CNN President Defends Coverage of Mueller Probe: 'We Are Not Investigators'

Published: 3/26/2019, 11:12:14 AM EDT

CNN President Defends Coverage of Mueller Probe: 'We Are Not Investigators' — Jeff Zucker, president of CNN, is interviewed during a Financial Times Future of News event in New York, on March 22, 2018. (Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images)

CNN President Jeff Zucker refused to apologize for his network's skewed coverage of the investigation into alleged collusion between the campaign of President Donald Trump and Russia.

Zucker addressed widespread criticism that heightened after Special Counsel Robert Mueller submitted his final report to the Department of Justice and said his team was unable to establish "that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities."

CNN became openly anti-Trump when he was a candidate, often questioning his judgment in riffs that lacked evidence. For instance, media host Brian Stelter, who has no background in psychology, wondered in 2017 about "uncomfortable questions" regarding Trump, including "is he suffering from some kind of illness?"

Even after the Mueller report found no collusion, CNN spun fresh anti-Trump angles, in one case spinning Trump's criticism of the yearslong investigation as "Trump moves to weaponize Mueller findings."

Zucker told the New York Times on Monday after the release of the Mueller report that he was "entirely comfortable" with the behavior and actions of his employees.

“We are not investigators. We are journalists, and our role is to report the facts as we know them, which is exactly what we did,” Zucker said. “A sitting president’s own Justice Department investigated his campaign for collusion with a hostile nation. That’s not enormous because the media says so. That’s enormous because it’s unprecedented.”

Stelter highlighted the quote and shared it on Twitter, sparking renewed criticism.

"There are dozens of stories that CNN got wrong—some of them treated as huge scoops. Every one of those mistakes skewed in the same direction. That's not an accident," wrote David Harsanyi of The Federalist, referring to "bombshells" that CNN promoted only to later retract or significantly change.

In one example, the network claimed that Trump's son Donald Trump Jr. received an offer of intelligence from Wikileaks but had to walk back the claim when it was revealed the alleged date of the offer was 10 days later than what the network first reported.

"Wow. Good on CNN for just coming right out and admitting it. They don't investigate. This is what I have been saying, they basically just read press releases and tweets," added independent journalist Tim Pool.

Stelter, the CNN host, responded to some critics, charging that Zucker's statement was being twisted.

"The meaning of the Zucker quote is obvious: He's contrasting federal investigators, who were charged with investigating Russia's 2016 attack, with journalists who were COVERING the federal investigation," Stelter told Pool.

Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani was among the critics of CNN's coverage, and told host Chris Cuomo that Zucker should apologize.

Others, though, noted other comments Zucker has made regarding CNN's coverage of Trump.

In 2017, he conveyed a threat against Trump to New York magazine.

"One of the things I think this administration hasn’t figured out yet is that there’s only one television network that is seen in Beijing, Moscow, Seoul, Tokyo, Pyongyang, Baghdad, Tehran and Damascus—and that’s CNN," Zucker said. "The perception of Donald Trump in capitals around the world is shaped, in many ways, by CNN. Continuing to have an adversarial relationship with that network is a mistake."

In 2018, Zucker said that his network's coverage of Trump was shaped by audience demand.

“People say all the time, ‘Oh, I don’t want to talk about Trump, I’ve had too much Trump.' And yet at the end of the day, all they want to do is talk about Trump," he told Vanity Fair. "We’ve seen that anytime you break away from the Trump story and cover other events in this era, the audience goes away. So we know that, right now, Donald Trump dominates.”

Zucker said his goal was to have pro-Trump voices on his network but then denigrated some of them.

“On MSNBC, you rarely hear from people who do support Trump. We want to be home to both those points of view," he said. "It is true some of these folks are not very good with the facts, but that’s OK in the sense that it’s our job then to call them out."