CNN President Jeff Zucker said Monday that he didn’t know whether his network will cover the Republican-led hearings on the 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, arguing that CNN will not be “shamed” into reporting on something if it has no news value.
“We’re not going to be shamed into it by others who have political beliefs that want to try to have temper tantrums to shame other news organizations into covering something,” he said in an interview with the New York Times at the Deadline Club’s annual awards dinner in New York City, Mediaite reported.
“If it’s of real news value, we’ll cover it,” he added.
The Times mentioned how CNN’s 24-hour coverage of the missing Malaysian flight was “mocked widely for its obsessiveness,” but Mr. Zucker maintained that it is an important story that needs to be told.
“If I take a step back from our coverage of the Malaysian plane’s disappearance, I’m incredibly comfortable with it,” he said. “I believed early on, right from the start, that it was an enormously important story: an American-made Boeing jet liner, with Rolls Royce engines, with 239 people, disappears into thin air…That’s why we devoted the resources that we did to it.”
The CNN president, however, admitted it may have been a mistake to allow for anchor Don Lemon’s infamous black hole theory.
“He was being facetious, but it did not come off that way,” Mr. Zucker explained. “And he knows that if he could do it over again, he wouldn’t quite present it that way.”
• Jessica Chasmar can be reached at jchasmar@washingtontimes.com.
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