CNN's Chris Licht Lights Himself On Fire

Fight woke, go broke?

This morning, Dylan Byers at Puck News got the scoop that CNN's CEO Christ Licht had been quitfired, just a year after taking the job. Proximately, Licht's departure was caused by the devastating Atlantic   profile by Tim Alberta which dropped like a bomb Friday during CNN's 9 a.m. editorial call. The 15,000-word piece painted Licht as the unqualified millionaire dispatched by CNN's gazillionaire overlords at Warner Brothers, in particular David Zazlav, to root out liberal bias at the network and return it to the halcyon days of straight news.

The story picks up in fall of 2022, with Licht on a mission to "save journalism" by firing hundreds of journalists and ditching the network's flailing streaming service CNN+. Alberta writes:

There was never going to be much goodwill between Warner Bros. Discovery and the journalists at CNN. In November 2021, not long after the corporate takeover was announced, John Malone, a right-wing billionaire who stood to become a major shareholder on the new Warner Bros. Discovery board, said that CNN could learn a few things from the reporters at Fox News.

“I would like to see CNN evolve back to the kind of journalism that it started with, and actually have journalists, which would be unique and refreshing,” Malone told CNBC. After Zucker was sacked, Zaslav, the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, exacerbated these tensions by choosing Licht without interviewing any of CNN’s internal candidates. Zaslav told numerous people that he needed an outsider to revamp CNN’s journalistic practices because Republican politicians had told him they were no longer willing to come on the network—a rationale that worried staffers there.

And if it had worked, if he'd been able to resuscitate CNN's ratings and profit margins, he'd have been hailed as a genius by his corporate masters and journalists alike. But it became almost immediately clear to everyone involved, with the possible exception of Licht himself, that it wasn't working. And what Licht hoped would be a paean to his glorious triumph remaking the media landscape, published in the nation's oldest prestige journal, instead documented a year of embarrassing failure. Licht's personal struggles serve as a perfect allegory for an industry which is being ripped apart at the seams as one political party rejects truth in favor of endless culture war and plutocrats eat nine-tenths of the pie and brand anyone who notices as "Marxist."

Licht is portrayed as obsessed with his predecessor Jeff Zucker, constantly shit-talking his own network and employees and discounting all criticism as sour grapes from disgruntled loyalists to the former leader. He was especially incensed at unflattering stories from Byers, who used to work at CNN and is seen as an ally of Zucker.

"Zucker couldn't do this shit," Licht grunts in a memorable scene at his trainer's studio, an elite redoubt where rich men pay a former boxer in pajamas to dominate them and force them to aimlessly drag around discarded construction materials. Even Licht's fitness regimen, resulting in a 50-lb weight loss thanks to "No more breakfast. No drinking during the week. No more carbs or sweets" because “I’m a fucking machine,” turns out to be rather less than promised. Licht is later revealed to be taking Ozempic, and his workouts are sacrosanct — except when a call from Zazlav lights up his watch!

Licht supplies a similarly clanging metaphor for his inability to manage his employees, relocating from Zucker's modest office on the 17th floor in the middle of the action to a palatial suite on the 22nd which "most staffers didn’t know how to find."

"It became symbolic of Licht’s relationship to his workforce: He was detached, aloof, inaccessible in every way," Alberta tells us, as if we could possibly miss it.

In retrospect, Licht's decision to participate in the piece, meeting with Alberta over a year to boast about his decision to remake the media landscape, looks like suicide by reporter. But in a sense, the job was always a kamikaze mission. Licht and his corporate bosses demand a return to some bygone Cronkite era of just-the-facts journalism, even as Licht himself spews the same just-asking-questions bullshit that serves as a gateway drug for heavy duty conspiracy theorists who congratulate themselves on taking on "heterodoxies."

“Wait a second. We don’t know how many deaths there were from COVID,” Licht lectures a student, sliding seamlessly into the died with COVID/died from COVID speculation that's a staple in rightwing circles.

“Where we run into trouble is when you say, ‘No. Come on. We’re not even having that conversation,’” Licht went on. “That goes to trust as much as anything else. If you’re solid on your facts, then you should be able to entertain that discussion.”

Of course, there's no way to talk about what ails the media without talking about Trump, particularly as the 2024 election approaches. But Zazlav didn't hire Licht to acknowledge that Trump's wholesale disregard for the truth and deliberate effort to frame the media as the "enemy of the people" has now spread to the entire GOP. So instead, Licht frames the issue as one of reporters inserting themselves into the story:

“If something’s a lie, you call it a lie. You know what you’re dealing with now,” he said. “I think he changed the rules of the game, and the media was a little caught off guard and put a jersey on and got into the game as a way of dealing with it. And at least [at] my organization, I think we understand that jersey cannot go back on. Because guess what? It didn’t work. Being in the game with the jersey on didn’t change anyone’s mind.”

The solution proposed by Licht and his bosses at Warner Brothers for the "jersey" problem was nothing more than bothsiderism. Because, for all his protestations that "You can’t tell me it’s not raining [when] it’s raining," Licht's plan was to make CNN a hospitable place for people who look into a thundercloud and call it sunny weather. After the disastrous CNN townhall where Trump steamrolled Kaitlan Collins before a crowd of hardcore MAGA supporters, the network cut to a panel which included Rep. Byron Donalds, an election denier and staunch Trump ally. If an unbiased middle lane exists, it doesn't include Donalds or Trump's aide Hogan Gidley, who appeared in the pregame panel.

Even without his leadership deficits, Licht was always going to fail. Alberta may have moved up the moment of impact, but his bosses put him there to Make Journalism Great Again by returning it to a bygone era that no longer exists. We live in a post-truth era, and the media can no longer serve the public by treating public figures as if they are presumptively acting in good faith. And while Licht is going away, this problem is not.

[ Atlantic ]

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