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Zucker’s Next Move?

Media and business gossips are already speculating about Jeff Zucker’s next move once the CNN imbroglio dies down. Zucker’s tenure atop NBCU may provide some clues.

Jeff Zucker on the set of The Today Show
Photo by Sonia Moskowitz/Getty Images
William D. Cohan
February 9, 2022

Amid all the extraordinary sturm und drang surrounding last week’s unceremonious defenestration of Jeff Zucker, it’s useful to remember that he has long been a source of fascination, envy, and schadenfreude. In 1993, nearly seven years after they graduated together from Harvard, my friend Michael Hirschorn, now an Emmy-award winning film producer, wrote a lengthy feature in Esquire, Zuck and Me, about his former classmate, then the 28-year-old executive producer of Today. “Jeff Zucker is the most successful person I know,” Hirschorn wrote. “…He looms as a living infomercial for what pure will to power will score you in the modern world.”