"The big keep getting bigger and their hearts keep getting harder."
Chris Licht's tenure at CNN is over. It was not successful through the lens of either ratings or journalism.
This week’s soundtrack: Made Out of Babies - “How To Get Bigger”
When CNN had its town hall with former president Donald Trump, I was among those criticizing it by noting that CNN – assuming it considers itself a journalistic entity – should not have put the big man on its air just to spout the usual Trump falsehoods about the 2020 election. No amount of fact-checking or tut-tutting from the moderator would be able to drown out Trump’s parroting of his usual debunked notions of a “rigged” election.
Chris Licht, the man in charge of CNN at the time of the town hall event, was fired last week, shortly after Tim Alberta’s Atlantic profile of Licht’s uneasy time at the helm went live. Alberta — full disclosure: I’m made acquaintance with Tim and I find him to be a terrific journalist and a pretty good softball player – masterfully described Licht and used his own words to seemingly paint a less-than-flattering picture.
I asked Licht to explain that mission to me, as plainly as possible.
“Journalism. Being trusted. Everyone has an agenda, trying to shape
events or shape thought. There has to be a source of absolute
truth,” he told me. “There’s good actors, there’s bad actors,
there’s a lot of shit in the world. There has to be something that
you’re able to look at and go, ‘They have no agenda other than the
truth.’”
Obviously, if you’re reading my newsletter, you know that this is a patently idiotic remark to make when you run a network that gave an evening of airtime to someone hopelessly devoted to the untruth. If someone cares about journalism’s obligation to the truth and takes seriously the role of gatekeeping in journalism, both-sidesism as practiced by the town hall… that ain’t it. It is, in fact, the exact opposite of it.
“You have a certain segment of society that has had an unfettered
megaphone to the leading journalistic organization in the world,” he
said. “And at the slightest hint that that organization may not be
just taking things that are fed to them from that segment of the
population, it must be that a fascist is running the network and he
wants to move it to the right … The fact that I want to give space
to the [argument] that this thing everyone agrees with might be not
right doesn’t make me a fascist right-winger who’s trying to steal
Fox viewers.”
I feel for Licht in a few ways. For one, being called a fascist is not a fun thing. Reporting on what a fascist or fascist-adjacent person says does not make one a fascist. Secondarily, Licht’s specific task in taking the job of running CNN was to increase the network’s ratings and to cultivate more Republican viewers; David Zaslav wouldn’t shut up about these two things for months. Those two things suck and they’re not easy.
But, I’m not going to cry for Licht. Not at all. On the fascist note, yes, the name-calling is unnecessary, but I would again note that gatekeeping is a big part of the job that Licht accepted. Dan Rather joking that the town hall was an in-kind donation to the Trump campaign wasn’t as much a joke as it was a cogent observation that ran in direct contrast to Licht saying in the Alberta profile that he knows that Trump knows how to get exposure and play the media. Licht was letting the big man do it all over again in the pursuit of ratings.
“Your beliefs can be different, but there’s only one truth,” he said. “And we have to be able to ask questions and have conversations that help people understand what’s happening … We have completely lost the ability to have difficult conversations without being demonized or labeled. It’s okay to ask questions, to have difficult conversations. You can strongly believe in something at your core, but that doesn’t affect the truth.”
Licht’s comments later in the profile speak to the problem with the current news industry climate not being able to square with his supposed views. TV’s obsession with ratings is not new and I’m not above criticizing TV as the main big problem in news, but seemingly every media company is downsizing right now, from The Athletic to the landmark newspaper in America’s second-biggest city to the mess at NPR earlier this year . The economics of it all are what they are, but overwhelmingly, news organizations are choosing larger profits to good journalism.
CNN’s leadership – Licht, in particular – was charged with getting ratings up. He and his bosses chose totally eschewing any notion of the truth in order to cater toward a group of voters who are happy to believe a series of, well, not true things (which even Fox’ leadership knew were wrong. Fox, the network whose viewers Licht wanted to steal).
