8 ms·

CNN Chairman and CEO Chris Licht Is Out

86 points by clessg 3y ago

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
cocacola1 3y ago
I don’t think it’s even been a week since that Atlantic article: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2023/06/cnn-ratings-chris-licht-trump/674255/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2023/06/cnn-rat... Archive link: http://archive.is/QhBcU http://archive.is/QhBcU
- sbuccini 3y ago
  I'd recommend any (aspiring) manager/founder to read this piece. So many lessons to be learned from Licht's tenure.
  - lotsofpulp 3y ago
    I feel like lesson #1 is avoid getting into a dying business.
    - sbuccini 3y ago
      This is a good one! If your mentors/the people who made your career warn you not to do something, you should think really, really hard about doing that thing!
      - pxue 3y ago
        All comes down to man's pridefulness.
  - subsubzero 3y ago
    A few mistakes(he made and stuff to avoid): - Know your workforce, Licht seemed completely oblivious to his staff and showed next to zero interest in any of them. - Make yourself available to your team(open door policy) - Licht hid out on the 22nd floor and was intentionally difficult to find. - Know your core customer - CNN is known as having bias against the political right, its audience skews very left. Licht having the debacle of a Trump town hall alienated its main constituency and further drove down ratings. - Pick the right people for critical jobs - Having a heavy and controversial morning host in Don Lemon makes zero sense, people want mellow and light-hearted banter when they are waking up. - Constantly bad mouthing the previous regime looks petty - Despite issues with CNN under Zucker it just looks bad and UN-professional to constantly put down ex-coworkers. - Sometimes a ship is just going to go down - Leaders and managers love turning around bad companies and teams, but I think CNN is headed one way and its all downhill from here. Thanks to social media, partisan news channels(Fox/MSNBC) and just changing demographics(not as many people watch live TV anymore).
- burnished 3y ago
  That was interesting, well worth the read.
- zoogeny 3y ago
  I want to comment on this article way more than the news he was fired. This article is proof that allowing sleazy journalists unfettered access can never be in your best interests. 90% of the article is informative and seemingly straight reporting. 10% is subtle and brutal undermining of Licht through implication and opinion. Little details, like mentioning the pauses before answering or how he "chews" his lips. All of the subtle details relay a much more biased outlook than the seeming fact-based narrative. The story the article wants us to believe is that Zaslav setup Licht as a "marionette" (in the article author's words) so that he could push unpopular changes through at CNN. Licht is made out to be impersonal, impotent and naive. He is both forced to tow the line for the execs above him and suffer the humiliation of being undermined by his underlings. There is the implication that even his greatest failures aren't due to incompetence but due to the meddling that was forced upon him. But Licht genuinely appears to have represented an attempt to move CNN back into a trustworthy news organization. The implication is that such a move is impossible due to the meddling of execs and the entrenched politics in the org. Every time I read an article in The Atlantic I get the impression that I am staring the Ministry of Truth in the face. We are about to see the media landscape once again reshaped. Articles like this are providing the context for some longer narrative arc that is just beginning to take shape. We all hope that discourse in America is going to return to some kind of moderate center and the rifts between partisan sides will be healed. But this article suggests that things are actually being steered away from that. The resistance to extreme populism is being painted as ineffectual. I can't blame them. Trump running in 2024 is going to cause quite the stir. There is the fear of an escalation of the kind of events we saw on Jan 6. My impression is that rather than calming things down, the sides are preparing to mobilize.
  - hedora 3y ago
    > But Licht genuinely appears to have represented an attempt to move CNN back into a trustworthy news organization. What?!? He fired a bunch of “radical left” reporters for saying there was no evidence the 2020 election was stolen, and for pointing out that it had been proven that many people claiming it was were intentionally lying. (these are both verifiable facts, and CNN management doesn’t dispute that). Then, they said their business plan for the next few years was to pull in the Fox News demographic by running similar content. Trump famously made fun of them for this, since it’s a transparently desperate, destined to fail strategy. It also immediately started alienating their existing audience. Note that, for legal reasons, Fox News is extremely clear that its programming is entertainment, and not news, so, even if you approve of their stated intentions, you can’t plausibly argue they are trying to become a “trustworthy news organization” by emulating Fox.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
sbuccini 3y ago
