Words Of Wisdom From The Late Rush Limbaugh

Due to the talk radio format he used, you often had to get lucky and hear him on the right hour and the right day to catch his most cogent thinking. (I think as well that he reached his peak eight or ten years ago.) But one set of remarks among several has stuck with me. I believe it was during the 2012 Sandra Fluke controversy, when he railed against

contraceptive mandates which included statements labeling Georgetown University Law Center student Sandra Fluke as a "slut" and "prostitute". Limbaugh was commenting on Fluke's speech the previous week to House Democrats in support of mandating insurance coverage for contraceptives. Despite disapproval from major political figures, Limbaugh made numerous similar statements over the next two days, which led to the loss of several of his national sponsors and Limbaugh apologizing on his show for some of his comments.

Limbaugh recovered from this setback and then some, as he did throughout his career. Remarks on his show during that particular kerfuffle reflected both his confidence and his insight. He said at the time words to the effect that if the media creates you, the media can destroy you. On the other hand, if the media didn't create you -- as he felt was the case with himself -- the media can't destroy you. He ended his career receiving the Medal of Freedom on his deathbed.

This applies in particular to Jeff Zucker, a Harvard alum:

Between January 2013 and February 2022, Zucker was the president of CNN Worldwide. Zucker oversaw CNN, CNN International, HLN, and CNN Digital. He was previously CEO of NBCUniversal. Zucker served as an executive in residence at Columbia Business School.

. . . He was a captain of the North Miami Senior High School tennis team, editor of the school paper, and a teenage freelance reporter ("stringer") for The Miami Herald. Zucker also was president of his sophomore, junior, and senior classes, running on the slogan "The little man with the big ideas." He graduated from North Miami Senior High School in 1982. Before college, he took part in Northwestern University's National High School Institute program for journalism. Zucker went on to Harvard University. He was president of the school newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, during his senior year. As such, he encouraged the Crimson's decades-old prank rivalry with the Harvard Lampoon, then headed by future NBC employee Conan O'Brien, which culminated in Zucker having O’Brien arrested. Zucker graduated from Harvard in 1986 with a Bachelor of Arts in American history.

In 1989, he was a field producer for Today, and at 26 he became its executive producer in 1992. He introduced the program's trademark outdoor rock concert series and was in charge as Today moved to the "window on the world" Studio 1A in Rockefeller Plaza in 1994. He is credited with managing the show during its most successful years and launching it into its 16 years of ratings dominance.

. . . In 2000, he was named NBC Entertainment's president. A 2004 BusinessWeek Profile stated that "During that time he oversaw NBC's entire entertainment schedule. He kept the network ahead of the pack by airing the gross out show Fear Factor, negotiating for the cast of the hit series Friends to take the series up to a tenth season, and signing Donald Trump for the reality show The Apprentice. He is credited with the idea to extend Friends episodes by 10 minutes and convinced the cast to extend their contracts by two years. The Friends era was one of the most profitable ever for NBC. The Zucker era produced a spike in operating earnings for NBC, from $532 million the year he took over to $870 million in 2003."

. . . In 2010, in response to a public controversy over the network's reported rescheduling of late-night hosts Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien, Los Angeles Times reporters Meg James and Matea Gold wrote that Zucker's tenure had led to "a spectacular fall by the country's premier television network" and dubbed the intra-network feud and subsequent public relations fallout "one of the biggest debacles in television history". Under Zucker NBC fell from being the number one rated network to the lowest rated of the four broadcast networks and was occasionally being beaten in the ratings by programming on some of the more popular cable channels.

Days later, The New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote that in Hollywood "there has been a single topic of discussion: How does Jeff Zucker keep rising and rising while the fortunes of NBC keep falling and falling? ...many in the Hollywood community have always regarded him as ...a network Napoleon who never bothered to learn about developing shows and managing talent." She explained that Zucker "is a master at managing up with bosses and calculating cost-per-hour benefits, but even though he made money on cable shows, he could not program the network to save his life."

After he moved to CNN, things peaked and then began a decline. A data point nobody has mentioned in discussing yesterday's ouster is this one in the Wikipedia entry:

On February 2, 2021, Zucker announced he would step down [as president orf CNN Worldwide] at the end of the year. In August 2021, however, it was reported that he did not plan to leave until the completion of the merger of WarnerMedia and Discovery, Inc.

So let's get real. He was already on his way out at CNN, was theoretically going to leave at the end of last year, and effectively extended his tenure by all of a month, except that by resigning under allegations of sexual harassment, he probably will lose at least some part of what would have been a generous golden handshake if he'd just left a month ago the way he was supposed to.

What strikes me, though, is how applicable Rush Limbaugh's insight is here: the media created Zucker, and the media destroyed him. Zucker was what Bp Barron would call a contingent being; he owed his existence to someone else. Speculation this morning is that Zucker's departure so far is being attributed to what one observer called an "HR technicality"; viz, an undisclosed "consensual relationship" with a colleague. My guess is that someone in the new management over CNN already had Zucker's number, and the wheels were in motion even before the Cuomo crises raised any questions about hanky pank.

Somewhere El Rushbo is laughing.