On Feb. 2, Jeff Zucker, president of CNN Worldwide, announced his resignation for violating the company’s code of conduct. Zucker failed to disclose a romantic relationship with his subordinate, Chief Marketing Officer Allison Gollust. He stated in a memo that “as part of the investigation into Chris Cuomo’s tenure at CNN, [he] was asked about a consensual relationship with [his] closest colleague… [of] more than 20 years,” and that he “was required to disclose it when it began but [he] didn’t.” Supposedly, the long-standing relationship between Gollust and Zucker turned sexual during the pandemic. However, according to the Wall Street Journal, Gollust was ousted from CNN on Feb. 18 because many people believed that the relationship started much earlier than the pandemic.
The relationship between Zucker and Gollust may have been completely consensual [he would have still violated CNN’s policy regarding romantic relationships], but their relationship is private and thus should be left out of this discussion.
Nonetheless, the discrepancy in power between Zucker and Gollust is substantial enough to incite inquiry into Gollust’s ability to decline Zucker’s sexual advances. Gollust met Zucker when he was an executive producer and seven years her senior. The next year, Zucker promoted her to Senior Publicist. I want to be clear that my intent is not to question Gollust’s talent as a publicist — there is no reason to suggest that she did not deserve her promotions — but evidence suggests that the relationship between Gollust and Zucker played a significant role in her career, and that may have limited Gollust’s decision-making power in the relationship. For example, if Gollust decided that she wanted to end her sexual relationship with Zucker, she could have been fired, or her burgeoning career could haven otherwise been halted.
This type of power imbalance was constant throughout their entire relationship, even if they truly began their relationship during the COVID-19 pandemic. Gollust had an exorbitant amount of implicit pressure on her to remain in a relationship with Zucker, which left Gollust subject to his inclinations. She was dependent on Zucker, and there is no evidence that she had the liberty to refuse his desires. However, the deeply inappropriate nature of their relationship is relegated to the background of the articles covering the transgression.
The articles I read seemed wholly uninterested in the relationship between Zucker and Gollust, instead focusing on the financial impacts of their scandal, and for some reason, Cuomo’s abhorrent behavior. I can somewhat understand why this is happening, given that Discovery, CNN’s parent company, will soon merge with Warner Media, and there is a possibility that the increasing amount of scandals coming from CNN might derail the merger. Such a cancellation would have a drastic impact on the lives of a lot of people, and thus would clearly merit reporting. However, the merger is the focal point of most articles. The actual events that led to Zucker’s resignation are briefly mentioned, but the nature of his relationship with Gollust or the possibility of Zucker lying to his lawyers about the duration of the relationship are not considered. These discussions also inevitably include a lengthy section about Cuomo, who has no association to the actual events of the Zucker story. Cuomo’s actions are reprehensible and deserve to be enumerated, but they do not pertain to this situation. In this context, Cuomo needs only to be mentioned in relation to the concerning culture of sexual assault at CNN, and how that might affect the merger.
Additionally, the reasons for Zucker’s resignation are often mainly attributed to external factors, not his sexual misconduct. A New York Times article on the subject speculated that “[t]he barb raised questions about whether the network’s future owners would seek major editorial changes,” and that “Mr. Zucker had a testy relationship with Mr. Kilar, the WarnerMedia chief executive.” The affair had violated company conduct, but that was not the stated reason for Kilar changing the company structure to push out Zucker. Rather, the article implies that Zucker’s resignation only occurred because a multitude of different factors converged and suggests that if Zucker was liked more by Kilar, then his misconduct would have been overlooked. The article should have instead drawn more attention to the consequences of Zucker’s actions. It seems like media companies thought that Zucker’s violations were not notable on their own and consequently that other things have to be constantly referred to so the article can justify its existence as news.
