It was one of those pieces of news that was simultaneously stunning and utterly expected: Chris Licht was out of CNN.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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 \u2013 whatever his faults \u2013 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 \u2013 even those who had supported overturning the 2020 election or downplayed the 6 January 2021 insurrection \u2013 would be welcome and treated well on the network.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
With clear orders from above, the former CBS executive aimed the cable network\u2019s 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 \u2013 which panders to its audience\u2019s most extreme views \u2013 isn\u2019t the place to find it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
party \u2013 the Republicans, of course \u2013 in the grip of those intent on dissolving democratic norms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, it didn\u2019t start off well. Then three things happened, any one of which might have been fatal. Licht provided Donald Trump a \u201ctown hall\u201d program last month, to be aired live, meaning that the former president\u2019s inevitable and endless lies would be aired live, too. It was a bad decision, poorly executed, which played out disastrously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The piece hit hard. It documented how Licht\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe thing that struck me was that Licht seemed to be operating on slogans, not actual ideas and didn\u2019t seem to recognize the difference between the two,\u201d observed Jelani Cobb, dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, after reading Alberta\u2019s article.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And Alberta\u2019s detailed chronicling of Licht\u2019s missteps was astonishing, Cobb told me in text messages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cJust the accretion of absurdities to the point where you\u2019re like, \u2018surely, this can\u2019t all be true.\u2019 And at the same time, it\u2019s like of course, this all seems logical.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Particularly disturbing were the decisions involving the town hall, especially the way CNN allowed far-right Republicans \u2013 Trump\u2019s cult members \u2013 to dominate the audience, which was supposed to be made up of ordinary Republican voters and undecided ones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But it\u2019s possible \u2013 likely, even \u2013 that Licht would have survived all of this if it weren\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cLicht 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\u2019s longevity if he had made ratings go up instead of down,\u201d observed the Los Angeles Times reporter Matt Pearce.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If Licht\u2019s ham-handed moves and his commitment to giving equal time to liars and insurrection apologists had \u201cworked\u201d \u2013 that is, if ratings had soared, profits risen and value been restored \u2013 nothing else would have mattered a whit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s never good to have \u201clost the room\u201d, as CNN\u2019s Oliver Darcy described in the Reliable Sources newsletter. It\u2019s never good to have used a powerful platform to erode democracy and certainly no boss\u2019s boss likes a negative, buzzed-about profile in a national magazine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But, sadly, these things would have been deemed tolerable if Licht\u2019s efforts had \u201cworked\u201d. But they didn\u2019t and so he\u2019s out. (\u201cCan you hear the champagne popping?\u201d one CNN journalist asked a Washington Post reporter.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Perhaps the biggest cheeses at CNN have learned the right lessons: that you can\u2019t \u201cboth sides\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There\u2019s little evidence that these will be the takeaways from this debacle. But it sure would be pretty to think so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n