#Jeff Zucker’s CNN successor faces a big mess

After CNN boss Jeff Zucker resigned in disgrace on Wednesday, it’s unclear who — if anyone — will take his place. But one thing is clear: There’s a big mess to clean up at the news network.

CNN has been plagued by a cascade of recent high-profile scandals and steep ratings declines. Now that rough patch is capped off by the news that longtime boss Zucker resigned after he didn’t disclose a romantic relationship with another senior executive at the company.

A decision on the seat at the top of the network likely won’t be made until AT&T completes its $43 billion deal to spin off CNN’s parent company, WarnerMedia, into a merger with Discovery. That deal isn’t expected to close until sometime this spring.

Once the deal closes, Discovery boss David Zaslav — who will grab the reins as CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery — will decide what to do at the top of CNN. He could decide, of course, not to appoint any one person to fill Zucker’s role.

“CNN doesn’t need to hire outside,” one media executive familiar with the situation told The Post. “The machine kind of runs itself. CNN is a big, old bureaucratic news organization.”

Still, this person said, there will be a lot of work to do. CNN, the source said, “has lost its way.”

The network had been riding high on strong ratings when Donald Trump was president. But without the Zucker-directed constant coverage of all-things Trump, CNN’s ratings began to freefall.

The network’s ratings took a nosedive, falling a massive 90 percent in the first week of the new year when considering overall viewers and in one all-important demographic coveted by advertisers.

Meanwhile, on Wednesday, CNN hastily named a trio of executives to fill Zucker’s shoes on an interim basis: Executive Vice President of Programming Michael Bass, Executive Vice President for Talent and Content Development at CNN Worldwide Amy Entelis and Executive Vice President Ken Jautz.

“It’s a classic bake-off,” said a source, referring to the race for the top job.

Media insiders buzzed that Zaslav will likely pick one of the three execs, as he will have a hard time finding a high-profile exec to clean up the mess that Zucker left behind.

Sources pointed to Entelis, a well-respected female exec as a frontrunner, followed by Bass. Other perennial favorites that are often mentioned for top jobs included Chris Licht, the executive producer of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” and former CBS News president David Rhodes, who is now running international business development at Sky News.

CNN’s ratings decline followed the network’s second-most-watched year ever. According to Nielsen, CNN has struggled to grab viewers during primetime, between 8 and 11 p.m., recording an 83% year-over-year drop. During the first week of the year, CNN recorded a year-over-year decline of 80% of its total audience. 

To attempt to turn around the ratings nosedive, Zucker revealed the network would launch its own streaming service, dubbed CNN+, this March.

But sources inside the network told The Post that developing CNN+ has been “disorganized” and that Zucker has failed to attract any true big names. Launching CNN+ will be a massive endeavor for the new management, they said.

To make matters worse, Zucker has been in the hot seat for his handling of a scandal concerning CNN anchor Chris Cuomo. Zucker finally fired primetime star Cuomo, after the anchor was found to be secretly aiding the defense of his embattled older brother, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, over sexual harassment allegations that resulted in his resignation.

Zucker said Wednesday that as part of a probe into Chris Cuomo’s alleged sexual misconduct, he failed to disclose what he said was a consensual relationship he had with CNN’s executive vice president and chief marketing officer Allison Gollust. The exec blamed the failure to disclose the relationship as the reason why he resigned from the network, even though news of the affair had been widely circulating in the media world for years.

“Everyboy knew about his affairs,” sniffed one source. “It only was a matter of time.”