Ever after its CEO’s firing, CNN remains stuck in no man’s land.
Technically, the news is that CNN CEO Chris Licht was pushed out this morning. But the only newsy part of that statement is that it happened this morning: Licht, whose tenure at the cable news giant barely lasted a year, has been a dead man walking for the last week.
The real question is whether Licht’s former boss, Warner Brothers Discovery CEO David Zaslav, has learned anything over the course of the debacle. It’s not clear that he has.
The very fast recap: Zaslav took over CNN and the rest of the company that used to be called Time Warner last spring. Then he installed Licht, a TV producer who most recently had turned around Stephen Colbert’s late-night CBS show, to replace former CNN boss Jeff Zucker, who had been pushed out by the previous owners. Licht then told anyone and everyone that his job was to fix CNN by reversing its supposed slide into liberal anti-Trump activism.
Things went south immediately: Disgruntled CNN staff distrusted Licht from the jump; Licht distrusted his staff; ratings plummeted from Trump and Covid-era highs, and things culminated in a much-derided “town hall” event with Trump last month. Then all of this was cataloged in great detail by the Atlantic’s Tim Alberta, who published a devastating 15,000-word piece about Licht’s tenure — with Licht’s hubristic co-operation — five days ago. Following the Atlantic piece, the only question about Licht’s position at the network was the timing of his departure.
But in the year prior to the Atlantic piece, Zaslav had insisted, publicly and privately, that Licht was doing great, and that his head-to-the-middle strategy was the right way to go. Days after the Trump town hall, Zaslav told investors that CNN was on the rise, due to the fact that it was now committed to showing “both sides” and courting Republicans. “Chris is rebuilding the network,” he said.
