CNN's Problems Go Way Beyond Chris Licht

Oh, also Licht agreed to a 15,000-word Atlantic profile; reporter Tim Alberta was given unfettered access for months to understand his deepest principles and goals, as well as his day-to-day existence. The conclusion of this profile, to sum up, was that  Licht is a dipshit. His firing would have happened anyway, but Alberta’s piece sped it along.

Licht claimed that he was trying to bring more sobriety to CNN, to make it a place where people could genuinely trust the news. He had, to be fair, famously done a version of this at CBS This Morning, which he helped relaunch in 2016. But cable news is not a place for sober analysis. It is a place for yelling. It is a place for conflict. It is a space for entertainment. It is possible to do this while informing its audience—at least to a degree—but if Licht meant what he was saying when he said he wanted to make the network more serious, he was doomed from the start. It may be more accurate to say that he and Zaslav hoped to make it a space in “the middle” again—a place where the right and the left could have a home—but this too shows both to be wildly out of their depth. The post-Trump right is fundamentally incapable of acknowledging basic reality, which makes doing this kind of “both sides”–focused journalism impossible.

The problems facing CNN go far beyond Licht, and it’s unlikely that anyone could have solved them. Cord-cutting is a major problem. Revenues are declining as a result; the average age of most cable news show audiences is “legally dead.” The business decisions made by the people in charge of these networks regarding streaming—look no further than the disastrous CNN+—have been catastrophic and have made everything a thousand times worse. People are not coming back to cable. Cable news may never again have the influence it enjoyed during the Trump era, a strange blip during an otherwise long and slow decline.