In a New York Times piece about the post-Licht world at the network, the paper covered the comments to staff from CNN’s remaining leadership about wanting to focus more on news, including the wildfires in Canada and the war in Ukraine. This is a fine notion and one that certainly plays it safe regarding news, truth and journalism, but it is also naïve to the point of being facile. The Times piece, of course, was published the day before the indictment of dozens of charges against Trump as made public.
(And I’d also add that just doing straight news about a war in Europe and wildfires north of the U.S. border are comparative ratings losers 16 months before a presidential election. Yes, readers and viewers claim that they want “straight news,” but go ahead and try to not cover the political bifurcation in the U.S. Like it or not, the politics will be ratings winners and CNN’s going to have to decide how it is going to be news-specific without angering someone.)
On Friday, CNN covered the indictment all day with its usual cast of analysts and no matter what CNN did (save for parroting Trump’s points about him being innocent), it was going to certainly make Trump’s biggest fans angry because of the tension between the truth and the former president’s relationship to it. The indictment is damning; it has transcripts of recordings of Trump essentially admitting to crimes while they were happening. There is no “both sides” to that, despite what some journalism professors and a lot of Licht types say. The truth remains the truth and there’s no obligation to broadcast anyone saying that this is a witch hunt or politicized. It’s as clear as it can be.
The umpire comparison – journalists are supposed to only call balls and strikes, not affect the game – often comes up in journalism 101 stuff, but calling balls and strikes does not mean you give one team a giant strike zone because they can’t get the ball over the plate. It means a ball thrown a foot outside – “the election was stolen” – is still a ball. An umpire who makes that call – as a lot of CNN claims to want to do – will not be in MLB for long. It is journalistic malpractice.
But journalistic malpractice was not why Licht got fired, of course (Jeff Zucker did far worse and only got got because of an inappropriate workplace relationship). Cable news – especially during a troubled merger – is a numbers game and ratings at CNN were down. In hindsight, seemingly every Licht move was the wrong one. Even if he was just executing his boss’ plans for CNN, people like Zaslav don’t get fired. They find a scapegoat and the Atlantic profile painted Licht in a bad enough light to open the door to firing him. All this journalism and truth talk is fine and well, but cable TV news is the same as it always was: CNN was covering Trump on Friday as it always was: not just because it was a big, important story, but also because it got ratings.
Lulu Update
Not shockingly, I watch a lot of sports. This only matters because I can sometimes get excited when a team I’m supporting scores and, in the moment, I clap or say “oh hell yeah” or something. This makes Lulu think it’s time to play – I clap a lot when we play with a ball or something – and she gets excited and goes and gets a ball or something. I usually feel bad enough to actually play with her, so she’s not really losing much in the transaction.
A Recommendation: White House Plumbers
I realize the irony in criticizing Zaslav and heaping praise on one of his company’s recent projects, though I think that White House Plumbers was finished far before the merger.
That said, I quite enjoyed the series. A fairly quick five-part miniseries starring Woody Harrelson and Justin Theroux, the show is a funny and semi-dramatized look at some of the mid-level managers who concocted and executed (sorta. They failed a lot.) the famed break-ins at the Watergate. Theroux is unyieldingly charismatic in everything he does, which makes his performance as G. Gordon Liddy both troubling fun; the series creators pain Liddy as a Nazi-admiring true believer maniac in contrast to Harrelson playing E. Howard Hunt as a mid-century dinosaur who believes in something greater than himself, despite signs emerging constantly that his bosses – John Dean, Bud Krogh and, of course, Nixon himself – being solely out for themselves.
Of course, the series is a comedy and it was helmed by comedy writers (Veep, most notably), so it is exceptionally funny. It’s got sight gags with silly wigs, dry political humor and the not super subtle Trump/Nixon comparisons. It’s a fairly quick, easy and entertaining watch. Five stars.