AT&T’s John Stankey And Discovery’s David Zaslav Avoid Talking Details Of Jeff Zucker’s Exit: “Unfortunate Set Of Circumstances”

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AT&T CEO John Stankey and Discovery CEO David Zaslav generally sidestepped questions about the exit of CNN boss Jeff Zucker amid dismay among the cable network’s on air talent and staffers over how the situation was handled.“Jeff resigned and the decision to resign was Jeff’s decision and it’s an unfortunate set of circumstances,” Stankey told CNBC in an interview in Pebble Beach, CA.According to sources familiar with the matter, WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar, Zucker’s boss, made it clear that he either had to resign or would be terminated for failing to disclose a relationship with Allison Gollust, CNN’s marketing chief.Yet there also has been ample other speculation over what led to Zucker’s exit.When Joe Kernen pressed Stankey on whether there were “other things in play for whether he was out anyway,” citing John Malone’s comments about the network, Stankey said, “Joe, I’m not going to speculate on your theory.” He added that “I’ve always had a practice of not commenting on personnel situations and I don’t intend to do that here.”Zaslav, who is poised to become the new CEO of Discovery-WarnerMedia, told CNBC in a separate interview that he was not involved in Zucker’s exit.“Jeff is a good friend of mine.

I can’t speak to this issue. We don’t own the company yet. We’re not involved in any of that,” he said.Asked about Malone, Zaslav said, “None of us had anything to do with it.

We’re running our business.”He did praise CNN and express bullishness on one of Zucker’s signature projects, the subscription streaming service CNN+, set to debut in the spring.“In terms of CNN+, we couldn’t be more excited about the fact that they have been hiring great journalists,” Zaslav said. “CNN has the greatest group of journalists in the