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CNN president Chris Licht
Getty
Forty-three years to the week that it was founded, CNN was at the center of the media universe. But while CNN’s launch on June 1, 1980 was marked by celebration, the experience in 2023 was, in the words of one former CNN journalist, one of “melancholy.”
On Monday morning, CNN CEO Chris Licht addressed his division’s employees on the daily editorial call, telling them he will “fight like hell” to win back their trust, and that they “deserve a leader who will be in the trenches” fighting for them.
It was a mea culpa that was warmly received after a week of confusion about his future at the network, and a story about CNN that rocked the channel.
First, the venerable cable news channel announced that David Leavy, a top lieutenant to Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, would now report to Licht as the news organization’s COO. The news, which Licht revealed on the daily 9 a.m. editorial call on June 1, immediately fueled speculation about what it meant for CNN’s future and Licht’s own future leading the outlet (especially with Leavy retaining some corporate responsibilities outside of CNN).
Licht is expected to spend more time on programming, leaning into his skills honed as a producer on shows like CBS’ Late Show, MSNBC’s Morning Joe and CBS This Morning.
But while Leavy is focused on “commercial, operational and promotional activities” at CNN, he has already reached out to top talent at the channel, sources say, signaling that he intends to forge relationships across CNN’s divisions.
One well-connected source said they think Leavy can help “stabilize” CNN, and added that he could be an “adult in the room.”
But CNN’s new COO was only the appetizer for the week.
On Friday, group text chains ricocheted through the halls of Hudson Yards as staffers digested Tim Alberta’s 15,000 word opus in The Atlantic, titled “Inside the Meltdown at CNN.”
That was the story that spurred on Licht’s Monday mea culpa.
Alberta followed Licht for months, with access most journalists would dream of. From early mornings with Licht and his private trainer to long train rides on the Acela to backstage access at the Donald Trump town hall in New Hampshire, Alberta captured a portrait of CNN’s current moment. And the reaction inside and outside of the company was intense.
Despite Leavy’s appointment as COO, and the response to the Atlantic story, Licht still appears to have some level of support from WBD CEO David Zaslav (even if that support has become more muted over time). On Monday’s call, Licht gave no sign that he intends to step aside from his seat anytime soon.
Alberta was offered a statement from Zaslav, but The Atlantic initially did not run it. A spokesperson for the publication said the statement came in the night before the story was released, and that “because of an oversight, it was not included or referred to in the story as originally published.”
“CNN is a very important business for us, and, in fact, we believe that nothing we do is more important, Zaslav said in the statement, which was provided to THR. “We have the best journalists in the world at CNN reporting the news wherever it happens, and we aspire to be the news organization most trusted by viewers globally. We set a high bar for ourselves and while we know that it will take time to complete the important work that’s underway, we have great confidence in the progress that Chris and the team are making and share their conviction in the strategy.”
The Atlantic has since added the comment from Zaslav to Alberta’s story.
The pressure is still on Licht to turn CNN’s fortunes around, but there appears to be some runway left. Exactly how much is not at all clear.
Licht’s progression atop CNN, as captured by The Atlantic, played out in multiple acts: From the launch of CNN This Morning to the show’s unraveling as Licht fired Don Lemon. From hypothetical “how will CNN cover Donald Trump” conversations to the now-infamous CNN town hall with Trump last month (“Well, that wasn’t boring,” Licht told Alberta moments after the town hall ended).
The town hall sparked anger in many CNN employees, some of whom kept quiet and others who expressed their disappointment in private. Christiane Amanpour, who has been with CNN since 1983 and is one of the channel’s most respected journalists, rebuked it publicly in a commencement address later that month to Columbia University journalism school students, noting that she brought up her concerns directly with Licht.
“We had a very robust exchange of views,” Amanpour told the students. “My management believes they did the right thing as service to the American people. I still respectfully disagree with allowing Donald Trump to appear in that particular format.”
The reaction to the town hall was not what Licht, or CNN, wanted to be dealing with.
It’s been a source of frustration inside the company that CNN receives so much press scrutiny, and top anchors and executives will often complain that their counterparts at MSNBC and Fox News don’t get the same treatment (the $787 million Dominion settlement and Tucker Carlson’s ouster have changed that perception in recent months, at least temporarily).
“I understand the scrutiny because it’s like a public trust, but boy, there’s a lot” Licht said at a lunchtime event in New York April 20, hosted by The Paley Center’s Media Council. He turned to the corner table where journalists from The Hollywood Reporter, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal were sitting, and added: “I have gone from being very concerned about my press and my image as it relates to what people read about me to — this is the God’s honest truth — to completely not caring about it because there’s been so much of it, to exclusively focusing on ‘how is this affecting the staff?’”
In fact, Licht described his job as “really to be the heat shield” of CNN.
On Monday’s call, Licht struck a similar tone, telling staff “I should not be in the news unless it’s taking arrows for you.”
Just a few weeks earlier, Licht was in the control room when Trump turned himself in to a New York court house, facing charges related to his alleged hush money payments to Stormy Daniels. And he was there that evening when Trump spoke about it. Licht wasn’t in the control room to dictate coverage — he says he trusted Anderson Cooper’s producer Charlie Moore to handle it.
