Licht was betting that by neutralizing the most fiercely anti-Trump voices at CNN-firing people such as Stelter and John Harwood, and clamping down on Jim Acosta and Don Lemon-he could return the network to the neutral center. Read: Why the media’s defense against Trump has proven so ineffective But with many CNN personalities establishing themselves as adversaries of the president-putting on a jersey, as Licht put it-the network looked less like the fearless news-gathering operation of Gulf War fame and more like a milquetoast replica of the liberal MSNBC.
Many of the criticisms were correct, though sometimes they were also histrionic and self-absorbed, as I noted in 2017. Once Trump was in office, CNN switched gears, becoming fiercely critical of the president. During the 2016 presidential campaign, the network unwittingly boosted Donald Trump by providing wall-to-wall coverage. Licht was not wrong to see serious problems at CNN. “He was dealt a bad hand, and then he played it badly,” as one of his friends told the media reporter Brian Stelter. He wanted to turn CNN back into the neutral arbiter of truth that it once was (or seemed to be) without understanding that such a role is impossible in today’s fractured, polarized cable-news environment. Licht’s clumsiness and tone-deafness in the story-he sniped at his staff, obsessed over his predecessor, and generally seemed feckless-were astonishing for someone in his position, and they’re the immediate context for his firing.īut the real reason Licht failed was not the way he executed his job but the way he conceived it in the first place. Licht was pushed out of CNN today, five days after my colleague Tim Alberta wrote a deeply textured, carefully considered, and entirely damning profile of the CEO. The precipitous fall of Chris Licht is just the sort of story that today’s cable-news environment is best at covering: dramatic, messy, lurid, and ultimately lacking in much substance.
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