Chris Licht’s troubled first year at CNN

One year into his tenure as the CEO of CNN, Chris Licht is taking a battering. Ratings are dwindling, viewers are outraged and an internal rift is widening. The mountain of problems facing the embattled CEO erupted into public view last week in the wake of the network’s town hall with Donald Trump, an event that sparked outrage inside and outside the CNN newsroom.

“It feels very bleak,” one CNN journalist told me. “Staffers are nervous about the future.”

The argument in favor of hosting Trump is so simple that it has been presented as obvious by Licht and David Zaslav, the head of CNN parent company WarnerBros Discovery: Trump is the former president; the de facto leader of the Republican Party; most likely to be the party’s next nominee for president; possibly the next president of the United States.

Inviting such a figure on air to face an interrogation from Kaitlan Collins, a tough reporter who has proven her chops time and time again, is a no-brainer. And yet CNN is not just under fire from its critics on the left, but by prominent voices inside the network, who have fumed over its handling of the event. Even those who see the value in having Trump on the air objected to the format, which featured Trump, anchor Collins and a room full of Trump supporters who cheered on his false claims and insults.

Collins, as many inside CNN acknowledge, was given an impossible task. Not only was she expected to calmly lead a horse through a hospital — CNN stocked the hospital with patients eager to see the horse wreak havoc.

One thing many at CNN stress is that Trump is no ordinary former president. They are correct, to an extent; Trump is alone in holding the ignoble distinction of inspiring a deadly riot at the US Capitol. The week CNN held its town hall, Trump was found liable for the sexual abuse and defamation of writer E. Jean Carroll.

There’s also a personal element to the Trump-CNN beef: beyond the high-profile clashes between him and CNN’s top stars, Trump spewed so much bile at the network during his presidency that one of his deranged supporters had the bright idea to send pipe bombs to CNN’s headquarters. Being on the business end of a mailed explosive device would inspire reflection on coverage from even the most objective of journalists. It’s easy to understand the sensitivity.

In the words of one disappointed CNN source I spoke with: “There’s just no excuse for jumping into bed with Donald Trump. And that’s what it looks like we’ve done.”

It’s a tale as old as Trump: a newsroom battle between leadership that sees objectivity as the all-powerful solution to the current political crisis, and a group of journalists who ascended to stardom on the basis of the idea that this time is different.

CNN senior media reporter Oliver Darcy emerged as the champion of the latter group, having criticized the town hall in his nightly newsletter. That swing got Darcy hauled into Licht’s office for a lengthy meeting in which he was told his coverage was too “emotional.”

On the other side: Licht made a convincing argument in his comments to rankled employees that the network can’t ignore Trump, and certainly can’t ignore his supporters. Indeed, there is a certain value to showing that Trump’s still got it, and that his supporters still love it. After all, as one Republican in the audience at the town hall noted, those voters who did not cheer him on were repulsed by the display. Those who may have forgotten who Trump is were served a lurid reminder.

Anderson Cooper, the living embodiment of CNN, backed Licht with an on-air defense of the event. “You have every right to be outraged today and angry and never watch this network again,” he said. “But do you think staying in your silo and only listening to people you agree with is going to make that person go away?”

Viewers may be taking their right to tune out seriously.

The town hall brought a momentary respite to CNN’s ratings woes — about 3 million viewers tuned in to watch Trump vs Collins — but even those numbers were lower than the network’s last equivalent town hall with Joe Biden.

“The numbers didn’t match up to the Biden town hall,” one CNN source said in shock. “And who the fuck is watching a Biden town hall?”

The source said they feared a key segment of CNN’s audience — the viewers Jeff Zucker doped up during the Trump years, turning millions into regular addicts of CNN’s take on the Trump show — had finally decided to tune out.

“We have run off our core audience,” they lamented. “Maybe they won’t come back.”

Following the town hall, the numbers only got worse. By Friday, the primetime audience dropped below Newsmax, an alarming development for one of the big three cable news networks.

No one said remaking a network that Jeff Zucker turned into #Resistance TV would be easy. To achieve the goals articulated by Zaslav, Licht had to level the network and start from scratch.

The changes implemented so far have been extensive. The costly streaming service CNN+ was shut down three weeks after its launch. The primetime schedule was demolished and has yet to be put back together. Several network stars were shown the door. Dayside anchors were booted from their swivel chairs into a sleek new standing studio.

Some of his moves showed promise. Licht’s first mission was to remake the network’s morning show, which has always struggled at third place in the ratings race, behind Morning Joe and Fox & Friends. CNN’s attempts at a newsier breakfast program have — shock! — been a tougher sell. Licht, who helped create Morning Joe, had the reputation to turn CNN’s morning woes around. His solution was CNN This Morning, built around Don Lemon, Kaitlan Collins and Poppy Harlow, which ran headfirst into a brick wall less than a year after its launch. Lemon, once one of CNN’s biggest names, is now a free agent — and Licht is again trying out Collins in different roles, in the hopes the rising star can help turn the ship around.

As any ratings-strapped network will tell you, ratings aren’t everything. In this case, there’s a drop of truth to that. Zaslav and the powers that be see the priority as restoring CNN to its former glory. They see the network as a reputational asset that the country — not just anti-Trump liberals — can regard as the most trusted name in news. As part of that effort, Licht has sought to turn down the volume of opinion punditry, open up the studio doors to Republicans and tout the network’s muscular reporting apparatus that spans continents. He’s had some success in achieving those goals. 

It’s just come at the cost of ratings and now, at the risk of losing the support of the newsroom. If the reputation of the network doesn’t turn around soon, CNN could be in for a grim reckoning.