Posted in: Opinion, streaming, TV, YouTube | Tagged: Chris Licht, cnn, donald trump, opinion, trump

CNN CEO Chris Licht Should Resign Over Trump Trainwreck: Opinion

WBD's David Zaslav brought in Chris Licht to take CNN in a new direction. Who knew that direction would be crashing to the ground in flames?

You can't really blame Donald Trump or moderator Kaitlan Collins for the nightmare that was last night's town hall meeting on CNN any more than you can blame a steaming pile of poop for being a steaming pile of poop. You know what you're getting. With Trump, you're getting a twice-impeached former POTUS who attempted to whip up a gaggle of tinfoil hat-loving folks to overthrow the 2020 U.S. presidential election (and hurt a lot of people in the process) before being found liable for sexual abuse by a jury in a civil suite case. And those are Trump's "good" points. With Collins, you have someone with deep right-wing roots via The Daily Caller who hasn't exactly done a great job of hiding them (don't let that 2018 "incident" with the Trump Administration cloud what Collins has had to say & write over the years – like ranking Syrian refugees based on their "hotness"). There was just enough follow-up from Collins to keep the hour-plus from being a little more than just handing Trump the mic and letting him work the stage like some hacky stand-up comic.

But before anyone thinks I'm being unfair to Collins (or her past tweeting issues), just take a look at the following clip that says more about Collins than another 50 words from me ever could:

Except they're not the real problem here. Because May 10, 2023, isn't the day that CNN officially died. That happened on February 28, 2022 – when Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav introduced Chris Licht as CNN's new CEO. And since then, Zaslav & Licht have been "Weekend at Bernie's"-ing the new channel. But last night, the limbs started coming off, and the body began to smell too horribly to ignore. Because in their efforts to move away from what they claim was ex-CEO Jeff Zucker's "Anti-Trump" stance when it came to CNN's reporting, Zaslav & Licht have swung the pendulum so far to the right that the damn thing might just loop back around on us again.

Look at what was allowed to go out over a supposed "objective" news channel on Wednesday night. By the time what felt like a three-hour infomercial had wrapped, Trump got to spew more nonsense about "rigged elections," praise the traitors who stormed Washington D.C. to steal an election because they're sore losers (emphasis on the latter) & gloss over the fact that he still hasn't answered questions about having classified docs at Mar-a-Lago. But perhaps the "sh*t icing" on the "sh*t cake" was that Zaslav & Licht gave Trump a stage & open mic to take shots at E. Jean Carroll… only about 24 hours after Trump was found liable by a jury in a civil case for defaming and sexually abusing the writer/journalist. And the reportedly "undeclared voters" in the audience laughed & ate up everything Trump had to say, giving off the kind of visual vibe that answered a very important & personal question for me. What would a Klan rally look & sound like if everyone attending forgot to pick up their dry cleaning?

But the town hall will get huge ratings, and Zaslav & Licht will take that as some kind of mandate to do more of it. But there's nothing profound about it. It's "car crash" television – and don't we all slow down to see if the sheet's been pulled yet? Collins will get the 9 pm slot because "The Blunder Twins" view her as "Tucker Carlson Lite" who could grab some eyeballs away from FOX "News" – and because she took one for Zaslav & Licht for last night, so they owe her. As much as the only decent thing that Licht could do for CNN is resign, cheap successes like these usually fuel egos, so I don't see that happening. As for Zaslav? Damn, but it sure would be funny if the Warner Bros. Discovery CEO & his team got hit with wave after wave of CNN-related questions during their Max rollout later this month. Just sayin'… And CNN? Well, the news channel's future isn't looking much brighter heading into the next POTUS election. CNN will continue to be a sad joke with a punchline that viewers end up paying for – a cautionary tale for future news efforts that if you're not about something? Well, you end up like CNN. Being about nothing.

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