once again professed a long-term commitment to the paper’s success, installed a new interim C.E.O. in Patty Stonesifer, and pledged to make significant investments in new editorial initiatives. 

By contrast, CNN staffers aren’t sure what to look forward to. Programming questions, like the longevity of Kaitlan Collins at 9 p.m., for instance, feel almost irrelevant to everyone save for the parties involved. Last week I reported that Phil Mattingly will become a CNN This Morning co-host. This week, I learned that the network is testing possible replacements for Alisyn Camerota at 10 p.m.—no doubt her attendance at Don Lemon’s Hamptons house, alongside Zucker, did not endear her to the bosses at WBD—and that Sara Sidner is seen as a possible candidate. (It’s not yet certain that Camerota will vacate that timeslot.) But none of these decisions stand to change the fortunes of CNN’s declining linear business, nor do they have any bearing on its long-term success in the post-linear era.

Interestingly, the further CNN employees drift toward this uncertain future, the more I hear them talk, somewhat wistfully, about CNN+. As much as that service was lampooned for its first iteration of programming—the Tapper book club, etcetera—it was, at the very least, a strategy for carrying CNN over into the streaming future, the architecture upon which CNN might have conceivably built a sustainable lifestyle subscription product, à la The New York Times. 

One of the chief architects of that vision, former CNN Digital chief Andrew Morse, left the company shortly after WBD killed CNN+ in the crib and ended up running the Atlanta Journal Constitution. Coincidentally enough, I learned this week that Cox Enterprises, AJC’s parent company, intends to invest around $100 million into the paper to fuel Morse’s attempt to make AJC the primary news and lifestyle brand of the American South. So they, too, have something to look forward to.

Back at CNN, however, there seems to be no future for the network other than as a tab on the Max streaming service. By that point, of course, the economics fueling the cable news business will have shifted so considerably—smaller sub fees, fewer households, lower ad rates—that CNN may no longer be able to afford the very talents now vying for the increasingly meaningless timeslots. Indeed, at the end of the day, Variety missed the real story.