Capitalism takes no prisoners
This is just breaking.
CNBC reports that after little more than a year, CNN CEO Chris Licht is leaving. Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav said executives Amy Entelis, Virginia Moseley, Eric Sherling and David Leavy will lead CNN until a replacement is found.
“Unfortunately, things did not work out the way we had hoped – and ultimately that’s on me. I take responsibility,” Zaslav said in a memo:
Licht drew heated criticism in recent weeks after the network hosted a town hall with Donald Trump that was packed with scores of the former president’s cheering fans. While the event drew 3.3 million viewers, CNN’s ratings plummeted afterward. Two days after the town hall, CNN’s prime-time viewership came in below right-wing outlet Newsmax, a much smaller network.
But it was an unflattering 15,000-word profile of Licht in The Atlantic – titled “Inside the Meltdown at CNN” – that might have sealed his fate. He apologized to staffers Monday morning, but top brass at CNN’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery, including CEO David Zaslav, weren’t happy with the article and the aftermath.
“The media has absolutely, I believe, learned its lesson,” regarding coverage of Donald Trump, Licht told The Atlantic‘s Tim Alberta. Licht was wrong about the media and about CNN.
“American journalism is dumber than most journalists, who often share my sense of absurdity about these practices. A major reason we have a practice less intelligent than its practitioners is the prestige that the View from Nowhere still claims…”
Dan Froomkin advised Licht’s coming successor a month ago about the emptiness of “the View from Nowhere” approach:
Licht has tried to make CNN neutral political territory, most notably by firing bold truth-tellers like Brian Stelter and John Harwood who minced no words when it came to calling out the tornado of lies spawned by Trump, Fox News, and the rest of the MAGA ecosystem.
Licht made it clear to the remaining CNN staffers that they should shove the contentious talk about Trump, in an attempt to appeal to more conservative voters; that they should not “take sides”.
[…]
Let’s be clear: Licht has to go. And his successor needs to learn the lesson he refused to learn.
It turns out The Market wasn’t buying the View from Nowhere. And journalism is poorer for still peddling what NYU associate professor of journalism Jay Rosen warned about in 2010:
When MSNBC suspends Keith Olbermann for donating without company permission to candidates he supports– that’s dumb. When NPR forbids its “news analysts” from expressing a view on matters they are empowered to analyze– that’s dumb. When reporters have to “launder” their views by putting them in the mouths of think tank experts: dumb. When editors at the Washington Post decline even to investigate whether the size of rallies on the Mall can be reliably estimated because they want to avoid charges of “leaning one way or the other,” as one of them recently put it, that is dumb. When CNN thinks that, because it’s not MSNBC and it’s not Fox, it’s the only the “real news network” on cable, CNN is being dumb about itself.
In fact, American journalism is dumber than most journalists, who often share my sense of absurdity about these practices. A major reason we have a practice less intelligent than its practitioners is the prestige that the View from Nowhere still claims in American newsrooms. You asked me why I am derisive toward it. That’s why.
“Champion the truth as boldly and enthusiastically as Fox spreads propaganda and disinformation!” Froomkin tweets this morning.
Newspapers that want to survive — those that aren’t owned by hedge funds — ought to pay heed to Licht’s fate.