A feeling of dread saturated the company. Ratings, in decline since Trump left office, had dropped to new lows. One year into the job, Licht was losing both battles. These assertions thrust Licht into a two-front war: fighting to win back Republicans who had written off the network while also fighting to win over his own journalists, many of whom believed that their new boss was scapegoating them to appease his new boss, David Zaslav, who’d hired Licht with a decree to move CNN toward the ideological center. He had swaggered into the job, telling his employees that the network had lost its way under former President Jeff Zucker, that their hostile approach to Trump had alienated a broader viewership that craved sober, fact-driven coverage.
When he took the helm of CNN, in May 2022, Licht had promised a reset with Republican voters-and with their leader. Licht had known the risks inherent to this occasion: Trump had spent the past six years insulting and threatening CNN, singling out the network and its journalists as “fake news” and “the enemy of the people,” rhetoric that had led to death threats, blacklists, and ultimately a severing of diplomatic ties between Trump and CNN leadership.īut that had been under the old regime. Licht, the 51-year-old chair and CEO of CNN Worldwide, had spent the past hour and a half inside a trailer behind the building, a control room on wheels from which he’d orchestrated a CNN town hall with Trump. We were standing in the lobby of the Dana Center, on the campus of Saint Anselm College. “Well,” Licht said, “ that wasn’t boring!” Normally brash and self-assured, Licht was pale, his shoulders slumped. S even months later, in Manchester, New Hampshire, I came across Licht wearing the expression of a man who had just survived a car wreck. We know that we’re getting played, so we’re gonna resist it.” “I think they know that he’s playing them-at least, the people in my organization. “The media has absolutely, I believe, learned its lesson,” Licht said. Now, just a few months into his job running one of the world’s preeminent news organizations, he claimed to have a “simple” answer to the question that might very well come to define his legacy.
Until recently Licht had been producing a successful late-night comedy show. This was the first of many on-the-record interviews that Licht had agreed to give me, and I wanted to know how CNN’s new leader planned to deal with another Donald Trump candidacy. “H ow are we gonna cover Trump? That’s not something I stay up at night thinking about,” Chris Licht told me.
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