CNN President Jeff Zucker on Wednesday said President Donald Trump is trying to bully the news network, but added that he won’t let him “intimidate” his employees, The Hill reports.
“My job is to remind everyone that they need to stay focused doing their job. He’s trying to bully us, and we’re not going to let him intimidate us. You can’t lose your confidence and let that change the way you conduct yourselves,” Zucker told The New York Times Wednesday.
When asked by the Times why Trump had hit his network, Zucker said the president’s preferred medium is television.
“Television is his preferred medium. And he knows our viewers can be swayed because they’re not watching Fox or MSNB – networks with an ideological bent in prime time,” Zucker added.
On Sunday, Trump tweeted a redditor’s video showing Trump body-slamming the CNN logo, which has since been retweeted for more than 330,000 times. The video immediately sparked backlash from CNN and other journalists.
CNN also faced its own criticism after it tracked down the creator of the video and, according to critics, “threatened” to expose the identity of the redditor who created it.
“He is a private citizen who has issued an extensive statement of apology, showed his remorse by saying he has taken down all his offending posts and because he said he is not going to repeat this ugly behavior on social media again,” the story, titled “How CNN found the Reddit user behind the Trump wrestling GIF,” reads on CNN.com
The blowback on social media against CNN has resulted in #CNNBlackmail trending on Twitter and includes condemnation from several public figures, including WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, Donald Trump Jr. and Vox’s German Lopez.
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