HAS TRUMP TURNED CNN INTO A HOUSE OF EXISTENTIAL DREAD?

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/07/has-trump-turned-cnn-into-a-house-of-existential-dread

...Last year, Zucker signed a long-term deal to extend his contract. “It was a relief to a lot of anchors,” the CNN employee told me. Zucker proceeded to subsequently renew a lot of those anchors’ contracts, a sign that if he were staying, they were too. So it was worrying to some in the CNN newsroom when Trump tweeted, on June 27, 2017, that “Fake News CNN is looking at big management changes.” Later that evening, Emily Smith at the New York Post reported that the “specter of a $100 million libel suit scared CNN into retracting” its story linking Trump ally Anthony Scaramucci to a Russian investment fund. In the wake of the retraction, and the resignation of the three journalists responsible for the piece, Fox News’s Sean Hannity and Trump’s elder son, Donald Trump Jr., both called for Zucker’s resignation. A few days later, Trump Sr. appeared at his first big re-election fundraiser, at the Trump Hotel in D.C., where he attacked CNN and Zucker by name. “These are really dishonest people,” he said, according to a recording of his speech that night released by the Intercept. Trump mused to the crowd about whether he should sue CNN. Then, he got personal. “Jeff Zucker, I hear he’s going to resign at some point pretty soon. I mean, these are horrible human beings.”

Some CNN staffers, who worried that this was more than the usual Trump bluster, pointed to a meeting at the White House roughly a week before the fundraiser, when Trump hosted technology and telecom C.E.O.s as part of the much-overlooked Technology Week, organized by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Seated beside Trump at the meeting was none other than AT&T C.E.O. Randall Stephenson, whose company is in the process of trying to buy Time Warner, CNN’s parent company. “I think there’s a real chance that Zucker is being forced out,” said another employee. “That’s going to blow up this organization like nothing in the history of CNN.”