THE NEW ABNORMAL

How CNN Stars Really Feel About Jeff Zucker’s Departure

Plus, a look at how Jerry Falwell Jr. gave it up for Donald Trump, David Wallace-Wells on how we’ve passed a climate change point of no return, and more.

There were rumors just a year ago that Jeff Zucker was going to run for mayor of New York, and now the CNN chief who was “in some ways the voice to the network” and “the guru for a lot of the top anchors” is out.

Daily Beast media editor Andrew Kirell breaks it all down with The New Abnormal crew, as co-host (and former CNN guy) Andy Levy says that “pretty much everyone knew that the two of them were in a relationship for a long time. I mean, I knew it and I couldn’t have been lower on the totem pole at CNN. Nobody seemed upset by it, particularly, but it was just known. It wasn’t even an open secret ’cause it really wasn’t even a secret.”

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​​We’re still connecting the dots about what exactly happened and how Chris Cuomo’s ouster set things into motion, says Kirell (stay tuned!), but, “Something in the threat of a lawsuit [may have] forced CNN’s hand and forced Jeff’s hand” and the hands of his bosses. After “removing the head of the entire operation, when they’re just about to launch CNN Plus,” inside the media giant “there’s definitely a suspicion, definitely a sense of ‘what now?’”

“A myriad of people have pointed out, like, Jeff Zucker did not hurt Donald Trump’s election chances back in 2016. And even to this day, they continue to hire former Trump staffers,” Levy added. “I don’t think personally that Jeff Zucker has made the world a better place. I mean, this is just my opinion [but] a lot of what he’s done at cable news has made cable news worse.”

Then co-host Molly Jong-Fast talks with New York magazine’s David Wallace-Wells about the big questions: whether or not the virus is endemic already or still a pandemic, and if the environment has already passed a point of no return.

“We’re now in that phase when—you know, when the global political community started really talking seriously about climate change in the early ’90s, they often said that the goal was to avoid what they call dangerous climate change, and we failed to do that. It’s not that we are failing. We have failed,” says Wallace-Wells.

“We are already in a climate that is dangerous to us. We will be adapting while we are responding. It’s not like human life is going to be impossible in this new context, although things will get worse. We have lost the opportunity to actually win this fight and secure a stable future. The questions now are how disruptive is it going to get, how much more suffering are we gonna endure, and how are we going be able to design ways to live in that future that will allow us to at least some of the ways that we’ve felt in the past that the future offered some more prosperity and security rather than a picture of less prosperity, less security, less equality.”

Plus, the gang rips into conservative cuckold Jerry Falwell Jr., and former Missouri Secretary of State Jason Kander explains what it is that the coasts don’t get about politics in the middle of the country, and why the key to winning there isn’t about being in the political middle.

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