by Chuck de Caro
Yo! John Stankey! We told you CNN was stinking up AT&T. Now you are making it worse!
In an interview with CNBC last week, AT&T boss John Stankey exchanged his trademark “Mr. Hollywood Casual” for “Doctor Evil Lite,” while dodging every sensitive question about CNN’s “Mother Zucker” debacle.
In fact, Stankey did the best non-stop weasel dance since the invention of “Whack-a-Mole.”
Upon observation, it seems that every time Stankey got a hard question, he stopped twiddling his fingers . . . and dodged even harder. Stankey not only used an ill-formed word salad (tossed vigorously) in a non-description of Zucker’s unending catastrophe, he even had the nerve to say:
However, you know, when I step back and think of what Jeff has been able to accomplish in the last nine years, you can’t take that away from him.
Really? Are you blind, John? Or simply vertiginous from the heights of AT&T?
Item: Zucker retained Don Lemon, who has been drunk on-air multiple times and who is about to face criminal charges of sexual assault.
Item: Zucker single-handedly turned CNN from “the most trusted name in news” into a left-wing kamikaze squadron, purveying fake news on the theme “Orange Man Bad” for four years and managed to lose 90 percent of CNN’s viewers.
Item: Zucker dumped CNN radio and the CNN airport network without any effort to improve them.
Item: Zucker had his mistress Allison Gollust on the CNN payroll for almost nine years! (Although Zucker could have put in Allison Gollust for the J.D. Power award for customer satisfaction for that brainstorm!)
Yeah, John, you are right. They can’t take that away from Zucker.
But wait! There’s more!
Goodness gracious! Could AT&T’s John Stankey be hiding something big?
Why?
Because he is trying to spin off his former company, WarnerMedia, amidst the Gotterdammerung of its subsidiary CNN, to Discovery, in order to get AT&T out of the massive debt it incurred acquiring WarnerMedia and Direct TV in the first place.
With AT&T stock very near its 52-week record low and Stankey cutting AT&T dividends in half, he might likely face a stockholder revolt in April if the Discovery venture doesn’t go through.
Especially if the huge WarnerMedia internal investigation which interviewed 40 people and accumulated 100,000 texts and emails on the Zucker affair suddenly became public in its entirety.
That icky-gooey document, of which tiny parts have already been leaked, has already brought forth emails between then-Governor Andrew Cuomo and Allison Gollust, which essentially turned CNN into Cuomo’s personal propaganda machine.
A cascade of those kinds of revelations could potentially load CNN with humongous ethical, legal, and financial liabilities for decades.
What if Discovery were to renege after finding out what goodies were in Gollust-the-Mistress’ (you will forgive the expression) “sweetheart” contract or trove of compromising emails and texts? For that matter, what legal and ethical tactical nuclear time bombs may be connected to Don Lemon or Chris Cuomo or even Zucker himself?
No wonder Stankey stopped twiddling his fingers every time the CNBC folks posed a Big Money question about Zucker and the CNN disaster.
Before the AT&T stockholders revolt, maybe Stankey’s Dr. Evil can solve his ever-growing CNN problem by finding some sharks with frickin’ lasers attached to their heads.
– – –
Chuck de Caro is a contributor to American Greatness. He was CNN’s very first Special Assignments Correspondent. Educated at Marion Military Institute and the U.S. Air Force Academy, he later served with the 20th Special Forces Group (Airborne). He has taught information warfare (SOFTWAR) at the National Defense University and the National Intelligence University. He was an outside consultant for the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment for 25 years. A pilot since he was 17, he is currently working on a book about the World War I efforts of Fiorello La Guardia, Giulio Douhet, and Gianni Caproni, which led directly to today’s U.S. Air Force Global Strike Command.
Photo “John Stankey” by Fortune Live Media CC BY-ND 2.0.
