Itemoids ★ Slate

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2023 › 06 › tim-alberta-discusses-cnns-turmoil › 674344

This story seems to be about:

Last Friday, The Atlantic published Tim Alberta’s profile of then–CNN CEO Chris Licht. Yesterday, Licht was ousted from the network. Below, in selected excerpts from today’s episode of our podcast Radio Atlantic, Alberta reflects on how Licht’s attempts to save the network went so wrong.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The true purpose of Ukraine’s counteroffensive The golf merger may be dead on arrival Is Gen Z coming for the GOP? The happiest way to change jobs A Plan Gone Awry

When Chris Licht was brought in to replace CNN’s former president Jeff Zucker in 2022, he was on a mission: He wanted to rid the network of what he saw as the mistakes of the Trump era, and to welcome more Republican viewers. After spending long periods of time talking with Licht over the past year, my colleague Tim Alberta found that while Licht’s theory of how to fix CNN may have made sense, the execution of that theory seemed to backfire at every turn.

The Atlantic published Alberta’s major profile of Licht last Friday. Yesterday, CNN staff learned that Licht is leaving the network. On today’s episode of our podcast Radio Atlantic, in his first (and, so far, only) interview on his reporting about Licht and CNN, Alberta joined host Hanna Rosin to discuss this week’s news. Below are some highlights from their conversation.

Licht came in with an “incredibly ambitious objective.”

After Alberta told Rosin how hard he’d worked to pitch Licht’s team on this story, she wondered: Why did Alberta want to write this profile so badly? “CNN had really been the poster child for Republican attacks on the media during the Trump years,” he replied. “I’d spent as much time covering Republican voters and Republican campaigns as anybody over the past five or six years. And I’d seen firsthand, time and time and time again, how, at rallies or smaller candidate events, CNN had sort of become the face of the hysterical liberal media that was out to get Trump and leading a witch hunt on his impeachment and on January 6 and on everything else.”

“Licht came in and quite overtly made it known, from the beginning, that his mission was to change that perception of CNN—was not to coddle the extreme right wing, so to speak, but to win back the sort of respectable rank-and-file Republican voter who had become so distrustful of CNN during those previous five or six years. And that struck me as an incredibly ambitious objective for somebody taking over one of the world’s biggest news organizations … at a really sensitive time.”

Licht was an awkward fit from the start.

Licht’s network predecessor, Jeff Zucker, was a beloved, “larger-than-life figure who had real personal rapport with just about everybody—not only the on-air talent but the producers behind the scenes, the camera crews,” Alberta explained. Licht, on the other hand, “went out of his way from the outset to be everything that Zucker wasn’t. So if Zucker was warm and affectionate and intimate with everyone, Licht was sort of cold and detached, almost aloof, purposely inaccessible.”

One of Licht’s first decisions as CEO was to turn Zucker’s former office—on the 17th floor of the CNN building, in the heart of the network’s newsroom—into a conference room. He then moved himself up to an office on the 22nd floor, a spot that most employees didn’t even know how to find. “And that one move, although it seems small, I think really in many ways came to define Licht’s relationship with his journalists,” Alberta said.

Licht’s mission was about more than just CNN.

“This was about the journalism industry itself,” Alberta said. Licht was “making it known that he felt that all of media had gotten played by President Trump. And he believed that if something was not done to fix that, that if there weren’t dramatic measures taken to restore and rehabilitate the media’s image in the eyes of much of the country, that it posed a real threat to democracy itself.”

So what happened to that mission?

Alberta quotes “the great philosopher Mike Tyson”: “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth … Chris Licht had a plan, and then he came in and he got punched in the mouth a bunch of times.

“The recurring theme that I heard from a lot of the top talent at CNN was that, in a lot of ways, they actually agreed in theory with the mission that Chris Licht had laid out, as far as toning down some of the outrage, trying to be more selective with when they really wanted it dialed up to 11, as he would say, and go strong on certain stories,” Alberta said. “But the execution of that mission was really what started to become shaky.”

One particularly troubling question was “what [to] do with Republicans who systematically attempted to deconstruct our democratic institutions a couple of years ago and prevent a peaceful transition of power. I mean, what do you do with those folks? Do you treat them as rational actors who need to be given a platform to reach the viewing masses?”

Licht’s programming decisions sometimes seemed to answer that question in ways that conflicted with his stated vision, Alberta explained, culminating in the network’s much-criticized town hall with Donald Trump last month.

Licht seemed defeated during Alberta’s final interview.

When Alberta met with Licht in mid-May, a week after the Trump town hall, “I could sense, having … gotten to know him fairly well over some period of time, that there was something a little bit different in his body language, that there was some self-doubt. There was maybe even a bit of sadness that things had gone so wrong.”

Looking back, did Licht’s mission fail?

Alberta pointed out that Licht set a lofty goal for himself: to reimagine the mainstream media’s relationship with a Republican base that had been “systematically manipulated” into not trusting them for decades. “It’s hard to draw any other conclusion” than failure “just based on the ratings,” Alberta said. “One year in the grand scheme of things is not a ton of time, but in that one year, there was just no measurable improvement. And in fact, all of the measurables actually showed that things were getting worse.”

Rosin posed an important final question: “My immediate thought after hearing that he was out at CNN was, In our political climate, is it even possible to do a reset like he was trying to do?”

“I think that’s the $64,000 question here, to be honest,” Alberta replied. He noted that he sees some of the internet’s “pile on” of Licht as unfair. Licht is a “talented guy” who has been successful in his past roles, Alberta said, and “I do think that he was dealt an exceptionally difficult hand, but I also think he made it even harder on himself than it had to be.”

“I don’t know if anybody at this point is capable of doing what Chris set out to do.”

Listen to the full podcast episode here.

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts

Today’s News In a surprise decision, the United States Supreme Court ruled 5–4 that Alabama’s current congressional map dilutes the electoral power of its Black voters, a likely violation of the Voting Rights Act. Federal prosecutors handling the investigation into former President Donald Trump’s possession of classified documents were spotted at a Miami courthouse where a grand jury has been hearing witness testimony, further evidence of a potential indictment. The Baptist minister Pat Robertson, founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network and an influential coalition of conservative Christians, has died at the age of 93. Robertson is widely considered a key figure in the rise of religious conservatism over recent decades. Dispatches Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf considers the battle over smartphones in schools. Weekly Planet: The not-COVID reason to mask is here, Katherine J. Wu writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read CBS Photo Archive / Getty

The People Who Use Their Parents’ First Name

By Jacob Stern

On a 1971 episode of The Brady Bunch, the family’s eldest son, Greg, decides that, as a freshly minted high schooler, he ought to be treated like a man. When he asks for his own bedroom, his parents acquiesce. When he asks for money to buy new clothes, they give it to him. When he asks to skip the family camping trip, they say okay.

But when he sits down at the breakfast table and calls his parents by their first name—“Morning, Carol! Morning, Mike!”—well, that’s a bridge too far. “Now, look, Greg,” his father answers with a wag of his finger. “Calling your parents by their first names might be the fad these days, but around here, we are still ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad’ to you!”

Read the full article.