In 2013, CNN edged out MSNBC as the #2 news network on cable. 2013 was also the year that Jeff Zucker was named president of CNN Worldwide. After leading CNN past MSNBC that first year, it appeared Zucker was the right man for the job, to finally rejuvenate the moribund CNN brand and bring energy back to the lackluster network.
Nearly nine years later, it's clear that was not the case.
Zucker has overseen one of the most catastrophic brand re-definitions in modern media history. CNN once possessed a somewhat stale, Larry King-sorta persona that didn't really excite the masses but was a stable, reliable place to go for information, inoffensive analysis, and most importantly, breaking news.
2012 saw a line-up of Wolf Blitzer, Erin Burnett, John King, Anderson Cooper, and Piers Morgan. It was... fine.
And, whenever there was a storm, fire, riot, earthquake, plane crash, or military development, CNN would always be the channel most people would turn to.
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Then along came Zucker.
When he took charge of CNN, he said he wanted CNN to morph into a news network with "an attitude and a take" that The Atlantic likened to Vince McMahon's approach to professional wrestling.
Zucker outlined his new mission to Capital New York's Mike Allen and Alex Weprin, saying he wants CNN to become the news network with “an attitude and a take." Much like how Vince McMahon changed the then-World Wrestling Federation in the mid-90s with racier, reality-driven storylines (known to historians as "The Attitude Era") Zucker plans to do something similar with cable news.
How right they were.
The vanishing of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 is the perfect example of how the wheels came off CNN's "news" brand and how Zucker re-made it into a low-rent, reality network.
The flight coverage was the kind of story that was tailor-made for CNN, and at the beginning of their coverage, they were the place to turn for all the latest live press conferences and analysis. Then, something weird happened.
As the missing flight story became rather stale, with no new leads and no new developments, MSNBC and Fox started to move on to other important news and political stories. Not CNN.
They strangely stayed with the 24/7 "BREAKING NEWS" kind of coverage of a story that, clearly, was not "BREAKING" and wasn't really "news" any longer.
The CNN approach to MH370 became a punchline... literally. Jon Stewart at "The Daily Show" pointed out the absurdity of CNN's hyperventilating coverage, as did most Americans at their office cubicles and coffee machines.
Eventually, the punchline of MH370 made its way onto CNN itself as host Don Lemon openly speculated as to whether the plane was sucked into a black hole (this is the same guy who questions your grasp of science if you balk at wearing a piece of cloth on your face while walking alone on the beach).
Zucker (and his paid sycophantic apologist Brian Stelter) would assure you that the ratings bounce from the MH370 coverage was palpable and worth the snide derision. And, yes, the network did have a bump during their ridiculous Malaysian air obsession. But, at what cost?
The wall-to-wall coverage on a story that didn't actually have any real news developments to justify the hyper-focus put the hosts and on-air analysts into the position of spending most of their time speculating rather than reporting and analyzing. It may have been entertaining, but it sure wasn't news.
And the habit of speculating and predicting rather than reporting and analyzing was hard to break. By the time the 2016 election came around, they approached presidential politics in the same way. They spent their time assuring their viewers that Hillary Clinton was assured of victory, and they willfully ignored the biggest story in American politics in nearly a century.
After the Trump victory in 2016, Zucker went all-in on the WWE style of news coverage. In just four short years, his "attitude" approach to the news has left CNN hemorrhaging viewers compared to their counterparts, rendering the once-reliable "most trusted name in news" motto to a punchline for talk radio hosts.
And because of their misfire on their coverage of MH370, CNN ruined their long-standing image as the network to turn to for real-time, up-to-the-minute coverage of breaking news and major events. The network that fumbled the plane crash story could no longer be trusted with the next big breaking event. So viewers learned to turn elsewhere.
Zucker taught them to turn elsewhere.
Instead of re-inventing CNN to be "the house that Zucker built," he watched as Jim Acosta and Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon brought the network into a nose dive, leaving it a pile of flaming debris not unlike the probable fate of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370. The irony is awesome.
Forget about "the house that Zucker built," it's "the house that Zucker burnt to the ground."
Now, will anyone have the talent to rebuild the house?
