CNN's Chris Licht is out after 16 months of missteps and no business strategy

Chris Licht left CNN on June 7, 2023, after just over a year as chairman and CEO of CNN Worldwide, with what CNBC catalogued as a litany of reasons: leadership style, morale, programming decisions, how to cover Donald Trump 'and, ultimately, hubris'. Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav had hired the 'Morning Joe' and 'Late Show with Stephen Colbert' producer to make CNN less of an advocacy network and more of a straight news operation.

Licht's tenure may have been doomed from its first weeks, per CNBC: he started weeks early to weigh in on CNN+, expressed skepticism about its programming, and the service was dead less than three weeks later. Without it he had 'a foundering cable TV network and no coherent digital strategy'. He laid off hundreds; the experiment moving Don Lemon to mornings failed and CNN fired Lemon in April 2023; a Tapper-to-prime-time plan was scrapped. CNN's 2022 profit fell to about $750 million — including $200 million of CNN+ losses — from $1.25 billion, and ad revenue dropped nearly 40% under Licht.

'There's no daylight between his vision for this network and my vision for this network,' Licht had said on taking the job. 'The only reason why I took this job is because it was him in charge.' Journalists called the anti-advocacy framing a straw man. Zaslav, whose own vision critics called equally thin, put COO David Leavy on the team finding a successor with 'a more holistic strategy than just programming for a 55-and-older cable TV audience'.

CNN profit fell to about $750M in 2022 from $1.25B; ad revenue dropped nearly 40% under Licht, per MediaRadar data

He arrived with show-producing credentials but no business plan for a network losing linear subscribers.

Killing CNN+ — the one growth story he could have pitched to press and investors — left employees without a north star.

Programming reshuffles failed on ratings: the Don Lemon morning experiment ended in a firing, the Tapper move was scrapped.

The hire mirrored Zaslav's own limited vision, so there was no strategy in place for Licht to execute even in principle.

Hiring a brilliant producer to run a business is not a strategy: without a growth story, programming wins cannot save the P&L.

The search for a new CEO began with Leavy on the team; the 2024 election and a stronger political ad market were expected to help CNN's financials, but CNBC noted that 'wait for 2024' was no solution for 2025 and beyond.