Chris Licht, CNN’s new top executive, said his channel will not cover former President Donald Trump as much as during his White House term and 2016 campaign.
Licht claimed that under former CNN executive Jeff Zucker’s direction, the network covered Trump ad nauseam and “let every little thing that he did consume everything, and so you ended up talking about him for eight hours a day.”
“And we’re not going to do that,” Licht said, noting that Trump raised CNN’s ratings during his presidency. “We’re going to be very clear and take everything on a case-by-case basis about what level of coverage it should be.”
Trump, Republicans, and critics of corporate media said that CNN took a markedly left-wing turn during Trump’s presidency. Meanwhile, the network has had consistently worse ratings than Fox News or MSNBC over the past several years.
“Our program-level measures reveal, at least based on the guests that appear on the show, popular primetime news shows on CNN—such as Anderson Cooper 360 or CNN Tonight—are more left leaning than well-known evening shows on MSNBC such as The Rachel Maddow Show or The 11th Hour with Brian Williams,” according to the study.
And it added: “While news shows across all time blocks have polarized since 2017, we find that this pattern is the most pronounced among primetime shows, with Fox News steadily becoming more conservative and MSNBC and CNN sharply becoming more liberal during the Trump presidency.”
On Tuesday night, Trump announced a third run for president at his Mar-a-Lago residence. CNN broadcast the first 20 minutes of his speech before cutting away.
Licht, who has been conducting a business review of CNN for the past six months, said in a memo late last month that sweeping changes will be made in the near future—including layoffs. He made reference to a looming worldwide economic downturn.