The fact that this story was broken by Darcy is just *chef's kiss*: From the Atlantic piece: "Licht was still coming to terms with the ferocity of the backlash later that night when CNN’s popular Reliable Sources newsletter landed in his inbox. He read the opening line in disbelief: 'It’s hard to see how America was served by the spectacle of lies that aired on CNN Wednesday evening,' Licht’s own media reporter, Oliver Darcy, wrote. Licht could handle being ridiculed by his media rivals. But being publicly scolded by someone on his own payroll—on the biggest night of his career—felt like a new level of betrayal. Licht, who just hours earlier had expressed ambivalence to me about how the event played, went into war mode."
- jackmott42 3y ago
  I have had a few interactions with "high level" or "big shot" executives in my life and it seems like their minds operate in a totally different universe. How Licht could not have felt the same way as Oliver about the whole situation is totally alien to me. At a much smaller and more petty scale my interaction with an executive was similar, in that he wanted me to add a feature to our shopping website, where if a user clicked the back button to leave, we would interrupt that with a popup trying to get them to stay. I said that I would not do that as it is unethical and rude. And he looked at me like I was the alien. Like why would anyone think that or care? If anyone reading this feels like I am an alien here, keep in mind Licht just got booted. The world cares, even if your sociopath CEO self doesn't.
  - netsharc 3y ago
    Since we all live on a gradient, I would think that feature is rude, but not necessarily unethical. Yeah, I suppose that's me being used to obnoxious software features, like what Microsoft has been doing the last few years (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36222006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36222006 ). Funny how many software and online services now blatantly act like abusive partners, "Oh yeah, we're cunts, but what are you going to replace us with?". Edit: the name Adobe just popped into my head.
    - 3y ago
shp0ngle 3y ago
the centre cannot hold
- ethanbond 3y ago
  [flagged]
- grecy 3y ago
  Love the reference!!
nradov 3y ago
CNN ratings took a huge hit after President Trump left office and US politics became boring again. I predict that Chris Licht's successor will benefit from a ratings boost as Trump ramps up his media presence for the 2024 election cycle. https://apnews.com/article/cnn-ratings-chris-licht-584ea2b45819d2cc416006d7bd8b77e8 https://apnews.com/article/cnn-ratings-chris-licht-584ea2b45... (I am not making a political comment here, just pointing out that CNN ratings are correlated with Trump's level of activity.)
- perardi 3y ago
  Yeah, TV news gets less eyeballs when it’s not a Presidential election year. https://www.ft.com/content/85241de6-981c-433a-9ab8-6518021d011a https://www.ft.com/content/85241de6-981c-433a-9ab8-6518021d0... Trump was a bigger bump and a bigger hangover, but it’s a known pattern. Which is my real “big media conspiracy”, which is barely a conspiracy: it’s hard to imagine substantial electoral when TV news is so dependent on this election year gusher of money. Especially at the local TV news level.
  - netsharc 3y ago
    Reminds me of 2008 Dem primaries. It felt like the media wanted to keep reporting it as being a race between Obama and Hillary, because if they said the truth halfway through the race that "Yeah it's Obama's to win.", they'd get less viewers and less ad money (including political ones...)
paddw 3y ago
Whatever the unforced errors that Licht made were, I think he was never going to overcome the difficulty of trying to compete with a "centrist" news network. The big problem with this is not just viewers, but the network talent, who, of course, are going to want to be part of programming which accords with their own ideology.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- nradov 3y ago
  Is that really true? There are plenty of charismatic, attractive talking heads who will cheerfully push whatever narrative their bosses feed them in exchange for a huge pile of cash. Lots of up and coming local TV news "talent" who are willing to do anything for a shot at a national network job. Ideology becomes remarkably flexible when you're trying to buy that yacht.
  - paddw 3y ago
    I think you are underestimating the cachet specific anchors have with their viewership, especially the over 50 crowd which constitutes most of CNN's viewership. Yes, you could find a competent and attractive person to fill the slot, but that would absolutely cause a nosedive in ratings. These places are not stupid. They would not continue to pay the absolute gob-premium sums of money to keep their top performing anchors if it was not showing up in the ratings, of course the talent matters very much.
local_crmdgeon 3y ago
I think that CNN is so disconnected from anything related to the rest of America that it's remarkable. It's not possible to make it successful after how badly they fucked up Trump/Covid/etc. Whenever I watch CNN, I get the feeling that they hate me, and everyone like me. I don't think I'm alone on that one, given their ratings. Ideally, Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon would never have to deal with "those people" - aka everyone I know and care about.
mint2 3y ago
I don’t remember when it was, many years ago but I believe it was during a presidential election cycle that cnn went with a painfully contrived holographic appearance of one of their anchors and spent a bunch of time hyping it up… it was pointless time wasting and utterly useless for viewers but must have sounded cool to some exec. It was almost painful to watch and I’m sure cost them oodles of money. That’s basically cnn for the past decade.
kernal 3y ago
They spent 3 years lying about fabricated Russia Russia Russia allegations and live COVID Kill counts. No wonder no one watches them anymore.

