It was one of those pieces of news that was simultaneously stunning and utterly expected: Chris Licht was out of CNN.
No doubt, the chairman and CEO had been embattled, almost from the start of his tumultuous year-long reign. He took over from Jeff Zucker, who – whatever his faults – was popular with the staff because he understood what they did and supported it. Soon after arriving, Licht went on an ill-advised apology tour on Capitol Hill in which he sent the message that Republican lawmakers – even those who had supported overturning the 2020 election or downplayed the 6 January 2021 insurrection – would be welcome and treated well on the network.
With clear orders from above, the former CBS executive aimed the cable network’s coverage at some sort of imaginary middle ground between Fox News on the right and MSNBC on the left. There may be a middle in American politics, but cable news – which panders to its audience’s most extreme views – isn’t the place to find it.
No, cable news is where viewers go to get their outrage on. More important, aiming for the middle is extremely dangerous for democracy when there’s a party – the Republicans, of course – in the grip of those intent on dissolving democratic norms.
So, it didn’t start off well. Then three things happened, any one of which might have been fatal. Licht provided Donald Trump a “town hall” program last month, to be aired live, meaning that the former president’s inevitable and endless lies would be aired live, too. It was a bad decision, poorly executed, which played out disastrously.
Meanwhile, ratings tanked. CNN, which only rarely has led the way among the three main cable-news networks, bumped along at the bottom of the sea floor. Ratings reached historic lows.
And finally, just last week, the Atlantic published a devastating 15,000-word profile, for which the reporter Tim Alberta got wide-ranging access to Licht and many others at CNN.
The piece hit hard. It documented how Licht’s decision-making was misguided, seeming to lack a moral core of journalistic mission, despite the lip service paid to the importance of reporting. And it showed his disconnect with the editorial staff; he was both distant, with an office far from the journalists, and intrusive, making radical personnel moves that played out poorly and engendered an atmosphere of fear and mistrust.
“The thing that struck me was that Licht seemed to be operating on slogans, not actual ideas and didn’t seem to recognize the difference between the two,” observed Jelani Cobb, dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, after reading Alberta’s article.
And Alberta’s detailed chronicling of Licht’s missteps was astonishing, Cobb told me in text messages.
“Just the accretion of absurdities to the point where you’re like, ‘surely, this can’t all be true.’ And at the same time, it’s like of course, this all seems logical.”
Particularly disturbing were the decisions involving the town hall, especially the way CNN allowed far-right Republicans – Trump’s cult members – to dominate the audience, which was supposed to be made up of ordinary Republican voters and undecided ones.
But it’s possible – likely, even – that Licht would have survived all of this if it weren’t for the one thing that really mattered: the numbers. Ratings, network value and profitability are the coin of the realm in corporatized cable news, and to a large extent, in mainstream media writ large.
“Licht managed to alienate everybody at CNN and people might think giving a magazine profile access was fatally stupid, but my experience of the media industry says all of this would have been irrelevant to a boss’s longevity if he had made ratings go up instead of down,” observed the Los Angeles Times reporter Matt Pearce.
If Licht’s ham-handed moves and his commitment to giving equal time to liars and insurrection apologists had “worked” – that is, if ratings had soared, profits risen and value been restored – nothing else would have mattered a whit.
It’s never good to have “lost the room”, as CNN’s Oliver Darcy described in the Reliable Sources newsletter. It’s never good to have used a powerful platform to erode democracy and certainly no boss’s boss likes a negative, buzzed-about profile in a national magazine.
But, sadly, these things would have been deemed tolerable if Licht’s efforts had “worked”. But they didn’t and so he’s out. (“Can you hear the champagne popping?” one CNN journalist asked a Washington Post reporter.)
Perhaps the biggest cheeses at CNN have learned the right lessons: that you can’t “both sides” your way into ratings success. That there is no vast political middle just waiting to be entranced by performative neutrality. And, most of all, that good journalism has nothing to do with sucking up to would-be authoritarians but rather it demands brave truth-telling.
There’s little evidence that these will be the takeaways from this debacle. But it sure would be pretty to think so.
Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture