NEW YORK (AP) – The chief executive CNN pushed out of a job on Wednesday faced mounting problems in his first year leading the struggling network: viewership and profits were declining, programming blunders were growing and the network’s journalists were losing confidence by the day.
Chris Licht’s very bad year culminated in a damning magazine profile last week, and just a few days later his tumultuous 13-month tenure was over.
Licht, 51, was informed of his ouster on Wednesday morning, and it was announced to the staff at the daily editorial meeting – the same place where Licht had said two days earlier that he would “fight” to earn the trust of those around him.
The executive who hired and fired Licht – Chief Executive Officer (CEO) David Zaslav of CNN parent company Warner Bros Discovery – accepted some of the blame for the network’s turmoil over the past year, and he appointed a four-person interim leadership team. Zaslav promised CNN staff a thorough search for Licht’s replacement.
“This really caps a tumultuous year for CNN that has seen shrinking profits, programming mistakes and really low employee morale,” CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy said on his own network on Wednesday.
Licht had a mandate to focus on news and try to and make CNN more palatable to both sides of the country’s political divide; Republicans had become increasingly suspicious of the network following repeated attacks by former president Donald Trump.
But some at the network saw the way that change was communicated as a repudiation of their past work.
A live town hall interview with Trump last month drew widespread criticism, with the former president overwhelming moderator Kaitlan Collins with several misstatements, as a pro-Trump live audience cheered him on.
Earlier in the year, Licht revamped the network’s morning show, but that proved unsuccessful and led to the firing of longtime personality Don Lemon. Efforts to build a new prime-time lineup moved slowly, with Collins only recently appointed to fill at 9pm hour that had been without a permanent host since Chris Cuomo was fired in December 2021.
