Chris Licht’s short, complicated and chaotic tenure as head of CNN is over. Warner Bros. Discovery Company announced this Wednesday through a statement that the Chairman and CEO of CNN Worldwide has stepped down, effective immediately. “The job of leading CNN was never going to be easy,” said the boss’s boss, David Zaslav, president and CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery. The departure comes weeks after a controversial live interview with Donald Trump and a devastating profile of his figure published in The Atlantic.
Licht assumed his role in May 2022, following a successful career at CBS News and MSNBC. He replaced Jeff Zucker at the chain, forced to resign at the beginning of 2022 after it was discovered that he had hidden a relationship with an employee. He came to CNN at a time of the network’s existential crisis. Viewerships for Donald Trump’s presidency had fallen during Joe Biden’s duller tenure, and Fox News was gaining share at his expense, problems that worsened during his tenure.
In his year at the head of the news channel, he has made some controversial decisions. He came up with the plan to shut down CNN +, the subscription news channel project abandoned by the company’s managers. His big bet on programming was a morning show, This Morning, with three presenters: Poppy Harlow, Kaitlan Collins and Don Lemon. The audience did not respond and the program was a failure since its launch, last October, but also the situation worsened when he said about the candidate for the Republican nomination Nikki Haley, 51, that she was no longer “through her prime” and that “a woman is in the prime of her life at 20 and 30 years old and perhaps at 40”.
He was suspended and stayed away from the cameras for a few days while he underwent a training program. He returned to the air on February 21, but it did not last long. On the same day that Fox News fired its great star Tucker Carlson, CNN dispensed with Lemon without much explanation.
The resignation comes just weeks after broadcasting an interview with Donald Trump to a live, supportive audience, a format that favored the former president and in which he felt comfortable spreading his lies. But it also comes after the publication of an extensive report on the executive in The Atlantic that portrayed the failure in his attempt to straighten the course of the chain. Licht gave extensive statements to the author of the profile in which he was critical of the chain he directed.
His approach was that the channel had moved away from its informative DNA and that in the Trump era it had become excessively ideologized. in the profile of The Atlantic criticized the coverage of events such as the pandemic and other editorial decisions. He also talked about the decision to give Trump a voice in the broadcast program, in which the former president insulted the presenter while the audience applauded him. The publication of the article last Friday fell like a bomb on CNN, causing the discontent of the newsroom.
It was surprising and it was seen as an error of judgment that he had agreed to participate in the profile with his statements despite the fact that it was devastating for him: “Licht lived on an island, surrounded by people who did not like him, or who doubted his vision of the company, or that he questioned its competition, or that he was directly in favor of its fall”, said the report written by the journalist Tim Alberta, who had been working for months and was able to interview the executive on numerous occasions.
Licht apologized Monday to CNN staff for taking the spotlight, and in a negative way. Those apologies have not served to save his position, since he has lost the support of who had protected him until now, the head of Warner Bros. Discovery, David Zaslav.
“I have great respect for Chris, personally and professionally,” Zaslav said in the statement. “The job of leading CNN was never going to be easy, especially at a time of enormous disruption and transformation, and he has poured his heart and soul into it. Although we know we have work to do as we look to identify a new leader, we have absolute confidence in the team we have in place and will continue to fight for CNN and its world-class journalism,” he added.
Warner Bros. has announced that while actively seeking a replacement, Warner Bros. has put in place an interim collegiate management team consisting of Amy Entelis, executive vice president of talent and content development; Virginia Moseley, executive vice president of editorial, and Eric Sherling, executive vice president of US programming, as well as David Leavy, chief operating officer, on business. The transition process can take months.
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