Why Chris Licht didn’t stand a chance

CNN had good journalistic intentions when they put Chris Licht in charge a little over a year ago. The idea was to transform the cable news channel from one with a predictably liberal bias and make it what it used to be when Ted Turner launched the channel in 1980: a place to go for down-the-middle, fact-based information.

It was an idea that didn’t stand a chance in today’s fractured media world. It was an idea that was bound to fail.

When Licht was fired yesterday, his boss, David Zaslav, who heads up Warner Bros. Discovery, CNN’s corporate parent, said Licht “poured his heart and soul into this job” but “for a number of reasons it didn’t work out.”

One of those reasons was that, under Licht, CNN’s ratings had hit all-time lows.

According to the New York Times, Zaslav said “he believes that CNN’s coverage veered too far into ‘advocacy’ journalism under his predecessor, Jeff Zucker. Mr. Licht has sought to include on-air perspectives from commentators and newsmakers across the political spectrum, including conservatives.”

Good idea, but that’s not what CNN viewers wanted. People tune into cable news to get precisely what Zaslav and Licht were trying to get away from — advocacy journalism. 

Unless it’s a story about the first shots fired in a foreign war, or about terrorists attacking Americans on 9/11, viewers don’t tune in to get down-the-middle, straight news reporting. They tune in to get their own biases validated by famous people on TV.

They tune in to hear how right their side is and how wrong the other side is. Liberals want to hear how corrupt conservatives are and conservatives want to hear only the worst about liberals.

The whole idea behind the cable news business model is to give the customers what they want, to throw red meat at them and hope they come back for more. Catering to the tastes of your audience is how you succeed in cable news. CNN wanted to get back to old-school basic journalism. But that’s not what the CNN audience wanted.

And it wasn’t only ratings that had hit rock bottom. It was also in-house morale.

Licht had been criticized by CNN journalists for more than a few of his decisions. His new morning show, with Don Lemon at the helm, flopped. He fired several liberal correspondents. But nothing Licht did drew more criticism than his decision to have CNN host a town hall with former President Donald Trump, hosted by Kaitlan Collins.

CNN wanted more diversity of opinion on its shows. And as the New York Times pointed out, “A major test of that strategy came on the town hall on May 10, when Mr. Trump unleashed a torrent of falsehoods to a cheering and adoring crowd, including when he referred to the town hall’s moderator, Ms. Collins, as a ‘nasty woman.’”

The broadcast was widely criticized, inside and outside the network. How could CNN give a man like Donald Trump such a forum, critics demanded to know. Never mind that Trump — with all his faults — was leading the GOP field of presidential hopefuls. Never mind that he might be president again. None of that mattered. Some thought that CNN was trying to be more like Fox News than what they had come to expect — a reliably liberal news organization.

“Some on-air talent looked dazed after the town hall had wrapped up,” the Times reported, “and Christiane Amanpour, one of the network’s top hosts, took issue with the forum, saying she and Mr. Licht ‘respectfully disagree’ about allowing Mr. Trump to appear on a town hall in that format.”

While the event drew a big audience — 3.3 million viewers — CNN’s ratings dropped precipitously afterward. Just two days after the town hall, CNN ratings fell below Newsmax, a much smaller rightwing network.

But it was a critical 15,000-word profile of Licht in the Atlantic titled “Inside the Meltdown at CNN” that was the final blow. Speculation went viral: How long would Licht last? The answer: He was fired just a few days later.

We no longer live in the media world of Walter Cronkite, who was once voted the most trusted man in America. We live in hyper-partisan times, and cable news both reflects that American divide and exacerbates the divisions — for ratings and for advertising dollars.

And the “unindicted co-conspirator” in all of this? The viewers. They may scream and yell about bias in the news, but, when all is said and done, bias in the news is just what they want. That’s why, despite CNN’s good intentions a year ago, their experiment was bound to fail.

Bernard Goldberg is an Emmy and an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University award-winning writer and journalist. He was a correspondent with HBO’s “Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel” for 22 years and previously worked as a reporter for CBS News and as an analyst for Fox News. He is the author of five books and publishes exclusive weekly columns, audio commentaries and Q&As on his Substack page. Follow him on Twitter @BernardGoldberg.