After Chris Licht was unceremoniously pushed out as the CEO of CNN earlier this month, it became clear that the hordes of woke staffers at the network had successfully staged a coup.
These malcontents — from top hosts to staffers — complained that CNN had become too neutral under Licht’s leadership. While Licht was certainly no right-winger, and despite being thwarted at every turn, he did seem to earnestly want to return CNN to its roots of real journalism. This is something the rabid ideologues that inhabit the network could not abide — if both sides get a fair shake, they might sometimes have to defend their positions. (RELATED: Shake Up In CNN Leadership Reveals The Left Has Completely Lost Its Sense Of Reality)
Luckily, for them a profile of Licht came out in The Atlantic earlier this month describing the “meltdown” under his leadership. It gave a behind-the-scenes look into the town hall with former President Donald Trump, among other grave sins, and quoted Licht on the need to move the network away from the “outrage porn” it trafficked in under the Trump-era former CEO, Jeff Zucker. Facing pressure from the chief of CNN’s parent company as well as his own staffers, Licht stepped down shortly after the article ran.
NOW – CNN Chairman and CEO Chris Licht is out at the network.pic.twitter.com/nLdCG7kdDV
— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) June 7, 2023
With the one moderating influence at the network gone, expect CNN to double down on the “outrage porn” as 2024 election cycle begins in earnest. In fact, given who’s in charge now, it may be worse than ever.
The New York Times smugly describes the new leadership structure as an attempt to “move on from the stormy tenure” of Licht. Reading between the lines, this clearly means a pivot to the hard left. While a new CEO has not yet been named, four executives are collaborating on the role for the time being.
Virginia Moseley is a veritable insider of the beltway media, serving nearly two decades at ABC News. She later transferred to CNN, handling breaking and domestic news-gathering. In this role, she was presumably responsible for ginning up outrage with the constant “breaking news” pieces about Trump during his presidency.
Licht nixed this practice, updating the CNN style guide to only deploy a breaking news banner when “something BIG is happening.” However, Moseley is likely to bring it back in her new role as head of U.S. Editorial. (RELATED: Corporate Media’s Latest Town Hall Could Be A Ploy To Boost Biden In The General Election)
More nefarious are her husband’s political connections. A former director at Morgan Stanley, he has been described as a “key Democratic Wall Street figure” for “decades.” He is reportedly both a member of Biden’s “inner circle” and “won [Hillary] Clinton’s confidence” as her deputy secretary of state. This is the epitome of an insider power couple likely to foster the worst kind of predatory corporate wokeness at CNN.
Two other members of the interim leadership — Amy Entelis and Eric Sherling — are long-serving CNN veterans. Entelis previously served as interim leader after Zucker’s ouster last year, and both served in high-level vice president roles during his tenure. They are surely familiar with his model of Trump-obsessed networking programming.
The fourth member of the team, David Leavy, is a representative of CNN’s parent company Warner Bros. He will serve as CNN’s chief operating officer while also maintaining his duties overseeing “public policy and social responsibility” at Warner Bros. Of course, this jumble of corporate buzzwords really just means he is in charge of making sure the company appropriately virtue signals to the far-left. (RELATED: Ousted CNN CEO Speaks Out For First Time)
None of them have given any intention to carry on Licht’s legacy, and that is likely the very reason they were hired. They will bring back the good old days, where every story deserves perpetual hyperventilation over the evil, orange man. They are likely to bring back some of CNN’s worst actors — like Brian Stelter and John Harwood — who disingenuously presented themselves as objective journalists but were some of the most rabid partisans in media.
If not them, then certainly more like them, as “crucial slots” remain unfilled. The Times reports that the morning and prime time line ups are currently being “fine-tuned.”
Ideology aside however, CNN must pivot if they hope to remain competitive in a diverse and evolving media ecosystem. CNN’s ratings plummeted when Biden won the presidency, losing nearly 70% of its audience over the first six months. The recent Trump town hall showed that the former president is the only chance the network has to recover those numbers. Yet a town hall cannot happen every day, and CNN staff has made it abundantly clear that they will not tolerate such even-handed platforming of the former president.
As the Times points out, the only thing CNN can do to stave off their “long-term decay” is give their viewers a steady dose of the only thing they want to hear — a ceaseless flow of “outrage porn.”