It’s been 48 hours and the media world is still abuzz over a Variety feature about CNN that is purportedly ridden with inaccuracies and has prompted outcry from several of its subjects. The Tuesday story—written by Tatiana Siegel—casts Jeff Zucker, the former CNN president who was ousted last year, as being on a desperate and bitter “quest to recapture the CNN throne,” with anecdotes about him traveling the world in pursuit of an international network of investors, including Jeff Bezos, Alex Soros, and Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich.
Fast forward and Siegel’s attempt to expose the mess seems to have set off a full-on media brawl. Zucker’s spokesperson, Risa Heller, denied that Zucker had ever discussed buying CNN with Bezos—or anyone—and said that Zucker has “never met or spoken to” Soros or Abramovich. “It is stunning to read a piece that is so patently and aggressively false,” Heller said in a statement to Vanity Fair. “On numerous occasions, we made it clear to the reporter and her editors that they were planning to publish countless anecdotes and alleged incidents that never happened. They did so anyway.” (Asked for comment on the response to the story, including calls for retractions, a Variety spokesperson told Vanity Fair, “Variety stands by our investigative story about CNN written by one of the best journalists in the business.”)
Apart from Zucker’s alleged takeover bid, Siegel is also getting flack for what she described as the “climate of betrayal” left in Zucker’s wake at CNN, as well as Zucker’s “behind-the-scenes attempts to undermine” both Chris Licht, his successor, and David Zaslav, the Warner Bros. Discovery CEO. Zaslav fired Licht in June, following a blistering 15,000-word profile—written by The Atlantic’s Tim Alberta—of Licht’s disastrous year atop the cable news network.
However, the Variety piece suggests Licht fell victim to cheap reporting, and questioned the journalistic “liberties” that Alberta took, such as “key off-the-record details and quotes [that] were used on the record.” Siegel also took aim at Puck’s Dylan Byers, who relentlessly chronicled the Licht era (and worked at CNN under Zucker), which made him a character in Alberta’s piece. She specifically alleged that “Byers’ conflict of interest runs much deeper than a kinship with a former boss,” pointing out that Zucker and Puck are both represented by Heller and asserting that Byers failed to disclose that Zucker had spoken to Puck about a potential investment in the startup—a detail reported by the New York Times last month.
A torrent of backlash among top media brass has ensued: Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg told CNN on Tuesday that “Siegel was informed by The Atlantic that the charges were completely false, but she nevertheless decided to smear Alberta.” According to Byers, Puck co-founder and editor-in-chief Jon Kelly also “sent an email to the author and the editors of the Variety piece on Tuesday outlining demonstrably false claims.” And on Wednesday, TheWrap reported that “Penske Media Corporation, the owner of Variety, has been contacted by Zucker’s team with a request to issue a retraction of the article.”
Meanwhile, Byers and Alberta have themselves taken to Twitter to refute various aspects of the story. Alberta in a series of tweets went point by point, from the number meetings Siegel said Alberta had with Licht, to her allegation that Licht’s now-infamous quote at the gym—that “Zucker couldn’t do this shit”—was actually something that Alberta said and Licht repeated. “If @Variety had real editorial standards this piece never, ever would have published,” Alberta wrote. Likewise, Byers on Wednesday claimed that the opening scene in Siegel’s piece—a run-in between a teary-eyed Zucker and Zaslav at a Miami Beach hotel—was riddled with factual errors. He also addressed Siegel’s conflict-of-interest allegations, acknowledging that Heller represents Puck but claiming that he was “wholly unaware” of Zucker’s conversations with his employer about a potential investment “until it was reported in the press. (Siegel was told that, too, but did not include it.)”
Variety is, as of now, sitting tight. Despite the public appeals to correct the record, CNN’s Oliver Darcy reported Wednesday that the outlet has “resisted taking any such action, outside quietly removing the widely panned Tatiana Siegel-written feature from its online homepage.” But the apparent errors, as Darcy writes, “raise serious questions about the editorial process at Variety that allowed Siegel’s feature to be published.”
Charlotte Klein
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