mara schiavocampo former abc and nbc correspondent now the host of a podcast and joanne lipman who wrote a guest essay about this topic. she is the former editor and chief of usa today and author of that s what she said. thank you for assembling this morning. claire, your 30-second assessment of what this week was for cnn. yeah, i mean, it s a little bit of a week from hell, right? we ve all been on the outside trying to figure out how this transpired, who was the main protagonist in pushing jeff out. was it the ceo of warner media, which is the holding company for sorry, the operating company for cnn? was it the at&t bosses who needed things to look clean before they hand off to discovery? was it john malone perhaps, one of the discovery shareholders? and so we ve all and chris cuomo not to leave him out, as you ve said, that s been a big part of the story here. i think this week will be a
just believe us. that s basically what the biden administration said this week, twice, when reporters pressed for evidence of the government s claims. just trust us. well, that is not what journalists do. that is not what journalists are meant to do. journalists are meant to probe and press for the evidence, regardless of who is in power. that s the purpose of places like cnn. that s the reason why we need independent news rooms in this country. that s why other countries suffer when they don t have them. for more on that and a lot of other stories david zurawik is here with me, former baltimore sun media critic, claire atkinson is also back with us, chief media correspondent for insider. david, i couldn t believe this. the biden administration is just saying, just trust us. believe us. that is not our role.
this place is not perfect. it will never be perfect. we will always have flaws, we will always screw up, we will always have to run corrections, we will always have to keep working to make it better and better and better every single day. that is the goal. but people who say we re lacking journalism, that we ve become an all talk channel, that we ve run off on our opinions all the time, that jeff zucker led us astray, those people aren t watching cnn. they re not watching cnn. they re watching complaints about cnn on other channels that don t know what they re talking about. that s the truth. let s put the map up on bureaus around the world. cnn has more bureaus around the world than any other organization on the planet. that map covers the world, london and hong kong, nairobi and all the rest. on the day jeff zucker resigned,
so that s his attitude. he is a liberal democrat, which is unlike john malone who is a conservative. mostly republican, but really a libertarian. the complication in this is that malone if you go back to ted turner, ted turner considered john malone his top investor and advocate so he felt that john malone was actually behind him and behind the news that cnn had created. now, malone has since criticized cnn for too much advocacy, too much commentary, too little reporting from the world. there s some merit to that. i mean, cnn had always talked about how we cover the world like no one else, maybe the bbc being an exception to that. well, they don t do it. if you watch cnn regularly, there s much more domestic news on it, much less international news, even though when afghanistan breaks or ukraine breaks, cnn puts some real
i m sure that the folks at discovery would not want to be dealing with that problem. and ultimately cnn has to adhere to the highest professional standards and, as you mentioned, when this kind of thing happens at other companies you would report on it. that s right. yeah. there s headline from pup, it says referring to whether more shoes will drop. is there another zucker shoe? and, mara, it seems to me so far there has not been any other shoe to drop and furthermore, there doesn t need to be. meaning clear violation of policy, thus that s all it took. there was no other need for anything else to be in the background. however, there s speculation that zucker and gulust were counseling andrew cuomo and there are reports to that effect that have been rejected by zucker s pr people. what s your read on that, mara? yeah, well, if information comes out to support that, that would definitely change the