CNN Chairman and CEO Chris Licht has resigned from the news network, effective immediately, parent company Warner Bros. Discovery said Wednesday.
The company said that as it searches for Licht’s replacement, it has established an interim leadership team that includes Amy Entelis, executive vice president of content and talent development; Virginia Moseley, executive vice president of editorial; and Eric Sherling, executive vice president of programming for the United States as well as David Leavy, director of operations, on the commercial side.
The move comes less than a week after the Atlantic magazine published a critical report on Licht. In an email to staff on Wednesday, Warner Bros. Discovery Chairman and CEO David Zaslav, wrote that the company will conduct an extensive internal and external search for a new leader.
“This job was never going to be easy, especially at a time of great disruption and transformation, and Chris put his heart and soul into it,” Zaslav wrote. “Unfortunately, things didn’t go our way, and ultimately that’s up to me.”
Licht, who most recently served as executive vice president of special programming at CBS and executive producer and showrunner of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” assumed his role in May 2022, replacing Jeff Zucker, who was forced to resign after Not revealing a consensual agreement about a relationship with a colleague. He had the goal of turning CNN into a “centrist ideology” news channel. after several years turn to the left during the government of Donald Trump.
Licht has been heavily criticized for the network’s decision to broadcast on May 10. the disastrous ‘Town Hall’ with former Republican President Donald Trumpduring which Trump repeated falsehoods about his defeat in the 2020 election, said that if elected he would pardon many supporters convicted of participating in a January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol, and called out the moderator of CNN, Kaitlan Collins, a “nasty person.”
CNN’s ratings have been falling, even as the company tries to get more Republican viewers. Despite the dismissal of Tucker Carlson the ratings of media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s news channel Fox News maintains it as the ratings leader in the United States, following the progressive MSNBC in second place. Even during primetime, CNN has lagged slightly behind the far-right Newsmax network in audience.
dm