Jeff Zucker’s legacy

In The Washington Post, Margaret Sullivan considers the legacy of CNN president Jeff Zucker:

Zucker, as much as any other person in the world, created and burnished the Trump persona — first as a reality-TV star who morphed into a worldwide celebrity, then as a candidate for president who was given large amounts of free publicity.

The through line? Nothing nobler than TV ratings, which always were Zucker’s guiding light, his be-all and end-all and, ultimately, his fatal flaw.

I remember what I think of as an infamous CNN moment from May 2016, when the network devoted screentime to a parked plane: “We’ll continue to monitor the takeoff of that plane.” As I wrote back then, any complaint

about the failure of “elites” to protect democracy from the likes of Donald Trump misses the point that Trump’s candidacy is itself the product of an elite — not a political elite but a media elite, one that has kept Trump (and even his parked plane) front and center for months now.

Good riddance to Jeff Zucker.