CNN's president says giving Donald Trump so much airtime wasn't worth it


CNN President Jeff Zucker regrets giving Donald Trump so much airtime in pursuit of high ratings, Buzzfeed News reported Friday evening.
"If we made any mistake last year, it's that we probably did put on too many of his campaign rallies in those early months and let them run," Zucker said while speaking at Harvard. "Listen, because you never knew what he would say, there was an attraction to put those on air."
Zucker was head of NBC Entertainment when Trump's Apprentice show debuted, and he recalled that "Trump delivered on PR, he delivered on big ratings." Still, Zucker maintained he did not help Trump secure special coverage from CNN, and said he would have given Trump's Republican primary rivals more airtime had they been more willing to do more interviews.
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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