The firing of Chris Cuomo was a surprise, but a welcome one to be sure. The prime-time CNN host has had a long history of saying highly divisive things that ran the gambit from being mistruths to bald-faced lies. This is the same Cuomo that even came to the defense of Antifa, the domestic terrorist group known for intimidation and violence.
But what he’s on the chopping block for is being far more involved with his brother’s scandals than initially thought.
As my colleague Sister Toldjah wrote, Cuomo’s firing is a day late and a dollar short and his termination should have happened back in May when it was first revealed. He wasn’t, with CNN showing their support for the “Fredo” of the Cuomo family. Fast forward to Saturday, and Cuomo is now suddenly fired as it comes out that there was more going on than just helping his brother with advice and listening in on phone calls concerning Andrew Cuomo’s various sexual harassment and assault allegations.
Cuomo decided that if he was going down, then he was taking his boss, Jeff Zucker with him. He made the claim that Zucker knew how deep the rabbit hole went and that he kept silent about it all this time. Zucker denies this, but it’s hard to believe him. As my colleague, Joe Cunningham points out, Cuomo was one of Zucker’s pet projects. He was supposed to be his golden child that he invested a lot of time and money into. Protecting something like that would be a priority.
That could be the case, but if I could don my tinfoil hat for a moment, I can’t help but feel that it could be something a bit more sinister. Zucker is a well-connected man on the left and as a man whose entire job is to relegate the flow of information, it’s highly likely that Zucker knows quite a bit about what goes on in the shadows. His silence is worth just as much, if not more, than what he airs on his news networks. That silence, however, comes with some danger. If it gets out that Zucker was sitting on damning information and said nothing then he would be, indeed complicit. Keeping Cuomo employed kept Cuomo silent.
But the truth will out and Cuomo got too hot for CNN to keep on board, thus Cuomo’s firing occurred. Now Cuomo is speaking out in ways that could harm Zucker. Zucker can do nothing but deny Cuomo’s claims but there are too many reasons to believe Cuomo. It’s likely that Zucker knew everything.
This then raises the question; what else does Zucker know? He was clearly willing to hold onto this bit of damning info, so what else is he hiding in his closet?
But even if he doesn’t know anything else, the fact that he’s even willing to keep that kind of secret is reason enough to expect a resignation from him. His ethical line is drawn nowhere that it should be and if he’s willing to keep secrets that are harmful to people, including sexual assault victims, then he’s disgraced and should be removed as CNN’s president post-haste.
The only thing that would save him, in this case, is a backroom deal with the Cuomo family where silence would be agreed upon all around. If Cuomo doesn’t return fire after Zucker’s denial or Cuomo walks back his accusation that Zucker knew all along entirely, then we’ll have a pretty solid idea that this is what happened.
Regardless, everyone will know that Jeff Zucker has a massive ethics problem. While this has plagued CNN for some time, it’s an ethics problem that even members of the left will have an issue with. Hiding involvement in sexual assault is a pretty serious crime post-#MeToo and whatever protection he was given by various politicians and connected leftists is now drying up.
Zucker should resign for moral reasons, but if he won’t, then I imagine he’ll resign because he was strong-armed into it.
