Let's be honest, whoever gets the top CNN job is also screwed because cable news is screwed. Its audience is dying off.
- CNN CEO Chris Licht stepped down on Wednesday.
- Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav is already on the hunt for his replacement.
CNN chair and CEO Chris Licht is out and the search is on for his replacement. Why would anyone want the gig?
Licht joined the company last year around this time, hoping to return it its centrist, objective roots – and away from the partisan skew the network adopted during the Trump years.
The idea, supposedly, was that such moderation would attract middle-of-the-road viewers who tuned the network out during the Trump and pandemic years.
It didn't work, and CNN ratings are terrible right now. Plus, Licht managed to alienate his staff with a combination of bravado and being reclusive.
So he's gone, and his old boss, Warner Bros Discovery CEO David Zaslav says he's already searching for a replacement.
I haven't seen the job description, but a fair one would say that the gig comes with enormous pay, immense influence, and a nightmare-like promise of almost inevitable doom.
Why?
Because no matter who takes this job, cable news is almost certainly going to be less popular in a year than it is today.
(You have to be careful with certainty around these things because, even as the cable news audience ages and dies, sometimes there are such giant ongoing news stories – like COVID or the Trump presidency – that the rest of us reluctantly blow the dust off our cable boxes and figure out how to switch to the right HDMI input or whatever.)
Todd Spangler at Variety painted a very bleak picture for the entire cable ecosystem in early May. He wrote that "total pay-TV penetration of occupied U.S. households (including for internet services like YouTube TV and Hulu) dropped to 58.5% — its lowest point since 1992, two years before DirecTV launched as a new rival to cable TV. As of the end of Q1, U.S. pay-TV services had 75.5 million customers, down nearly 7% on an annual basis."