CNN president: Trump ‘spends his days and nights watching CNN’

CNN President Jeff Zucker said President Trump is obsessed with his cable news network, spending “his days and nights watching it” despite constantly attacking it in public.

“A lot of this is red meat for his base,” Zucker said in an interview with NPR published Thursday. “He claims that CNN is unwatchable, but the only way he knows that is because he’s watching it obsessively. We know that he spends his days and nights watching CNN.”

CNN has been targeted as “fake news” by Trump more than any other broadcast news outlet. The president has not appeared on a CNN program since August.  

{mosads}Trump’s attacks on the network and the press in general have been unusually quiet this week, with the president not targeting the media in any capacity since Feb. 26.

The cease-fire has caught the attention of CNN, which is featuring a ticker on its politics feed tracking the last time Trump “has attacked anyone on Twitter.”

How long has it been since Donald Trump attacked someone on Twitter? https://t.co/JlBPkp4s1h pic.twitter.com/cJ0MDOMWqd

— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) March 1, 2017

Hmm – is this covering it?- or egging it on? https://t.co/wBa7hLiQPD

— Bret Baier (@BretBaier) March 2, 2017

Zucker’s professional relationship with Trump started in 2003 when both were at NBC. The former NBCUniversal CEO helped launch Trump’s highly successful reality television program, “The Apprentice,” which still credits the president as an executive producer.

“I always knew he was capable of generating tremendous amount of publicity. I always knew that he was incredibly charismatic, and I always knew that he knew how to attract attention,” Zucker said.

“All of those things have been borne out through the campaign and into the first two months of his presidency. None of that has really changed.”

Much of the media, and particularly cable news networks, were criticized by both sides of the aisle in 2016 for giving Trump too much coverage while ignoring other candidates in the field.

Zucker tells NPR that, if given the opportunity to do it again, CNN probably wouldn’t have focused so much on the New York real estate mogul, particularly from the stump.

“If we could go back, we probably wouldn’t cover as many Trump rallies live as we did. We didn’t cover any more than Fox News or MSNBC; I think the only difference is that we’ve acknowledged we probably took too many of them.”

Zucker’s mantra to his team is to not allow the White House or president “throw you off your game” when reporting.

“Do not be intimidated,” he said. “Go where the story goes. Report the facts. Make sure you’ve got it right. And don’t let things that the president says or that the White House does throw you off your game.”