Chris Licht out at CNN

The new owners of the Cable News Network today fired CEO Chris Licht after little more than a year. CNN’s chief talent and content development officer will take over while Warner Brothers Discovery hunts for a permanent replacement.

Chris Licht out with little ceremony

The Daily Caller first broke the story. According to them, David Zaslav, CEO of Warner Brothers Discovery, announced the move in a morning editorial call.

According to this outlet, Amy Entelis, a long-serving ranking executive, will fill in while the owners search for a replacement.

However, The New York Times suggests CNN will not have a single interim CEO. Instead it will have a three-member leadership council reporting to Warner Brothers Discovery COO David Leavy.

The journal BizWomen describes Entelis as the current executive vice-president in charge of talent and content development. She has been with CNN since 2012.

On Friday (June 2), The Atlantic published this story they titled “Inside the Meltdown at CNN.” Tim Alberta, for his story, interviewed Chris Licht – who said flat-out that Trump had “played” the legacy media. On Monday he apologized to staff, in the morning editorial call, for suggesting that CNN was all about him. CNN’s Brian Stelter tweeted this account:

Stelter asked, “Question now: what do Zaslav and Leavy think?”

John Solomon at Just the News mentioned the Atlantic article, but also mentioned the Trump Town Hall on May 10. In that even, CNN Anchor Kaitlan Collins spent the evening hurling insults at Trump – to definitely counterintuitive effect. After that episode, CNN anchor Anderson Cooper actually said he could not blame viewers for never watching the network again. (Source: the New York Post.)

Trying to change the perception

Chris Licht repeatedly said (as he did here to US News and World Report) that he wanted to change viewers’ perception of the network. Specifically he wanted viewers to see CNN as an objective reporter of the news, not a leftist cheerleader. The reaction to Trump’s Town Hall would seem to show that:

• CNN now has a leftist base of viewers and supporters, and
• Chris Licht accomplished nothing more than their alienation (as Fox is alienating its viewer base).

But the search engines turn up this eight-year-old article from a conservative blogger who vowed never to watch CNN again. Blogger Nathan Hammond objected to an earlier story suggesting the FBI and DHS regarded right-wing voters as domestic terrorists.