86 points by clessg 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

I don’t think it’s even been a week since that Atlantic article: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2023/06/cnn-ratings-chris-licht-trump/674255/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2023/06/cnn-rat... Archive link: http://archive.is/QhBcU http://archive.is/QhBcU

sbuccini 3y ago
I'd recommend any (aspiring) manager/founder to read this piece. So many lessons to be learned from Licht's tenure.
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  I feel like lesson #1 is avoid getting into a dying business.
  - sbuccini 3y ago
    This is a good one! If your mentors/the people who made your career warn you not to do something, you should think really, really hard about doing that thing!
    - pxue 3y ago
      All comes down to man's pridefulness.
- subsubzero 3y ago
  A few mistakes(he made and stuff to avoid): - Know your workforce, Licht seemed completely oblivious to his staff and showed next to zero interest in any of them. - Make yourself available to your team(open door policy) - Licht hid out on the 22nd floor and was intentionally difficult to find. - Know your core customer - CNN is known as having bias against the political right, its audience skews very left. Licht having the debacle of a Trump town hall alienated its main constituency and further drove down ratings. - Pick the right people for critical jobs - Having a heavy and controversial morning host in Don Lemon makes zero sense, people want mellow and light-hearted banter when they are waking up. - Constantly bad mouthing the previous regime looks petty - Despite issues with CNN under Zucker it just looks bad and UN-professional to constantly put down ex-coworkers. - Sometimes a ship is just going to go down - Leaders and managers love turning around bad companies and teams, but I think CNN is headed one way and its all downhill from here. Thanks to social media, partisan news channels(Fox/MSNBC) and just changing demographics(not as many people watch live TV anymore).
burnished 3y ago
That was interesting, well worth the read.
zoogeny 3y ago
I want to comment on this article way more than the news he was fired. This article is proof that allowing sleazy journalists unfettered access can never be in your best interests. 90% of the article is informative and seemingly straight reporting. 10% is subtle and brutal undermining of Licht through implication and opinion. Little details, like mentioning the pauses before answering or how he "chews" his lips. All of the subtle details relay a much more biased outlook than the seeming fact-based narrative. The story the article wants us to believe is that Zaslav setup Licht as a "marionette" (in the article author's words) so that he could push unpopular changes through at CNN. Licht is made out to be impersonal, impotent and naive. He is both forced to tow the line for the execs above him and suffer the humiliation of being undermined by his underlings. There is the implication that even his greatest failures aren't due to incompetence but due to the meddling that was forced upon him. But Licht genuinely appears to have represented an attempt to move CNN back into a trustworthy news organization. The implication is that such a move is impossible due to the meddling of execs and the entrenched politics in the org. Every time I read an article in The Atlantic I get the impression that I am staring the Ministry of Truth in the face. We are about to see the media landscape once again reshaped. Articles like this are providing the context for some longer narrative arc that is just beginning to take shape. We all hope that discourse in America is going to return to some kind of moderate center and the rifts between partisan sides will be healed. But this article suggests that things are actually being steered away from that. The resistance to extreme populism is being painted as ineffectual. I can't blame them. Trump running in 2024 is going to cause quite the stir. There is the fear of an escalation of the kind of events we saw on Jan 6. My impression is that rather than calming things down, the sides are preparing to mobilize.
- hedora 3y ago
  > But Licht genuinely appears to have represented an attempt to move CNN back into a trustworthy news organization. What?!? He fired a bunch of “radical left” reporters for saying there was no evidence the 2020 election was stolen, and for pointing out that it had been proven that many people claiming it was were intentionally lying. (these are both verifiable facts, and CNN management doesn’t dispute that). Then, they said their business plan for the next few years was to pull in the Fox News demographic by running similar content. Trump famously made fun of them for this, since it’s a transparently desperate, destined to fail strategy. It also immediately started alienating their existing audience. Note that, for legal reasons, Fox News is extremely clear that its programming is entertainment, and not news, so, even if you approve of their stated intentions, you can’t plausibly argue they are trying to become a “trustworthy news organization” by emulating Fox.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

sbuccini 3y ago

The fact that this story was broken by Darcy is just *chef's kiss*: From the Atlantic piece: "Licht was still coming to terms with the ferocity of the backlash later that night when CNN’s popular Reliable Sources newsletter landed in his inbox. He read the opening line in disbelief: 'It’s hard to see how America was served by the spectacle of lies that aired on CNN Wednesday evening,' Licht’s own media reporter, Oliver Darcy, wrote. Licht could handle being ridiculed by his media rivals. But being publicly scolded by someone on his own payroll—on the biggest night of his career—felt like a new level of betrayal. Licht, who just hours earlier had expressed ambivalence to me about how the event played, went into war mode."

