President Donald Trump has often said that all the major news networks and newspapers will endorse him in 2020 simply because they will not be able to survive in the post-Trump world. Trump undoubtedly has his tongue planted firmly in cheek when he says this, but there’s an element of truth to it. We don’t expect for a second that the Washington Post will actually endorse Trump in the next election, but you can bet your bottom dollar that they are secretly hoping he’ll pull off a second term. These anti-Trump news organizations are making money hand over fist.
Don’t believe it? Just ask CNN head honcho Jeff Zucker, who admitted to Vanity Fair this week that whenever his network switches to some other kind of news coverage, the ratings plummet.
“We’ve seen that anytime you break away from the Trump story and cover other events in this era, the audience goes away,” Zucker said. “So we know that, right now, Donald Trump dominates.”
Zucker said that even though people claim they’ve had enough of the never-ending Trump Show, the ratings verify that there is no such thing as too much Trump.
“People say all the time, ‘Oh, I don’t want to talk about Trump, I’ve had too much Trump,’” he said. “And yet at the end of the day, all they want to do is talk about Trump.”
Zucker said CNN was careful to present the audience with views across the political spectrum, which sets the network apart from the competition.
“On MSNBC, you rarely hear from people who do support Trump,” Zucker said. “We want to be home to both those points of view. It is true some of these folks are not very good with the facts, but that’s okay in the sense that it’s our job then to call them out.”
Yeah, putting Trump supporting analysts on the air just so the rest of the Wolf Blitzer panel can gang up on them is not “presenting both sides.” It’s just setting up bowling pins so you can knock them down. And if Zucker thinks every Trump-hater they have on the air is a master of “the facts,” he’s sadly mistaken.
CNN is losing the ratings war against MSNBC and Fox News, but even third place is good enough to rake in the dough these days; Vanity Fair reports that the network is on track for its most profitable year since it launched.
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