The Warner Bros. Discovery chief, David Zaslav, has been clear about what he wanted for the cable news network from the day he took charge of CNN in 2022. Publicly and privately, he told associates, reporters and anyone else that he wanted to move the network away from what he considered left-wing “advocacy” and toward more “balance.” His CNN would not be anti-Trump and would be more welcoming to Republicans.
When Mr. Zaslav’s hand-picked CNN chief Chris Licht seemed to struggle with that assignment in the months that followed, Mr. Zaslav backed him up with the ultimate carte blanche statement: “Ratings be damned.”
Indeed, the ratings would be doomed, as would Mr Licht’s tenure, which came to an abrupt end after just over a year on Wednesday when Mr Zaslav reached his limit.
The dismissal of Mr. Licht immediately raised a decisive question for the television news industry and beyond: Can a de-aligned, independent approach to news work in today’s fragmented, on-demand media age, in which the public is groomed for news on its own terms? And, of all places, can it work in the very niche areas of cable?
In the end, Mr. Licht’s effort seemed to satisfy no one. And the first lines among some news commentators were that he had failed because his mission was impossible, a dead idea from a bygone age.
In fact, Mr. Licht’s short tenure does not provide an easy answer. His mission was largely doomed by the specific form of his assignment, his own missteps, and a seemingly incomplete understanding of the network as it existed before his arrival.
But it did make it clear how difficult it can be to find the success that Mr. Licht was sent to look for. Polarization is sky-high and Americans are occupying dueling information silos. Cable, a medium that played for divided interests from the start, now competes with social media, where the most successful items are often the most outspokenly partisan and provocative.
But despite all that, it is extremely difficult to create a media version of a shared public square without a clear idea of what it means to be “balanced” or to give equal say to “both voices” – as Mr. Zaslav it expresses. . That’s especially true when former President Donald J. Trump, the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, continues to falsely claim that the 2020 election was “stolen” from him.
And, several current and former CNN employees said, that clear idea was exactly what was missing under Mr. Licht and his boss, Mr. Zaslav, whose direction he followed. The definition was shaped more by what they didn’t want—everything that had preceded them under Mr. Licht’s predecessor, Jeff Zucker—than by what they did want.
Several of them pointed to an early mistake from above that early on fostered mistrust — and undermined Mr. Licht — with the CNN staff before the merger of Discovery and WarnerMedia, CNN’s parent company, was even complete.
In an interview on CNBC in November 2021, a prominent board member of Warner Bros. Discovery, the cable pioneer John Malone, belittling CNN and praising Fox News as he discussed his own hopes for CNN under the new corporate structure.
“Fox News has, in my opinion, taken an interesting trajectory to try to have news news, I mean some real journalism, embedded in a program schedule of all opinions,” Mr. Malone said. “I’d like to see CNN evolve back to the kind of journalism it started with and actually have journalists, which would be unique and refreshing.”
It was conceived as a reflection of what was effectively a news organization brimming with leading journalists. Many of them revered Mr. Zucker, who was forced to leave in February 2022 after failing to report a romantic working relationship.
“His suggestion that CNN’s thousands of journalists weren’t real was deeply insulting,” said Brian Stelter, the network’s former top media correspondent and former reporter for The New York Times. (Under Mr. Zucker, Mr. Stelter had emerged as the epitome of the network’s sometimes belligerent defense against “fake news” attacks that Mr. Trump waged against the network, and a regular target of conservative criticism. He would become one of the first high-profile presenters Mr. Licht Sneed.) “I think a lot of CNN staffers learned that Malone wanted CNN to become more like Fox.”
Mr Stelter claims the network was already recalibrating for the post-Trump era when Mr Zaslav took over. Many staffers agreed with Mr. Licht on the general idea that the network should play fair, and he and others saw the new leadership as “pushing at a stooge.”
For example, one thing that Mr. Zaslav and Mr. Licht made clear was that they wanted to reverse the Republican backlash against appearing on CNN. “Republicans are back on the air,” Zaslav declared at a media conference in May. “Republicans weren’t on the air.”
But the idea that including Republicans in programming was new to the network ran counter to recent history.
Early in Mr. Trump’s rise to power, Mr. Zucker was criticized for giving Mr. Trump too much uncritical airtime, and then for hiring a cast of outspoken pro-Trump analysts like Jeffrey Lord and Corey Lewandowski.
The tone certainly changed as CNN, like many others in the news media, more aggressively denounced Mr. Trump’s false statements. He, in turn, labeled them “fake news” and “enemies of the people.”
Few have been as attacked by Mr. Trump as CNN. Memories are still fresh of the mail bomb scare in the New York offices in 2018 – part of an environment that subsided before Mr. Licht and Mr. Zaslav arrived.
Even now, Mr. Zucker’s fans at the network—and they still are legion—will say that if his CNN incarnation seemed hot and angry at times, he did so to defend the truth.
“Under the Zucker regime, CNN said, ‘We may sound outraged, but we are spreading lies and standing for the truth. If that sounds angry, so be it,” said Frank Sesno, former bureau chief of CNN Washington and now a professor in the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University.
Mr Sesno said he too believed the network’s job was to “tone down certain elements and dial back some things” of the Trump presidency. But he said Mr. Licht had gone about it the wrong way.
“What Licht was really trying to do, and it didn’t work, was he tried to make a tone change, but he made it sound like a content change,” Mr. Sesno said.
The town hall that CNN held with Mr. Trump last month was not particularly unusual by the standards of the 2016 campaign. That, of course, was before the uproar caused by four years of Trump administration and his election lies, which led to the Jan. 6 riots. 2021 fueled.
Mr. Licht’s handling of City Hall would help seal his fate — especially his decision to stage it in front of a fervently pro-Trump crowd that applauded the former president as he spewed untruths and CNN host Kaitlan Collins, who served as his inquisitor.
There appeared to be broad agreement within CNN that the execution was poor. In the first place, there was less uniformity about holding the town hall. After all, Mr. Trump was the leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination.
As Anderson asked Cooper on the air the next night to acknowledge the viewer’s disappointment, “Do you think that person will go away if you stay in your silo and only listen to people you agree with?”
An answer seemed to come in the days that followed: the network had its worst ratings in eight years.
Even now, Mr. Zaslav seems intent on sticking to his strategy. “Viewing numbers are damn,” he has said. But history shows that no television strategy can survive eternal ratings.
