Does CNN's 'meltdown' spell doom for centrist cable news?

Warner Bros. Discovery this week ousted Chris Licht as CEO of CNN after just over a year on the job. Licht's departure came days after The Atlantic published a damaging profile describing a "meltdown" at the struggling cable news outlet under his leadership. The article said Licht had "lost the confidence of his own newsroom" as he made changes to shake the liberal reputation CNN had under former chief Jeff Zucker. A CNN town hall during which former President Donald Trump repeated his false claims about the 2020 election and mocked CNN in front of an audience of his fans brought the simmering internal complaints to a boil.

Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav said Licht had made a valiant effort to do the job he was hired to do and remake CNN. "I have great respect for Chris, personally and professionally," Zaslav said in a press release. "The job of leading CNN was never going to be easy, especially at a time of huge disruption and transformation, and he has poured his heart and soul into it."

CNN's ratings were falling when Licht took over, and they kept going down. In May, CNN's prime-time viewership fell 25% compared to a year earlier. Fox News, fresh off its sacking of No. 1 host Tucker Carlson, fell even more sharply, with its prime-time audience falling 37% year over year, but the conservative outlet remained the most-watched cable network by far. MSNBC, which appeals to a more progressive audience, was the only one that made gains. Was Licht just the wrong person for the job, or do CNN's struggles just show that trying to attract both liberal and conservative viewers won't work on cable news in a country so sharply divided?

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Cable viewers want a point of view

Zaslav wanted Licht to shift CNN away from what he saw as its "left-leaning 'advocacy' and toward more 'balance,'" said Jim Rutenberg in The New York Times. But finding balance is much trickier than simply giving equal time to "both voices," something CNN was reminded of after the Trump town hall. And attracting viewers with an "unaligned independent approach" is hard to do in an era of "splintered, on-demand" news sources. "Polarization is sky high." And "cable, a medium that played to divided interests from the start, is now competing with social media, where the most successful items tend to be the most stridently partisan and provocative."

At this point, it's worth asking whether cable audiences "really want hard news without a point of view," said Ed Morrissey at Hot Air. "They certainly don't seem to reward it. Fox News wins every time, and that's no accident. MSNBC remains competitive, more so than CNN now, and that's no accident." Licht might have bought himself some time, and cover in the newsroom, if he had chosen some other Republican candidate — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis or, better yet, Nikki Haley — instead of Trump for that first town hall, but it wasn't his fault that he failed. His bosses made "a very bad bet" and "found out the hard way" that cable viewers might say they just want the facts but "put their money on entertainment and self-validation instead."

Licht's "anti-woke centrism" is what failed

Licht wasn't championing hard news, said Perry Bacon Jr. in The Washington Post. He was peddling an "anti-woke centrism that is increasingly prominent in American media and politics today, particularly among powerful white men who live on the coasts and don't identify as Republicans or conservatives." Licht fired great CNN journalists "for being too anti-Trump" and tried to present himself as fair by criticizing progressive causes. "There can and should be open debate about police reform, diversity, COVID-19 policies and other issues," but when the left is "pushing America to finish the work of the 1960s and create a true multicultural democracy" and the right "is banning Black intellectual ideas from public schools, it's a huge mistake for powerful non-Republicans in society to spend so much time bashing the left."

Licht leaves CNN as he found it, said Ethan Bauer in the Deseret News, fumbling for a way to survive now that Trump has changed the world for the mainstream media. The second Trump announced he was running for president in 2015, he upended "two traditional assumptions of political reporting: cordiality and (at least some semblance of) a good-faith give-and-take. No sitting president had vilified the press since the advent of TV news to the extent Trump did." Viewers looking for left-leaning fare can tune in to MSNBC, and those on the right flock to Fox News. CNN is "uniquely positioned to bridge that divide," but Licht "in the eyes of many observers squandered whatever opportunity he had to build something transformative." The opportunity is still there, but CNN can't figure out how to grab it.