After Chris Licht, people are wondering where CNN goes from here. Here's a wild suggestion
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Sometimes we're cast in roles we didn't audition for and never would have chosen had we been offered the option. Such is life. But there's an important distinction between being assigned a role and embracing it. Once you've chosen to play a part, and you do it to the hilt, any sudden transformations won't be plausible. Even if your about-face marks a return to who you truly are it's too late — you've already made the audience believe you.
This is the conundrum facing CNN faces as it hurtles into an interregnum. Chris Licht, the chairman and chief executive of CNN who stepped into the job – after Jeff Zucker was defenestrated – was ousted on Wednesday. The diagnostic precision of Tim Alberta's 15,000-word profile for The Atlantic reveals Licht to have been badly suited for the position, which was handed to him by Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav without considering any other internal candidates.
But this was a miscasting in an already badly directed production. The coverage in the wake of Licht's firing hints at the long shadow Zucker cast over his tenure whether on purpose or due to the space Licht allowed his predecessor to occupy rent-free in his head.
Multiple stories reference sources who still admire Zucker and what CNN achieved under his leadership as if yearning for the good old days. It's been a trying year for CNN's staffers, certainly. But to place a halo on the memory of the man before Licht doesn't make him a hero in retrospect.
Rather, it forgets that Zucker was one of the media gatekeepers who elevated Donald Trump's candidacy in 2016 by giving his campaign billions of dollars' worth of free media exposure. That's before factoring in the image inflation Zucker gifted to Trump via "The Apprentice," a show he greenlit in his days as NBC's entertainment president.
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CNN boss Chris Licht out after Trump town hall disaster — but don't expect a "course correction"
Then when Trump cast CNN as the "Fake News" villain early in his presidency, Zucker responded to that slander by encouraging his anchors and journalists to vociferously battle in defense of small "d" democracy.
This was pretty much the case with every cable news outlet that wasn't Fox News or the far-right upstarts that arose during Trump's administration. But the reputationally if not practically centrist CNN leaned hard into this adversarial role, scoring record-high ratings and close to $1 billion in annual profit during the Trump years. Arguably, they had to take up a war footing in an era derailed by doublespeak and lies flaunted as fact, and used to attack marginalized communities. Don Lemon was a terrific champion. At night. In the morning, not so much.
The network's style needed an overhaul. That doesn't mean Licht was a better option for CNN's bottom line.
Recapping Zucker's time at CNN is a necessary part of any Licht postmortem dedicated to figuring out how CNN can do better because it reminds us of what Licht inherited. Zucker was well-liked by CNN staffers and, unlike Licht, who formerly produced MSNBC's "Morning Joe" and "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert," struck a balance between managing up and supporting his news room. Maybe too much, as we learned when Chris Cuomo was fired for serious ethical lapses.
He also juiced the ratings by tapping into the audience's outrage while peddling false equivalencies in its analysis and platforming slimeballs like Corey Lewandowski. Once Trump was out of office, CNN's ratings declined. The network's style needed an overhaul. Zucker was booted before he could attempt one.
None of this means Licht was a better option for CNN's bottom line. From the many reports about what's occurred inside the cable news stress factory over the past year – including layoffs, plummeting morale and programming shakeups that never should have happened in the first place – it hasn't been pretty. CNN needed a physician, and Zaslav sent in a quack who haphazardly amputated healthy limbs, firing media analyst Brian Stelter and White House correspondent John Harwood, and moving Lemon to a morning show for which he was ill-suited.
From what Alberta reveals in that piece, Licht's failure was two-pronged. One, he assigned himself the part of journalism's savior.
Just . . . take that in for a moment.
Two, though, strolls far into the realm of the phantasmagoric by positing that CNN's path back to trust involves winning back Republican viewers and GOP contributors to its fold. Trump's town hall showed how likely that is to happen, although among the many alarming details The Atlantic piece reveals is that Licht set up CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins to fail as a moderator by intentionally stacking the audience with MAGA attendees and neglecting to put any decorum guardrails in place.
If viewer trust in CNN was low before, it's certainly lower now. It fell behind Newsmax in the ratings two nights after airing the town hall. That was Licht's fault. But the executive team brought in to replace him must contend with the problem that existed before he arrived and that he failed to fix, which is to restore CNN's brand as a straightforward purveyor of news and information.
If viewer trust in CNN was low before, it's certainly lower now.
The way to do that will not be simple, because cable news has morphed into a partisan circus where journalism is sloshed into the same bucket as opinion. But CNN has to try, which may begin by accepting a simple fact: to wingnuts, CNN will always be the villain not matter what its reporters and anchors do. Orange Leader may have made the channel his bête noire, but Fox News Channel has spent decades telling its viewers that CNN, MSNBC and any information source that isn't Fox is lying to them.
This is why everyone who got wind of Licht's plan to move CNN rightward to appease his Warner Bros. Discovery overlords knew that way lies madness. There's no winning those people back or the congressmen they elected to represent them. You might as well summon Voyager 1 back from deep space by pointing your TV remote at the sky and pressing any downward-pointing arrow. It's a cool thing to fantasize about, but it ain't happening.
Neither should the assigned leadership team take inspiration from Licht's repeated motto of "Some people like rain; some people don't like rain. You can't tell me it's not raining [when] it's raining." That is a smokescreen for false equivalency. Instead, let the other guys opine about the likability or unlikability of rain. There's an audience that wants a factual explanation of why the rain's coming down, who it's falling on and whether, according to vetted scientists, something detrimental is in that rain.
This would align with part of what Warner Bros. Discovery board major shareholder John Malone told CNBC in late 2021 that reportedly offended staffers. "I would like to see CNN evolve back to the kind of journalism that it started with," he said, which I agree with. The profoundly insulting part came after these words, where Malone implied CNN's staff did not consist of real journalists.
But that's no worse than the sentence that came before his slight. "Fox News, in my opinion, has followed an interesting trajectory of trying to have news news, I mean some actual journalism, embedded in a program schedule of all opinions."
It probably occurred to people in touch with reality that this man's opinion should have never factored into the direction of CNN's newsroom.
Nor, for that matter, should the new leaders pursue the lost cause that is getting viewers to tune into CNN for fun. Not even when Anthony Bourdain was on CNN did I turn to the channel for fun. Bourdain, rest his soul, sought to be illuminating and expand the way we view the world and travel. He was entertaining. My guess is that he wasn't going for fun. His aim was higher — he made us want to watch him and listen to his observations. He felt true.
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The interim leadership team consists of CNN veterans Amy Entelis, Virginia Moseley and Eric Sherling, who join the newly installed COO David Leavy in overseeing the day-to-day operations at the network as the company does a search, for real this time, for Licht's replacement.
Out of the three newly announced names, Entelis is the one whose impact on viewers is already substantial. After joining CNN in 2012, she launched the CNN Originals brand, which includes award-winning documentaries and docuseries, including earning CNN its first Oscar with "Navalny." A few trade reports hint that she has the best odds of winning this CEO derby.
If she does, that augurs well for a newsroom in need of guidance as we head into a presidential election cycle likely to be as fractious as 2020's, starring a dishonest showman who has convinced a too-large swath of the audience that CNN is cable news' mustache-twirling, untrustworthy elitist. Those people can never be persuaded otherwise, and there's no use in trying.
We'd all be better served by a 24-hour news channel with leadership that prioritizes news and information instead of its shareholders' whims. Those men want to offer distractions while the flood slowly rises. What we need is a stable raft, not messy playacting.
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