Michael Wolff: Jeff Zucker and the Insatiable 'Will to Power'
The myriad complications of an always triangulating man
Michael Wolff is the best-selling author of 10 books including international bestsellers Fire & Fury, Siege, and Landslide and A Biography of Rupert Murdoch, The Man Who Owns the News. His latest book is Too Famous: The Rich. The Powerful. The Wishful. The Notorious. The Damned. He last wrote here about Norman Mailer.
The first Jewish president, as he has often joked to friends (a Harvard joke — that is, not quite a joke at all) is on the ropes. But is this the end?
Let’s clarify that Jeffrey Adam Zucker’s interest has always been power and politics rather than simply media and television. His Harvard classmate, Michael Hirschorn, himself a would-be world beater who lost out to Zucker in a primal Harvard competition to run the Harvard Crimson, described Zucker in an article in Esquire little more than 10 years after their graduation as, already — by his early thirties Zucker was one of the leading television executives as the producer of the Today Show — “a living infomercial for what pure will to power will score you in the modern world.”
He made one President, launching Donald Trump as a television star — something which began as near meta-media joke but which became programming genius — and believed he contributed mightily to unmaking him by turning CNN into an adversary network (a rating plus). His involvement with the Cuomo brothers, a straight line between politics and television — undoubtedly more germane to his downfall than the hoary office romance which has so far gotten top billing — was part and parcel of the television news man’s belief that he is as politically savvy and attuned to the nuances of power as any politician.
And this may be true. Zucker’s entire career has been a study in accumulating, expanding, and consolidating power in an industry certainly as toxic, Machiavellian, unforgiving and childish as politics. He not only has risen as all others in TV have fallen, but — in the face of failure, ridicule, and a loss of his all-important power base when Comcast acquired NBC from GE — risen again. Zucker may be the only true television executive of his generation to have succeeded (at least up until now) in absolute terms.