Did you hear? Chris Licht is out at CNN! Assuming you’re not a journalist or a well-adjusted person, and I apologize if the first descriptor there automatically implies the latter, you’re probably saying “who?”
But to the extent that understanding America’s horrifyingly dysfunctional news business is a requirement for fixing our toxic politics, there’s a lesson here. The recent drama at CNN is just emblematic of the fact that nearly all of America’s major news organizations are completely and utterly beyond repair. In order to understand what I’m talking about, first indulge me in a brief recap of the last decade at CNN.
In 2013, Jeff Zucker became head of CNN. Formerly the head of NBC’s entertainment division, Zucker was notable for pushing the vaunted cable news brand in a more “infotainment” direction. And notably, one of Zucker’s successes at NBC was a popular, long-running reality show known as “The Apprentice.”
By the time Donald Trump was running for president in 2016, Zucker’s CNN was all in on broadcasting his former employee’s campaign rallies, which managed to get a notable ratings spike for a cable news network that was usually in third place. Of course, the rest of Trump’s 2016 campaign is literally history and once the dust settled from Zucker’s various public apologies for giving Trump hundreds of millions worth of unearned media coverage, CNN turned on a dime and the network’s political coverage in the ensuing years was marked by credulous reporting of partisan disinformation, various
