The Memo: CNN drama shows network lacks solution to Trump dilemma

Chris Licht isn’t the whole story.

News of the departure of the CNN chairman and chief executive early Wednesday morning ricocheted around the media world.

But the bigger issue is the struggle of CNN in particular, and news organizations in general, to find a satisfactory way to deal with former President Trump, eight years after he descended the elevators at Trump Tower to begin running for the presidency.

Trump, in a sense, has claimed another scalp with Licht’s departure. 

The former “Morning Joe” and “Late Show with Stephen Colbert” showrunner has, like many others, failed to chart a way through the political and media landscape that Trump has created.

A 15,000-word story on Licht that appeared in the Atlantic last week may have been the final straw in the executive’s brief but tumultuous reign atop CNN. But the far more serious misfire was the disastrous town hall the network hosted with Trump on May 10. 

In the estimation of just about everyone, the way the town hall was produced — in front of a crowd specifically engineered to be sympathetic to the former president — set CNN and its moderator, Kaitlan Collins, up for failure.

CNN’s own Oliver Darcy wrote within hours of that event that it was “hard to see how America was served by the spectacle of lies that aired on CNN Wednesday evening.” 

Many at the network and beyond agreed with him — even if his assessment drew Licht’s ire.

Yet the town hall was, in a sense, an overcorrection. It was the most high-profile example of an effort by Licht to reverse away from CNN’s coverage of Trump during the tenure of his predecessor, Jeff Zucker — coverage that had won ratings but had also grown to seem troll-ish and petty at times.

By all accounts, Licht and his boss, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, were seeking to reposition CNN closer to the center ground it had once occupied.

Yet, as ratings and morale have declined, there remains a question as to whether that ground even exists in any meaningful way — especially while Trump, the most polarizing president in living memory, is a key player on the political scene. 

Comparing the current landscape to the pre-Trump era, Todd Belt, a professor and the director of the political management program at George Washington University, told this column, “The news audience is different now.”

“Because people have their preconceived notions of Donald Trump, oftentimes they are looking for information confirming what they already believe about him,” Belt added. 

“I think CNN is still trying to figure out where they fit in there and how they can generate an audience that will rival Fox. [Fox’s] formula is pretty easy, and we heard a lot about that during the Dominion case.”

Belt was referencing internal emails revealed during legal action taken against Fox News by Dominion Voting Systems, which claimed it had been defamed by the network.

Those emails showed some prominent figures at Fox fretting about dropping ratings in the wake of the 2020 election — a phenomenon they blamed on figures at the network who correctly stood up against Trump’s false claims of fraud.

The Dominion case was settled by Fox for $787 million, though Fox was not required to issue an apology and admitted only to acknowledging “the Court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false.”

CNN’s troubles, however, are of a whole different kind. 

News of Licht’s abrupt departure has prompted a new round of soul-searching about the future of the network and of cable news itself.

Semafor’s Ben Smith contended that the central problem is an ongoing, and apparently irrevocable, decline in cable news as a medium. 

“Cheap talk about shifting CNN from anti-Trump confrontation toward an imagined center simply didn’t find an audience,” Smith wrote Wednesday. 

“And the most obvious explanation is the one that people in media have been saying so long we’ve stopped believing it: Cable news is in a broad, secular decline. Even the best managers and executives won’t be able to reverse that.”

Vox’s Peter Kafka likewise contended that there was not, really, any chance of success in the kind of news coverage Zaslav and Licht purported to want. 

“Some people will turn to CNN or other cable TV channels in times of crisis or something truly extraordinary. But even that’s a habit specific to people who’ve grown up with TV, a number that’s shrinking all the time,” he wrote. “There’s no cheering section for ‘neutrality,’ despite what media executives and some journalists may insist.”

For now, a transitional leadership team will try to put the pieces of CNN back together. But they face an extraordinarily difficult task in trying to map out the course ahead.

Grant Reeher, a professor of political science at Syracuse University, pointed to one of the fundamental problems in covering Trump, specifically.

“You have people who just assume he’s not telling the truth. And then you have people who just believe him — and they’re not going to disbelieve him just because The Hill or ABC or anyone else fact-checks him.”

In terms of the bigger picture, Reeher said that all media organizations, including CNN, face a steep climb if they have any chance of recovering the position of authority they once held.

“In the abstract, it’s not impossible,” he said. “Polarization makes it harder but not impossible. But when the media outlets themselves have been sucked into the polarization, it becomes well-nigh impossible.”

The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage.