Chris Licht is out at CNN less than one month after his network held a controversial town hall with former President Donald Trump.
The announcement was made by parent company Warner Bros Discovery and their CEO, David Zaslav, who sent a memo to staff on Wednesday morning.
“This morning we are announcing that Chris Licht will be leaving CNN and we will be conducting a wide search, internally and externally, for a new leader,” Zaslav wrote.
“I have known Chris for many years and have enormous respect for him, personally and professionally,” he continued. “This job was never going to be easy, especially at a time of great disruption and transformation, and Chris poured his heart and soul into it.”
CNN will have a team leading the network in the interim as they embark on an effort to find a suitable replacement.
BREAKING: @CNN fires Chris Licht after just a year. The left was mad at him after a recent town hall with @realDonaldTrump. Trump dominated the town hall and many were furious. pic.twitter.com/WNGYZweCek
— Simon Ateba (@simonateba) June 7, 2023
RELATED: Report: CNN Employees In a Full-Blown Meltdown Over Trump Town Hall
Chris Licht Canned After Trying to Restore Integrity to CNN
Sadly for him, Licht was in an absolute no-win situation, so his firing comes as no surprise.
Two of the major “missteps” he was responsible for that presumably led to his firing, according to CNBC, were the Trump town hall event and a profile in the Atlantic that heavily featured whining about the town hall.
Employees and contributors to CNN were absolutely beside themselves after the network decided to allow Trump a platform.
Weeks later, chief international anchor Christiane Amanpour, who once compared Trump to Hitler and the Nazis, was still complaining about the event.
Christiane Amanpour gave a speech at Columbia yesterday. She did not flinch. @oliverdarcy reports: https://t.co/Fu6ALfCuBC pic.twitter.com/cjDm2JvDZP
— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) May 18, 2023
The Atlantic article referenced the town hall event as well as Licht’s criticism of CNN’s previous leadership that allowed the network to obsess over COVID numbers with “no context.”
Zaslov though, responded to the profile stating, “We have great confidence in the progress that Chris and the team are making and share their conviction in the strategy.”
Suddenly that conviction is gone.
Chris Licht out at CNN, per Dylan Byers. The internal and external coup is complete. https://t.co/al5FvDEjyX
— Joe Concha (@JoeConchaTV) June 7, 2023
RELATED: CNN’s Christiane Amanpour Still Crying About Network Giving Trump a Town Hall
CNN’s Ratings Are A Disaster
It’s easy to speculate over what led to Licht’s ouster at CNN. The man attempted to convince the public that he was determined to steer the network back to producing actual journalism.
Perhaps that’s where he went wrong. Liberals don’t have the stomach for facts and journalism.
Last summer, Licht announced that he was evaluating whether or not certain on-air talent were too partisan for the network as they tried to adopt new “values.”
Licht, according to multiple sources that spoke with Axios at the time, was “evaluating whether personalities and programming that grew polarizing during the Trump era can adapt to the network’s new priority to be less partisan.”
Then he made the mistake of actually letting the current leader for the Republican nomination for President speak on his network. That is a move heavily frowned upon in mainstream media.
Media figures are flagrantly re-writing the history of CNN, right before your eyes, to make it seem as if CNN only started failing when Chris Licht was hired and demanded it stop being a DNC activist group.
CNN was already in “free fall” and “collapse” when Licht was hired. pic.twitter.com/lUsdw0vdpc
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 7, 2023
No matter what, however, the ultimate job of the CEO is to deliver success, and CNN’s ratings were already in the toilet long before Licht came aboard.
After an initial massive bump from the Trump town hall, CNN saw their numbers continuously plummet, so far so that at one point they had sunk below the ratings of the much smaller Newsmax network.
Give a big congratulations to @mattgaetz‘ latest victory over CNN!https://t.co/K03dixqKxo
— ThePoliticalInsider (@TPInsidr) May 31, 2023
On a side note, Licht’s ouster also comes less than six months after CNN hired Adam Kinzinger as a contributor despite his penchant for lying, his poorly educated opinions, and his stunted growth.
Coincidence? We think not.
