For decades, CNN was a preeminent news source, notable for 24-hour, round-the-clock coverage — the network that never went to bed.
Launched in 1980 by Ted Turner, the cable network’s nonstop news show was especially prominent during the 1990 Gulf War, when CNN was still independent. Its subsequent history is as follows:
- Time, Inc., a newsmagazine publisher, and Warner Brothers, a movie studio, merged in 1990 to form Time-Warner.
- Time-Warner acquired CNN from Turner in 1996.
- Time-Warner was acquired by AT&T in 2018, then spun off and merged with Discovery in 2022 to form Warner Brothers Discovery.
- Warner Brothers Discovery (WBD), the present owner of CNN, then restructured CNN’s news operations as described below.
WBD’s boss, David Zaslov, put Chris Licht (bio here) in charge of CNN and tasked him with improving ratings by increasing its appeal to Republican viewers, in particular Trump supporters. Licht fired a bunch of CNN journalists, and then put on the much-derided Trump townhall on May 10, 2023.
Licht filled that audience with Trump fans, and instructed the audience they could applaud Trump, but could not boo him. During the show, Trump repeated his 2020 election lies, and ran roughshod over CNN’s host. It was a journalistic disaster.
Behind the scenes at CNN, Raw Story says (here), Licht was
“fighting to win back Republicans who had written off the network, while also fighting to win over his own journalists, many of whom believed their new boss was scapegoating them to appease his new boss, David Zaslav, who’d hired Licht with a decree to move CNN toward the ideological center.”
Licht was trying to mix oil and water. If Republicans — Trump supporters in particular — are only willing to listen to the kind of propaganda Fox purveys, you can’t win them over with journalism or honest reporting. And if you’re going to turn CNN into another Fox, you’re going to lose the journalists and face a newsroom rebellion.
That’s exactly what happened to Licht after his Trump townhall fiasco.
Licht isn’t a journalist; he’s a ratings guy. That’s understandable; CNN is a business, and his job is to make money. If that requires sacrificing journalism for the sake of audience share and ratings, well, that’s life in the big city.
But Licht’s orientation put good journalists out of work (at CNN, at least), and is on the verge of wrecking CNN as a news source. Among other things, there’s a lot less news on its website now. But the real problem is reorienting CNN’s news operations from objectivity to appeasing an audience that demands ideological programming.
News media shouldn’t appease anyone. Their job is to report facts. Reporting that exposes Trump’s lies isn’t “liberal biased,” because Trump is a liar. Debunking his election lies isn’t “biased” reported, because those claims are false. As a neutral observer, CNN doesn’t become “liberal” or “biased” for reporting facts as they really exist. If CNN stops reporting facts that anger conservatives in order to appease that audience, then it has left the news business and become a propagandist.
Zaslov apparently realizes CNN can’t compete with Fox as a rightwing propagandist, or capture that audience with the kind of half-hearted pandering Licht attempted with his misbegotten townhall. (Licht seems not to want to go all-in on Fox-style propaganda.) Since that townhall, Raw Story says, “things may have changed at the news network.” Zaslov has moved up an executive he’s personally close to, which could mark “the beginning of the end for Licht.”
That would be a good thing, because CNN lost its way under Licht — the firing of journalists, fewer news stories, and ideological slanting of editorial management. Licht is a failed experiment. He shouldn’t be eased out, he should be fired; and if Zaslov is serious about saving CNN’s reputation as a news source, he’ll put a journalist in charge of its newsroom and editorial decision-making.
And there’ll be no more Trump-friendly townhalls, audiences recruited on the basis of their political leanings, or instructions they can clap but can’t boo when a toxic guest mangles truth and spews venomous lies.