In movies and history books when someone is fighting with the French Resistance against the Nazis nobody cares if they are cheating on their spouse, or engaged in dubious ethical practices. It’s an existential crisis, and normal rules don’t apply. This is the attitude, more than any other, that best explains the astounding decline and fall of the Cable News Network that culminated this week with the toppling of its president Jeff Zucker.
Over the past 5 years, especially surrounding the rise of former President Donald Trump, CNN saw itself less as a news organization and more as a band of superheroes, fearlessly committed to saving our nation from mostly imaginary dire threats to democracy. It was an attitude that came straight from the top, from Zucker, and it earned him the loyalty and respect of a newsroom he badly ran off the rails.
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