CNN Battered by CEO Problems
Morning host Don Lemon’s sexist comments are the least of CNN’s problems.
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Chris Licht was put in charge of CNN in May 2022 as a part of the restructuring ordered by parent Warner Bros. Discovery’s chief David Zaslav. Zaslav wanted to chop down expenses at the debt-laden company. Licht’s tenure and his efforts to cut costs have done more harm than good. (Click here for the 25 brands customers are abandoning.)
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Morning host Don Lemon’s sexist comments are the least of Licht’s problems. Lemon is getting special sensitivity training when he should have been fired.
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Licht’s major trouble is that CNN’s ratings are dropping frighteningly. February is likely to be its worst month for audience size since June 2014, against the important 25- to 54-year-old age group. That means lower profits just when Zaslav is desperate for higher ones. Stars Anderson Cooper and Wolf Blitzer have been unable to help reverse the noise dive.
CNN’s audience trails those of rivals Fox News and MSNBC. This is particularly painful for a channel that invented 24-hour news. CNN was founded in 1980 and pioneered almost every major advance in the medium.
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Licht’s current challenge is that he has no more talent or shows to shuffle. He almost certainly has his talent where they will do him the most good. He would need to overhaul the entire network on the chance it might do better. And that is a dangerous strategy Zaslav will not let him undertake.
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Licht is trapped in a situation that TV networks have gotten into from time to time since the dawn of television. He has shows with low ratings. He can only cancel them for new programs he is willing to gamble will do better.
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Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.
His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.
