News reports on Chris Licht’s sudden but predictable firing as chairman of CNN make it sound like his relatively brief tenure was marked by a series of blunders that cumulatively led to his demise. It’s nonsense.
Licht was fired for one reason, and it’s that he actually believed CNN was a place he could revert back to something of a major news-gathering operation without a complete overhaul of producers, correspondents, and, most of all, the anchors.
After a year of tinkering with the margins — moving drama queen Don Lemon from nights to mornings, firing the on-camera masturbator — Licht ultimately failed to do anything that would steer CNN away from its current status as a patronizing, angry propaganda outfit toward something less hysterical and more even-handed. That would require terminating Jake Tapper, Anderson Cooper, Erin Burnett, and on and on. But for whatever reason, Licht thought he could get there instead with an endless series of internal memos on word usage and “balance.”
CNN, as a TV product, doesn’t sell journalism or news, and it hasn’t since 2015. CNN, as a TV product, sells made-up reasons for Americans to hate one another. The pandemic death ticker, the deadly BLM riots, “the big lie,” the “violent insurrection” — all of it is promoted and repeated on air at CNN to give half the country a reason to hate their neighbors.
It’s a large part of news journalism to cover political conflict. CNN doesn’t cover political conflict. CNN creates it. CNN foments it.
