You can say this much for Chris Licht: He had a vision for the future of CNN. It was a flawed vision, and sort of a stupid one—which perhaps explains why, as of Wednesday morning, Licht is now the ex-CEO of the network—but at least Licht realized that something needed to change at the cable-news giant. When Licht, previously the executive producer of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, took charge at CNN last spring, its ratings were going through a post-Trump doldrums and much of its programming felt inessential. Interpreted charitably, the moves Licht made during his 13 months as CEO were meant to right what many had deemed a sinking ship. The moves didn’t work, but at least Licht tried.
But if you’re going to give someone credit for trying, then you have to assign them responsibility for failing. Over the course of his time at CNN, Licht managed to alienate both staffers and audience members with a series of changes seemingly designed to lure back some alleged silent majority of center-right viewers. If those viewers exist at all, they weren’t swayed by Licht’s initiatives: Of late, CNN’s ratings have at times even lagged behind those of Newsmax, the cut-rate right-wing fantasy factory commonly found on, like, channel 1467. (Does it help Newsmax that Fox News is going through its own post–Tucker Carlson agonies? Yes. But it’s shocking that CNN has occasionally joined its right-wing rivals in the dumps.)
Licht’s departure, which the CEO of parent company Warner Bros. Discovery announced Wednesday in an all-staff email, marks the end of his brief, tumultuous tenure at the network. With luck, it will also mark the end of the empty thesis that CNN can or should restore its fortunes by pandering to those people who hate the organization because Donald Trump told them to.
In part, CNN’s decline was and remains a function of the ongoing demise of cable television at the hands of cord-cutters, combined with the ongoing proliferation of smaller and niche broadcast and audio news outlets that, taken together, diminish the need for one massive outlet that everyone in America watches and trusts. And yet CNN has always wanted to be—and has seen itself as—a network that represents the last word in news for the bulk of the nation. Its recent ratings have belied its self-image. You can’t credibly call yourself the news network of record when you’re lagging behind Jesse Watters in the 7 o’clock hour.
From that perspective, I can kind of understand why Licht’s CNN focused on chasing after the people who weren’t watching. There’s little reason to stick with what works when, from a ratings standpoint, it doesn’t actually work. Licht and others high up in the Warner Bros. Discovery corporate structure clearly felt that the network’s ratings doldrums were linked to the ways in which its programming had departed from the news-focused neutrality for which it had once been known. (It’s very possible, perhaps even probable, that Licht’s bosses still feel this way, and that Licht’s tenure is seen less as a failure of ideas than a failure of execution.)
Under the preceding CEO, Jeff Zucker, CNN’s hosts and reporters had been free to call out the excesses of the Trump administration, and to be direct about the ongoing danger that Trumpism posed to American democracy. Licht believed that CNN’s path back to ratings dominance required a return to first principles, i.e., fewer monologues about the evils of Trumpism and more dispassionate news reporting. In theory, this idea wasn’t a bad one. The Zucker years at CNN were hardly some halcyon era of unbroken journalistic excellence. CNN was often junky and tiresome under Zucker! By minimizing the time that his hosts and reporters spent preaching to the choir, Licht hoped to win back viewers who just wanted to watch the news.
And yet there’s no real evidence that CNN got any better at reporting under Licht than it had been under Zucker. That’s not to say that CNN was bad at reporting under Zucker: It wasn’t! Even at its most resistance-brained moments, CNN writ large has always been one of the world’s best sources of on-the-ground reporting, with a vast newsgathering infrastructure that gives the network an edge on its competitors. Licht’s critique was essentially one of framing more than one of journalistic nuts and bolts. He wanted CNN to be primarily known for its already-good reporting, not for making right-leaning viewers uncomfortable by reminding them over and over that they’d voted for a monster.
The problem, unfortunately, was that you cannot credibly report on U.S. politics in 2023 without acknowledging that much of the Republican Party has been epistemically captured by anti-democratic forces. The only people served by the executive decision to pretend that it’s still 1990 and both sides of the aisle are basically normal are right-wing operators who seek to exploit the reportorial “view from nowhere” for their own gain. By cutting loose some of his network’s most prominent and articulate Trump critics while actively soliciting and platforming voices from the right—up to and including the former president himself—Licht effectively chose to court the approval of people who are fundamentally opposed to the entire premise of the news, like a distraught lover obsessing over an ex who posts every day on Facebook about how much they hate them.
The nadir of Licht’s time at CNN was probably the embarrassing town hall the network hosted with Donald Trump in May, a cringeworthy hour in which the former president and current front-runner for the 2024 Republican nomination lied and sneered and blustered in front of a friendly crowd for an hour, essentially unimpeded by host Kaitlan Collins. When CNN cut to its commentators at the end of the town hall, they were shocked and silent, mirroring the dominant reaction in living rooms across America. Licht tried to defend the town hall in an all-staff meeting the next day, claiming that “America was served very well by what we did last night,” and later scolding CNN reporter Oliver Darcy for being too critical in his postmortem of the event. But Darcy’s harsh critique was also an accurate one. The town hall was a cynical ratings stunt that sold out the network’s platform while alienating many of those who actually believed in what CNN allegedly stands for.
Although Licht professed to believe in what CNN stands for—as evidenced in a disastrous recent Atlantic profile that may have sealed his fate—the past 13 months proved that he did not know what it meant to embody those virtues in our current political climate. A serious news organization in 2023 cannot adopt a “view from nowhere” mentality that draws false equivalence between the two major political parties—at least not as long as the Republican Party remains in thrall to a seditious liar who would disrupt the peaceful transfer of presidential power in order to soothe his own wounded ego. At least that’s the main ego CNN has to worry about now.
