Jeff Zucker to ESPN?

Deadline’s Nellie Andreeva writes that Jeff Zucker has been in talks with Disney about possibly taking over ESPN…

Reps at Disney could not be reached for comment, but multiple sources close to Zucker confirmed to Deadline that he has had conversations for the top job at the sports giant. I hear he met with Disney chairman and chief executive officer Bob Iger last week in New York.

(snip)

Zucker, whose current CNN contract I hear is up at the end of the year, is an intriguing proposition. He has a higher profile than any of the other potential candidates. He was able to reverse CNN’s linear ratings declines even before the Donald Trump-fueled political coverage ratings bonanza. He also successfully built the cable news network’s digital brand, overseeing a big online expansion.

Those are things Disney wants to see ESPN achieve. The network’s ratings woes have been dragging down Disney’s stock price as the sports net has been shedding linear subscribers. Disney also has been looking to better monetize ESPN and its programming in a multi-platform universe, including via a recently announced ESPN-branded OTT service.

I agree with part of Andreeva’s retrospective of Zucker’s “accomplishments”. He did make a huge push into digital for CNN…the success of which is still to ultimately be judged. But don’t give him too many props for “fixing” CNN’s ratings. He never got CNN close to striking distance of FNC and though he did push CNN above MSNBC…that had as much, if not more, to do with MSNBC’s crashing and burning on its own than it did with anything Zucker did…a point reinforced by the NBC cable network’s rebound in the ratings.

I would also be remiss in not noting one of the things Zucker did over the air was basically kill CNN’s news brand. He pushed (exiled?) the bulk of the news, even major world news, to the digital platform. Under Jeff Zucker, CNN stopped being the cable network to turn to for straight news and became the network for watercooler news.

All of which makes his hiring by ESPN all the more questionable because ESPN’s problem is eroding viewership. Driving people to digital for sports won’t solve that problem. You don’t want to move your biggest sports assets to digital…right now you’ll lose out on that deal because there aren’t enough out there to make up for what you lose by cutting off cable distribution. Ultimately at some point that will change and digital will become to dominant distribution channel. But we are still years from that point.

In addition to spearheading CNN’s ratings resurgence, Zucker has been able to grow a slew of media stars, turning Don Lemon, Jake Tapper and Chris Cuomo into household names.

Oh please. None of these guys are household names. I love me some Tapper but even he isn’t a household name. And Zucker didn’t “grow” any of these guys. Lemon became “famous”, if you want to use that term, all on his own because of his gaffes. Tapper had a rep before he even got to CNN and that hasn’t changed since he’s been there. I see very little of Zucker’s imprint on Cuomo. And as long as we’re talking about profiles, what the hell has happened to Anderson Cooper since Zucker arrived? He went from being CNN’s go to, bounce around the country/world, news star to being a low profile desk jockey. Maybe that’s partly Cooper’s own doing/choice…but you can draw a dividing line between Anderson Cooper pre-Jeff Zucker and Anderson Cooper post-Jeff Zucker.

Update: CNN’s Brian Stelter, completely and irrevocably entangled in conflict of interest mode for this story for as long as it plays out, along with the similarly ensnared Dylan Byers note that CNN is denying the that Zucker is interested.

In response to questions, CNN spokeswoman Allison Gollust said, “Jeff loves his job at CNN, and has no interest in running ESPN.”

They also note that Andreeva updated her original story to remove the Iger sentence…

Deadline’s story, written by Nellie Andreeva, initially said “I hear that he met with Disney chairman and chief executive officer Bob Iger last week.” But that sentence was later cut from the story. Multiple sources denied to CNN that there’s been any in-person meeting between Zucker and Iger.