CNN employee to Vanity Fair: ‘Real chance that Zucker is being forced out’

A Tuesday Vanity Fair report quotes a CNN employee saying “there’s a real chance that [CNN President Jeff] Zucker is being forced out,” as a result of a pending merger between AT&T and CNN’s parent company, Time Warner.

The story, titled “Has Trump Turned CNN Into a House of Existential Dread?,” notes that AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson and President Trump have met “numerous times” since Trump took office in January.

The president, who often refers to CNN as “fake news,” reportedly told attendees at a recent fundraiser in Washington, D.C., that “he heard CNN may see management changes in the near future.”

“That’s going to blow up this organization like nothing in the history of CNN,” the CNN employee who spoke to veteran media writer Sarah Ellison added.

{mosads}Zucker hired Trump in 2004 to star in “The Apprentice” while he was president of NBC Universal. The show would go on to be one of the top-rated programs on the network for several years.

But after CNN coverage of Trump turned noticeably negative, Trump and Zucker have feuded publicly.

“Jeff Zucker, I hear he’s going to resign at some point pretty soon. I mean, these are horrible human beings,” Trump said at a June 28 fundraiser at his D.C. hotel.

“I believe CNN is the only major news organization that has not had an interview with Trump as president,” Zucker told a gathering of media reporters in June. “I do think that tells you he knows he would be held to account on CNN.”

A recent Harvard study showed CNN coverage of the Trump administration as being 93 percent negative.

A July 3 Axios online poll showed Americans trust CNN more than Trump by a 7-point margin.

Trump has not appeared on the network since August 2016.

Trump’s aides have reportedly discussed the upcoming merger between AT&T and Time Warner as possible leverage as tensions continue to mount between the White House and CNN.

According to The New York Times on July 5, the Justice Department will likely approve the merger announced last October.

But while the paper reported that analysts say there isn’t much in the way of stopping the deal, “the president’s animus toward CNN remains a wild card.”

In an interview for the story, Zucker would not comment on the merger but did say he has not spoken about it with Time Warner’s chief executive, Jeffrey Bewkes.

“It’s not something I think about,” Zucker told the Times.

The Hill has reached out to CNN for comment.