CNN President Jeff Zucker was repeatedly booed and shouted at during a conference for campaign managers Wednesday night over his network's coverage of Donald Trump, Politico reported.
The normally formal event held by the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics turned raucous as the discussion turned to the amount of coverage CNN gave to the eventual GOP nominee and now president-elect.
Republican campaign managers in the crowd of 200 became more and more vocal as Zucker defended the large amount of coverage CNN gave Trump, while saying it offered the same to the other candidates, even allowing for them to call in.
"I have to respectfully push back on the campaign managers who spoke here today, because frankly, respectfully, I think that's bull----," Zucker said. "Donald Trump was on CNN a lot. That's because we asked him to do interviews, and he agreed to do them. We continuously asked the other candidates to come on and do interviews."
"I don't remember getting invited to call in, though," Carly Fiorina deputy campaign manager Sarah Isgur Flores said.
Other voices joined in:
- "We didn't get that call."
- "We'd be invited for eight seconds."
- "At 2 o'clock in the afternoon, we'd be invited on."
But Zucker insisted, "All of the Republican candidates were invited to come on. Cable news in general, CNN in particular, should not be held responsible for the fact that Donald Trump said yes to those interviews."
"It's not the interviews," Marco Rubio senior advisor Todd Harris said.
"You showed hours upon hours of unfiltered unscripted coverage of Trump, this was not about interviews."
"You showed empty podiums!" one audience member shouted.
"Again, Donald Trump was asked to come on, and he agreed to come on and answered questions," Zucker said. "The other candidates were asked to come on."
"That's not true, you can't keep saying that," senior Mike Huckabee adviser Chip Saltsman responded.
"If they had wanted to call into the morning show, they were invited call in, and they declined," Zucker said. "I think that some of them should look in the mirror and decide whether or not they made a mistake by not taking us up."
"Go ahead and name them . . . that's not true," Saltsman shot back.
Trump campaign strategists in the room remained silent, Politico reported, except for one: former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, who became a paid CNN contributor after he was dismissed from the Trump campaign.
After leaving the room during the debate and returning, Lewandowski grabbed the microphone from a student questioner who asked Zucker why he hired Lewandowski while he was still receiving severance pay from the Trump campaign.
Lewandowski said he had added substance to the conversation. Zucker said if he had it to do over again, he would have insisted Lewandowski take all his severance pay at once before he became a paid contributor.
Asked by Washington Post correspondent Karen Tumulty whether they should have aired what she called "nutjob surrogates" – she included Trump spokeswoman Katrina Pierson in that assessment – Zucker said it was up to the campaigns to send which surrogates they wanted to represent them.
"At the end of the day, it is up to the viewer, the electorate to decide whether that represents their candidate well," Zucker said.