A New York jury on May 9 found Donald Trump liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll, an advice columnist who sued him years after the assault she alleged. The next day, CNN held its much-criticized town hall with Trump. In its tee-up coverage, a chyron that included the term “SEXUAL ABUSE” appeared on the screen. A lieutenant of CNN chief executive Chris Licht notified the control room: Scrub those words.
That morsel surfaced in a searing profile of Licht that appeared last week in the Atlantic under the byline of Tim Alberta — a piece that aggregated a run of bad stories about Licht and added a few new ones. On Wednesday morning, CNN staffers learned that Licht was out, as first reported by Puck’s Dylan Byers.
There are many subplots to Licht’s abbreviated tour, but the sexual abuse chyron moment captures a critical one: His departure marks the failure of his mandate — delivered from his corporate overlords, including Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav — to recalibrate the network’s political sensibility toward the center. To the extent that anyone ever understood what that meant for actual CNN broadcasts, it’s now clear that it meant sanitizing the screen in deference to the Republican front-runner.
Advertisement
A disaster, in other words. Time for the next experiment in reimagining CNN. “I have great respect for Chris, personally and professionally,” Zaslav said in a statement. “The job of leading CNN was never going to be easy, especially at a time of huge disruption and transformation, and he has poured his heart and soul into it.”
Correct about the “time of huge disruption,” though this bit of commentary omits the disruption that Zaslav served upon his own company. As Alberta notes, Zaslav told others that he needed an outsider like Licht to revamp CNN “because Republican politicians had told him they were no longer willing to come on the network.” And John Malone, chairman of a company with a large stake in Discovery, told CNBC, “I would like to see CNN evolve back to the kind of journalism that it started with, and actually have journalists, which would be unique and refreshing.”
Follow this authorErik Wemple's opinionsUh: CNN is brimming with journalists — journalists who, for example, have been breaking stories on the investigation of former president Trump over classified documents or sending dispatches from Kyiv or criticizing their own network for its crummy Trump town hall, as Oliver Darcy and Christiane Amanpour did. Darcy wrote in his newsletter, “It’s hard to see how America was served by the spectacle of lies that aired on CNN Wednesday evening” and received a scolding from Licht for being too “emotional,” according to Byers.
Advertisement
“Emotional,” in this context, is a bro-scold for telling the truth about Trump.
And Trump looms over all this chaos. He’s the guy whose 2016 campaign rallies served as interminable programming blocks under former CNN Worldwide president Jeff Zucker; it was Trump who eventually broke with the network and called its broadcasts “fake news”; and whose every outrage, erroneous tweet and reckless initiative was covered by CNN from early morning to late at night, over and over and over. Critics interpreted the blanket coverage as left-wing activism; defenders, including former CNN anchor Don Lemon, who was fired by Licht earlier this year, point to the raw material that fueled it all: “A lot of people are Monday-morning-quarterbacking about what happened,” Lemon is quoted in the Atlantic piece. “You have to remember the time that we were in. Every single day, we were being attacked by the former administration. And that’s not hyperbole. … We had bombs sent to this very network.”
The Erik Wemple Blog is partial to Lemon’s explanation. Though Zucker’s flood-the-zone approach to Trump was a nauseating spectacle — and Jim Acosta, who covered the White House, manifested a steady glee in shouting down Trump and his lieutenants — there’s little question about the threat the former president posed. Jan. 6, 2021, is all the proof you need.
Yet Trump’s multiyear fake-news fusillade against CNN has paid off. It seeped into the heads of the moguls who took over the network last year from its previous owner, AT&T, to the point that they went about correcting the network’s alleged tilt. “I think he changed the rules of the game,” Licht told Alberta about Trump, “and the media was a little caught off guard and put a jersey on and got into the game as a way of dealing with it. And at least [at] my organization, I think we understand that jersey cannot go back on.”
Advertisement
Well, the centrist jersey isn’t fitting too well, either — considering that it apparently means defanging truthful coverage, giving voice to an election denier and dressing down a staffer such as Darcy for doing his job. Those actual journalists at CNN wouldn’t stand for all that, and they made their opinions clear, both on the record and on background (mostly the latter). For some perspective, though, consider that Licht is leaving for reasons that look like misdemeanors next to the routine atrocities at Fox News, where the management team appears ensconced after a $787.5 million settlement over knowing falsehoods that defamed Dominion Voting Systems.
Fox News also continues drubbing CNN in the ratings. Perhaps people don’t care to watch a centrist product, however it’s defined or presented. “I’m not sure there’s enough day-in, day-out passion for that to succeed,” Zucker said last year at a conference.
Meaning that CNN’s overlords are due for a trip to the drawing board. They might consider more input from the network’s veterans, who speak less about jerseys than about stories.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZLyxtc2ipqerX2d9c3%2BOaW1oaGdksKm%2ByKxkpaGTncFur82nZJydnqm%2Fqr%2FTZqeopJmptqS%2Fjg%3D%3D