Chris Licht’s tumultuous one-year tenure as the CEO of CNN has ignominiously ended, but the real story, the important story is why. The answer is that the leftist activists on staff will not tolerate anything that questions progressive orthodoxy.
The irony of course is that when the head of Warner Brothers/Discovery David Zaslav plucked Licht for the job he specifically said he wanted a more down the middle CNN. "Journalism first," he boldly pronounced last summer, adding, "America needs a news network where everybody can come and be heard; Republicans [and] Democrats."
As Billionaire Warner Bros board member and Zaslav confidant John Malone put it back in August of last year he wanted "The news portion of CNN to be more centrist." Pretty clear.
Less than a year later, on Wednesday, Licht was shown the door mainly for echoing these statements in an Atlantic magazine feature and for greenlighting a town hall on the network with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.
Think about that. Trump is the most likely GOP nominee for president at this point and Licht thought maybe viewers should hear from him. For his trouble half the on-air talent at the low-rated outlet grabbed the fainting couch and threw a freak out over "platforming" Trump.
This isn’t so much the inmates running the asylum as it is the censors running the newspaper.
Pick an issue, any issue, Trump, the 2020 election, Hunter Biden, the trans issue, COVID-19, all of them, and you can be sure that the bobbleheads on CNN will be in sync with their chorus of left-wing talking points.
It was Licht’s predecessor, former CEO Jeff Zucker, who changed CNN’s mission from reporting the news to saving America during his tenure. His was a vision of activism, brave journalists, at least in his mind, slaying the lies of the bad orange man like St. George slaying dragons.
The only problem was that aside from captive audiences at the airport nobody wanted to watch it. Zucker’s pet project, the doomed streaming service CNN+, was such an unmitigated marketing disaster that the creators of New Coke busted out champagne at the new low-water mark.
Isn’t this exactly what Licht was brought in to change, by trying to pull in a more ideologically diverse audience? And his efforts were frankly pretty milquetoast. He fired a few personalities seen as biased, but it's not like he gave Steve Bannon a weekend show or courted advertising from My Pillow.
The lesson here is clear: no real conservative voices, the kind that actually reflect the views of the vast majority of Americans on the right, will be tolerated by the crybaby lefty loons in the CNN newsroom.
What’s less clear is why Zaslav and The Powers That Be are allowing the employees to tank the network with this ideological veto. Who is the boss, Zaslav or Jake Tapper, and who on earth would want to pretend to be CEO while the staff really runs the show? There is no mystery why CNN is about as popular as BBQ ribs at a PETA convention, it's because everyone knows that despite their claims of being neutral the network does not accept as valid the viewpoints of tens of millions of Americans.
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Whatever his faults might have been, however bad of a boss he may have been, Licht understood what the problem was, and sought, at least modestly, to fix it. Nobody is going to be fool enough to try that again after seeing him pantsed by his employees and employers, alike.
Until CNN gives up on the ridiculous proposition that most conservative ideas are so dangerous that they shouldn’t get airtime, then nothing, not one thing will change.
It's a shame really, because CNN can and should be an important voice in American discourse, but it isn’t anymore, and that’s not Chris Licht’s fault, it's the fault of the talent at the network who, like petulant children, demand only to hear their own favorite story.
It is also the fault of the leadership at Warner Brothers/Discovery who folded like the New York Times, both literally and figuratively when the woke newsroom brought out the guillotine for Licht.
In the end, CNN will reap what it sowed here — declining viewership, declining revenue, and most damaging, declining relevance. It turns out CNN employees really like hearing their own opinions and voices, unfortunately they are very fast becoming the only people who do.
