Trump’s enabler takes on the Tories

Former CNN boss Jeff Zucker was confident he would emerge a winner in the battle for the Telegraph Media Group. He didn’t reckon on a fight with the Tory establishment. Jane Lewis reports

“Zucker has become one of the media world’s most consequential egos”

When former CNN boss Jeff Zucker swooped in with an audacious Abu Dhabi-backed bid for the Telegraph Media Group last September, he appeared “confident he would emerge a winner”, says the Financial Times. And why not? Zucker’s RedBird IMI vehicle promised investment and global expansion – and posed none of the competition risks of other bidders. The deal was backed by influential Tories, including two former chancellors, and mainly financed by “a British ally” in the Gulf with a stellar record of inward UK investment. Zucker himself staked his “reputation and legacy” on guaranteeing editorial independence. What could possibly go wrong?

Hands off our Torygraph

“Ever bullish”, Zucker underestimated the Tory establishment’s fierce resistance to “foreign state ownership” of its “house” publications, and the “ferocious lobbying campaign” that would ensue. His tilt “reopened Brexit-era fault lines in the party”, forcing the government to scupper the takeover by taking the nuclear option of changing the law. RedBird sources might mutter about the inability of “a weak PM” to control “the chaos within his party”. But this has been a bruising episode for Zucker, 58, who – having been pushed out of CNN in 2022 following a MeToo sting – was staking his career comeback on a deal.

This was “the latest twist in a career of reinvention” – and “an intriguing follow-up” to Zucker’s divisive ten-year reign at CNN, says The New York Times. His ultimate goal was expansion into the

US, where he believes there’s a market for “centre-right” news coverage. But the move surprised many onlookers, says Variety, not least because rumour had it that Zucker – still sore about his ousting from arguably the world’s most influential news brand – had been “travelling the globe” assembling a team of investors to stage a bid for CNN. The producer who first gave Donald Trump a stage on The

Apprentice, later switching to become an implacable opponent, has “one of the media world’s most consequential egos”.

Zucker was always going places, says the FT. Born in 1965, the son of a cardiologist and a schoolteacher, he majored in US history at Harvard and on graduation joined the NBC network as a researcher. A workaholic, who once told an interviewer he had never taken a holiday, Zucker’s rise through the news business was “stratospheric”, says the Daily Mail. At 26, he was put in charge of NBC’s breakfast news show, Today, which he built into the most watched of its kind in the US – the perfect platform from which to climb the greasy pole at parent company NBC Universal where he served as CEO until 2011. Two years later, he jumped ship to become president of CNN.

Falling foul of Trump

Zucker’s record at the station divides the critics, says the Daily Mail. On the one hand, he succeeded in revitalising a station which was losing viewers to more partisan rivals. On the other, he stands accused of “dumbing down” the supposedly high-end broadcaster and dicing with its reputation for “impartiality”. It broadcast Trump’s rallies live and uninterrupted on a near-daily basis in 2016 as it made for great ratings, says the FT. The station’s subsequent switch to a more critical stance left Trump sore – he describes his former TV mentor as “a world-class sleazebag”.

Both RedBird (founded by Zucker’s private-equity partner, Gerry Cardinale) and Sheikh Mansour’s IMI vehicle, are now “in limbo” regarding the Telegraph, says Bloomberg: stuck with the debt, without being allowed to own the titles. Much the same might be said of Zucker himself. “The biggest difference in my life is the pace,” he told the FT last year. “For 35 years, my DNA and metabolism was go, go, go, making 30 decisions a day.” The silence these days must be deafening.