Chris Licht’s Fundamental Mistake

© Photograph by Mark Peters for The Atlantic

The precipitous fall of Chris Licht is just the sort of story that today’s cable-news environment is best at covering: dramatic, messy, lurid, and ultimately lacking in much substance.

Licht was pushed out of CNN today, five days after my colleague Tim Alberta wrote a deeply textured, carefully considered, and entirely damning profile of the CEO. Licht’s clumsiness and tone-deafness in the story—he sniped at his staff, obsessed over his predecessor, and generally seemed feckless—were astonishing for someone in his position, and they’re the immediate context for his firing.

[Read: Inside the meltdown at CNN]

But the real reason Licht failed was not the way he executed his job but the way he conceived it in the first place. He wanted to turn CNN back into the neutral arbiter of truth that it once was (or seemed to be) without understanding that such a role is impossible in today’s fractured, polarized cable-news environment. “He was dealt a bad hand, and then he played it badly,” as one of his friends told the media reporter Brian Stelter.

Licht was not wrong to see serious problems at CNN. During the 2016 presidential campaign, the network unwittingly boosted Donald Trump by providing wall-to-wall coverage. Once Trump was in office, CNN switched gears, becoming fiercely critical of the president. Many of the criticisms were correct, though sometimes they were also histrionic and self-absorbed, as I noted in 2017. But with many CNN personalities establishing themselves as adversaries of the president—putting on a jersey, as Licht put it—the network looked less like the fearless news-gathering operation of Gulf War fame and more like a milquetoast replica of the liberal MSNBC.

[Read: Why the media’s defense against Trump has proven so ineffective]

Licht was betting that by neutralizing the most fiercely anti-Trump voices at CNN—firing people such as Stelter and John Harwood, and clamping down on Jim Acosta and Don Lemon—he could return the network to the neutral center. CNN wouldn’t hesitate to call out Trump’s lies, but it wouldn’t pose as the resistance either. This not only would be good for its journalism, he wagered, but would also reclaim the huge, underserved center in the media audience.

But Licht’s analysis misconstrued the cable landscape. No such audience appears to exist—or at least, it doesn’t seem to exist among cable-news viewers, night in and night out.

[David A. Graham: Chris Cuomo must go]

CNN’s viewership still booms whenever there’s a major news event, because viewers maintain a vestigial sense of the network as a place for serious news in a way that Fox News and MSNBC are not. But breaking news simply doesn’t happen that much—even if you slap BREAKING NEWS on a chyron all day, every day. (Cutting back on that practice was one of Licht’s unequivocally correct decisions.) The people who watch cable the rest of the time tend to be news junkies and political junkies. As American politics has become sharply polarized, so have they.

America really does have a substantial centrist middle, which explains why Joe Biden is president today, but it’s composed of normal people. Less than 10 million people watch cable news nightly; 155 million voted in the 2020 election. There simply aren’t enough rabid news consumers who are also staunch centrists to sustain a network. Even Fox News is bleeding viewers who find it insufficiently conservative to networks further to the right, like Newsmax.

Licht’s attempts to market CNN to this imaginary audience just dragged the network down further, most vividly demonstrated by the disastrous May town hall with Trump, where the former president bullied CNN’s Kaitlan Collins and pumped out nonsense. Licht’s attempts to win over conservatives didn’t work; they were still watching Fox (or Newsmax), but they took the overtures as a sign of weakness and a way to tug CNN further right. Meanwhile, the liberal and centrist viewers whom CNN had retained were appalled by the spectacle and lost allegiance. He made other errors too, like elevating Lemon, only to fire him when a new morning show flopped and Lemon’s sexist remarks alienated his co-hosts.

[David A. Graham: The double bind of Trump’s outrageous statements]

Licht fell victim to the same fallacy as many other media figures, from moguls to reporters to critics: They overestimate the power of the press, believing it to be the dominant force shaping American society. TV, magazines, and online outlets all convey the national discourse, but too often arrogantly assume they’re creating it out of thin air. One simple example suffices: The great mass of the press detested Trump, and and if the media had the kingmaking (or -breaking) power that it presumes, he would never have become president.

Licht’s catastrophic tenure is a shame, not only because CNN is one of the largest and most important reporting organizations in the country, but also because the role it used to play in the American media was valuable. Having a network that is widely viewed as reliable and basically trustworthy by a broad swath of the public is positive, and the partisan lean—sometimes open, sometimes less so—of much of the press today helps explain declining trust in the media. But Licht could no more rebuild the old CNN in today’s environment than he could turn back the clock to 1993. That time has expired, and now, so has Licht’s.