jackmott42 3y ago
I have had a few interactions with "high level" or "big shot" executives in my life and it seems like their minds operate in a totally different universe. How Licht could not have felt the same way as Oliver about the whole situation is totally alien to me. At a much smaller and more petty scale my interaction with an executive was similar, in that he wanted me to add a feature to our shopping website, where if a user clicked the back button to leave, we would interrupt that with a popup trying to get them to stay. I said that I would not do that as it is unethical and rude. And he looked at me like I was the alien. Like why would anyone think that or care? If anyone reading this feels like I am an alien here, keep in mind Licht just got booted. The world cares, even if your sociopath CEO self doesn't.
- netsharc 3y ago
  Since we all live on a gradient, I would think that feature is rude, but not necessarily unethical. Yeah, I suppose that's me being used to obnoxious software features, like what Microsoft has been doing the last few years (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36222006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36222006 ). Funny how many software and online services now blatantly act like abusive partners, "Oh yeah, we're cunts, but what are you going to replace us with?". Edit: the name Adobe just popped into my head.
  - 3y ago

shp0ngle 3y ago

the centre cannot hold

ethanbond 3y ago
[flagged]
grecy 3y ago
Love the reference!!

nradov 3y ago

CNN ratings took a huge hit after President Trump left office and US politics became boring again. I predict that Chris Licht's successor will benefit from a ratings boost as Trump ramps up his media presence for the 2024 election cycle. https://apnews.com/article/cnn-ratings-chris-licht-584ea2b45819d2cc416006d7bd8b77e8 https://apnews.com/article/cnn-ratings-chris-licht-584ea2b45... (I am not making a political comment here, just pointing out that CNN ratings are correlated with Trump's level of activity.)

perardi 3y ago
Yeah, TV news gets less eyeballs when it’s not a Presidential election year. https://www.ft.com/content/85241de6-981c-433a-9ab8-6518021d011a https://www.ft.com/content/85241de6-981c-433a-9ab8-6518021d0... Trump was a bigger bump and a bigger hangover, but it’s a known pattern. Which is my real “big media conspiracy”, which is barely a conspiracy: it’s hard to imagine substantial electoral when TV news is so dependent on this election year gusher of money. Especially at the local TV news level.
- netsharc 3y ago
  Reminds me of 2008 Dem primaries. It felt like the media wanted to keep reporting it as being a race between Obama and Hillary, because if they said the truth halfway through the race that "Yeah it's Obama's to win.", they'd get less viewers and less ad money (including political ones...)

paddw 3y ago

Whatever the unforced errors that Licht made were, I think he was never going to overcome the difficulty of trying to compete with a "centrist" news network. The big problem with this is not just viewers, but the network talent, who, of course, are going to want to be part of programming which accords with their own ideology.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
nradov 3y ago
Is that really true? There are plenty of charismatic, attractive talking heads who will cheerfully push whatever narrative their bosses feed them in exchange for a huge pile of cash. Lots of up and coming local TV news "talent" who are willing to do anything for a shot at a national network job. Ideology becomes remarkably flexible when you're trying to buy that yacht.
- paddw 3y ago
  I think you are underestimating the cachet specific anchors have with their viewership, especially the over 50 crowd which constitutes most of CNN's viewership. Yes, you could find a competent and attractive person to fill the slot, but that would absolutely cause a nosedive in ratings. These places are not stupid. They would not continue to pay the absolute gob-premium sums of money to keep their top performing anchors if it was not showing up in the ratings, of course the talent matters very much.

local_crmdgeon 3y ago

I think that CNN is so disconnected from anything related to the rest of America that it's remarkable. It's not possible to make it successful after how badly they fucked up Trump/Covid/etc. Whenever I watch CNN, I get the feeling that they hate me, and everyone like me. I don't think I'm alone on that one, given their ratings. Ideally, Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon would never have to deal with "those people" - aka everyone I know and care about.

mint2 3y ago

I don’t remember when it was, many years ago but I believe it was during a presidential election cycle that cnn went with a painfully contrived holographic appearance of one of their anchors and spent a bunch of time hyping it up… it was pointless time wasting and utterly useless for viewers but must have sounded cool to some exec. It was almost painful to watch and I’m sure cost them oodles of money. That’s basically cnn for the past decade.

kernal 3y ago

They spent 3 years lying about fabricated Russia Russia Russia allegations and live COVID Kill counts. No wonder no one watches them anymore.