“I knew no matter what we did, we would get shit,” Licht told Pamela Brown, CNN’s chief investigative correspondent and his interrogator for the Paley event. “So I wanted to absorb that.”
But Alberta’s story, when combined with Leavy’s hiring, ignited a new wave of anxiety inside the channel, with some staffers flabbergasted with the level of access Alberta had, and others dissecting Licht’s comments about what CNN’s mission is (“Journalism. Being trusted. Everyone has an agenda, trying to shape events or shape thought. There has to be a source of absolute truth,” Licht told him), or his frank comments about how CNN should be thinking about diversity: “I said, ‘A Black person, a brown person and an Asian woman that all graduated the same year from Harvard is not diversity,’” he told Alberta.
“Licht confided in Alberta the way a client confides in a therapist,” noted former CNN anchor Brian Stelter.
Indeed, one CNN staffer told THR that the profile offered a lot of “tea leaves” that employees were analyzing and debating. Another said that they felt they learned more about Licht’s strategic vision for CNN from the profile than they did from his internal CNN town halls.
On an Acela ride from New York to Washington D.C., Alberta asked Licht if he believed there were people within CNN who wanted him to fail. “I’m sure,” he responded, adding that he was certain it was only a “very small pocket” of the company.
“I would say that for anyone who does want me to fail — what are you going for? Who would you want in this seat?” Licht added. “You want a journalist? You want someone who has a direct line to the corporation and can make a phone call and go, ‘Hey, what the fuck?’ Do you want someone who’s done the job? Who’s done a lot of the jobs? Who understands exactly what it takes to do what I’m asking? Someone who believes that our future is based on executing great journalism? Maybe they don’t like my style or whatever, but I’m not quite sure what you’re going for—if you want me to fail.”
And yet the headlines won’t stop.
There are still people outside of CNN that have deep connections to the news organization that are critical of its current path. Alberta notes suspicions from Licht that his predecessor, Jeff Zucker, is behind some of the negative stories.
Zucker was the focus of a New York Times profile published Sunday, and while he did not comment on the record, his spokesperson Risa Heller did.
“It is wholly unsurprising that Jeff Zucker, the architect of CNN’s unprecedented success, would have deep misgivings about the direction the network has taken since he left,” Heller said, adding that it was also no surprise “that he gets asked a lot, publicly and privately, and regularly from former colleagues, about what he thinks of CNN now.”
A well-connected media insider told THR that after reading the Atlantic article, this person’s main takeaway for Licht was “you have some of the best journalists in the world. Let them do their jobs.”
At the Paley Center, Licht told Brown that “the health of CNN really matters to people who care about journalism, and that’s something that you genuinely feel from the people in the organization.”
“We talk a lot about that whoever’s sitting in my chair, you are a temporary occupant, you are a caretaker of that chair, you are fulfilling the mission of Ted Turner,” Licht added.
Amid the chaos, hundreds of current and former CNN employees gathered at the CNN Center in Atlanta, the “mothership” (as employees fondly called it) for the channel for the past 35 years, at least until the balance of power slowly migrated northward over the past decade, first under Jeff Zucker and AT&T, and later under Licht and WBD.
The reason? To say goodbye, as the channel plans to depart the mothership for the company’s Techwood campus a few miles away. The mood was mostly joyous, per one attendee (as any big reunion would be), but it also served as a metaphorical goodbye to the CNN that was, at it adapts to WBD’s corporate cost-cutting and moves to its new Atlanta home.
“It felt like a funeral, but a celebratory funeral,” the attendee said.
In Atlanta, attendees heard from former CNN president Tom Johnson, and Turner’s mission to make CNN the most trusted name in news, the mission that Licht still seems to have as his North Star, was front and center.
Johnson ran CNN during its heyday during the 1990s, when it established itself as a household name during the Persian Gulf War and became arguably the most valuable news outlet in the world. He retired in 2001, before the internet and the iPhone disintermediated how consumers get their headlines, and before the cable TV bundle began its great unraveling.
Johnson read a letter from Turner (now 84 years old), dated June 1, 2023. In the letter, Turner recalled his CNN launch speech, in which he hoped the power of the channel and its journalism could “bring together in brotherhood and kindness, and friendship and in peace, the people of this nation and this world.”
“Of course, CNN’s story is being rewritten, just like the story of the world it covers in real time,” Turner added in his letter, perhaps an acknowledgement of the channel’s new ownership, and its current challenges.
But he added, CNN still has a pivotal role to play, adding that “we must ensure a gold standard for democracy and truth.”
“As your Captain Courageous [Courageous was the name of Turner’s America’s Cup-winning racing yacht], I look to the horizon with anticipation,” Turner wrote. “Set sail, CNN! May you find safe harbor in your new (and old) home, sweet, home.”
43 years almost to the day after it launched, CNN is still searching for that safe harbor, as the channel, its journalists and its leadership navigate newly turbulent waters. And the headlines tracking every motion.
Kim Masters contributed to this report.
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