CNN Chairman and CEO Chris Licht Is Out
cnn.com
cnn.com
Archive link: http://archive.is/QhBcU
- Know your workforce, Licht seemed completely oblivious to his staff and showed next to zero interest in any of them.
- Make yourself available to your team(open door policy) - Licht hid out on the 22nd floor and was intentionally difficult to find.
- Know your core customer - CNN is known as having bias against the political right, its audience skews very left. Licht having the debacle of a Trump town hall alienated its main constituency and further drove down ratings.
- Pick the right people for critical jobs - Having a heavy and controversial morning host in Don Lemon makes zero sense, people want mellow and light-hearted banter when they are waking up.
- Constantly bad mouthing the previous regime looks petty - Despite issues with CNN under Zucker it just looks bad and UN-professional to constantly put down ex-coworkers.
- Sometimes a ship is just going to go down - Leaders and managers love turning around bad companies and teams, but I think CNN is headed one way and its all downhill from here. Thanks to social media, partisan news channels(Fox/MSNBC) and just changing demographics(not as many people watch live TV anymore).
The story the article wants us to believe is that Zaslav setup Licht as a "marionette" (in the article author's words) so that he could push unpopular changes through at CNN. Licht is made out to be impersonal, impotent and naive. He is both forced to tow the line for the execs above him and suffer the humiliation of being undermined by his underlings. There is the implication that even his greatest failures aren't due to incompetence but due to the meddling that was forced upon him. But Licht genuinely appears to have represented an attempt to move CNN back into a trustworthy news organization. The implication is that such a move is impossible due to the meddling of execs and the entrenched politics in the org.
Every time I read an article in The Atlantic I get the impression that I am staring the Ministry of Truth in the face. We are about to see the media landscape once again reshaped. Articles like this are providing the context for some longer narrative arc that is just beginning to take shape. We all hope that discourse in America is going to return to some kind of moderate center and the rifts between partisan sides will be healed. But this article suggests that things are actually being steered away from that. The resistance to extreme populism is being painted as ineffectual.
I can't blame them. Trump running in 2024 is going to cause quite the stir. There is the fear of an escalation of the kind of events we saw on Jan 6. My impression is that rather than calming things down, the sides are preparing to mobilize.
What?!? He fired a bunch of “radical left” reporters for saying there was no evidence the 2020 election was stolen, and for pointing out that it had been proven that many people claiming it was were intentionally lying. (these are both verifiable facts, and CNN management doesn’t dispute that).
Then, they said their business plan for the next few years was to pull in the Fox News demographic by running similar content.
Trump famously made fun of them for this, since it’s a transparently desperate, destined to fail strategy. It also immediately started alienating their existing audience.
Note that, for legal reasons, Fox News is extremely clear that its programming is entertainment, and not news, so, even if you approve of their stated intentions, you can’t plausibly argue they are trying to become a “trustworthy news organization” by emulating Fox.
It's not politics so much as tone that lacks semblance of neutrality. "It's not what you said but how you said it" , there are many ways to state a simple fact and journalists are trained to do so in a way that lets viewers/readers trust in them. They have to sound objective and their conclusions must be (and sound as if they are) based on facts and rational thinking as opposed to emotional reactions anyone one of us could have. Their emotional presentations help them with viewers that are only looking to have their biases confirmed but alienate viewers looking for facts and truth.
> they said their business plan for the next few years was to pull in the Fox News demographic by running similar content.
Who are "they" and where did "they" say this?
Licht's background, based on the article, was as the producer for Morning Joe with Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski. My understanding is that show would be considered a left-leaning show. He is also known as the show-runner for the late-night Stephen Colbert show. I believe that is also a pretty left-leaning show.
I am maybe more willing to give him the benefit of the doubt in the face of the clear smears against him from The Atlantic article, but it seems well within reason to see him as a left-leaning believer in journalistic integrity. I assume that he honestly believes that the remedy to the rise of right-wing populism is to engage the other side in open debate and encourage the truth to shine through. But it seems beyond reason for me to assume he was a covert right-wing operator masquerading for decades as a left-wing political show runner waiting for his chance to transform CNN into Fox News.
Your response is totally in-line with the implied environment that The Atlantic is painting. The left is so ravenous for blood that they will paint anyone leaning towards the center as an enemy. The execs at CNN don't want moderate and unbiased voices (they "helicoptered" in). The reporters at CNN don't want moderate and unbiased leadership (they undermined Licht). And the public don't want moderate and unbiased media (they didn't tune in and ratings dropped). It doesn't matter if that is true or false, it is the narrative being implied.
> Mr. Zucker’s criticism has rankled executives of Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN, according to people familiar with their thinking. They suspect Mr. Zucker has leaked unflattering information about the network’s operations to the press.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/04/business/jeff-zucker-cnn-...
How is Tim Alberta "sleazy?" He's done fine reporting for The Atlantic.
From the Atlantic piece:
"Licht was still coming to terms with the ferocity of the backlash later that night when CNN’s popular Reliable Sources newsletter landed in his inbox. He read the opening line in disbelief: 'It’s hard to see how America was served by the spectacle of lies that aired on CNN Wednesday evening,' Licht’s own media reporter, Oliver Darcy, wrote.
Licht could handle being ridiculed by his media rivals. But being publicly scolded by someone on his own payroll—on the biggest night of his career—felt like a new level of betrayal. Licht, who just hours earlier had expressed ambivalence to me about how the event played, went into war mode."
I said that I would not do that as it is unethical and rude. And he looked at me like I was the alien. Like why would anyone think that or care?
If anyone reading this feels like I am an alien here, keep in mind Licht just got booted. The world cares, even if your sociopath CEO self doesn't.
Funny how many software and online services now blatantly act like abusive partners, "Oh yeah, we're cunts, but what are you going to replace us with?".
Edit: the name Adobe just popped into my head.
You can appeal to potential customers, but guilt, harassment and bullying lose you customers.
it was pointless time wasting and utterly useless for viewers but must have sounded cool to some exec. It was almost painful to watch and I’m sure cost them oodles of money.
That’s basically cnn for the past decade.
https://apnews.com/article/cnn-ratings-chris-licht-584ea2b45...
(I am not making a political comment here, just pointing out that CNN ratings are correlated with Trump's level of activity.)
https://www.ft.com/content/85241de6-981c-433a-9ab8-6518021d0...
Trump was a bigger bump and a bigger hangover, but it’s a known pattern.
Which is my real “big media conspiracy”, which is barely a conspiracy: it’s hard to imagine substantial electoral when TV news is so dependent on this election year gusher of money. Especially at the local TV news level.
Whenever I watch CNN, I get the feeling that they hate me, and everyone like me. I don't think I'm alone on that one, given their ratings. Ideally, Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon would never have to deal with "those people" - aka everyone I know and care about.