Chris Licht is out of a job after it emerged he’d intentionally seeded the community’s Trump city corridor viewers with followers
CNN has parted methods with CEO Chris Licht a yr after he promised to revive the floundering information community as a drive for severe journalism, David Zaslav, the CEO of the community’s father or mother firm Warner Brothers Discovery, instructed staff on Wednesday.
Licht will likely be changed on an interim foundation by a bunch of senior CNN execs led by Amy Entelis, the one-time deputy of his polarizing predecessor, Jeff Zucker. Earlier than his ouster final yr, Zucker oversaw the transformation of CNN from a comparatively impartial information community to a virulently anti-Trump opinion platform – a metamorphosis Licht was supposedly tasked with reversing.
Trade insiders hint Licht’s downfall to the Trump city corridor held final month. The occasion was broadly panned as catastrophic for supposedly ceding management to the true property mogul and his adoring followers. Licht had apparently been anticipating an “additional Trumpy” crowd for the occasion, however insisted that moderately than marginalizing and demonizing the previous US president, because the community had achieved whereas he was within the Oval Workplace, the city corridor moderator ought to search to “confront him with details.”
Licht had been promoted to the highest function with a mandate to stroll CNN again from the anti-Trump precipice it had reached beneath his predecessor, Jeff Zucker, and – based on the Atlantic – considered his objective as nothing lower than to “save journalism.”
The CEO had instructed a journalist profiling him for the journal that his “mission” for CNN was “being trusted.” “Everybody has an agenda, making an attempt to form occasions or form thought. There needs to be a supply of absolute reality,” he stated, suggesting he wished to raise the community mocked by Trump, his supporters, and even a lot of his haters as “pretend information” to be that supply.
The profile was not flattering to the embattled CNN boss, with some claiming he got here throughout as paranoid and out of contact if genuinely involved with the community’s lack of ability to narrate to center America and decided to rebuild its status, promising to “cowl [Trump] like every other candidate” in 2024.
In follow, the community has continued to hemorrhage viewers whereas dropping a few of its most recognizable if controversial names, together with Brian Stelter and Don Lemon, and – if rankings are any choose – has didn’t persuade centrist audiences that it has left its anti-conservative polemics behind.
Licht apologized to CNN staffers on Monday for the Atlantic profile, describing the expertise as “tremendously humbling.”
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