Whenever questions about CNN’s declining ratings have come up over the past year, Warner Bros Discovery chief executive David Zaslav has urged patience. Just last month he endorsed the work that Chris Licht, his handpicked choice to lead CNN, was doing to revive the news network.
But when Zaslav installed a longtime confidant, David Leavy, at CNN last week as chief operating officer, it was viewed as a sign that his patience could be starting to run out, current and former employees said. “They are now down in the ratings, down in financial performance, down in employee morale and they’re down in public perception,” said a former senior employee. “It’s clearly not the right business strategy.”
The situation at CNN took on an even greater sense of urgency shortly after Leavy’s appointment was announced, when a damning profile of Licht was published by The Atlantic magazine. The 15,000-word article, published on Friday, depicted Licht as thin-skinned, isolated and struggling to find a strategy to reverse the network’s sharp ratings decline. It went off like a bombshell in the US media world.
Although he was not due to start in his new role for another two weeks, Leavy worked the phones through the weekend, calling CNN journalists and offering reassurance. “It’s interesting that Leavy is reaching out to a lot of the talent directly,” noted one veteran CNN employee at the weekend. Confidence in Licht, this person added, was “completely absent” within the newsroom.
Licht apologised to CNN staff on Monday morning, vowing to “fight like hell” to regain the trust of employees, which had already eroded before the article was published. Only weeks earlier, CNN hosted a controversial town hall meeting with Donald Trump, who insulted the network’s moderator to cheers from an audience packed with the former president’s supporters. CNN journalists were furious, but Licht defended the decision, saying that “America was served very well by what we did”.
Licht’s comments were in line with Zaslav’s goal to reposition the cable news pioneer as a less “activist” network than it had been in the Trump years, a stance that was also advocated by the cable billionaire and Discovery board member John Malone.
But Malone’s criticism of CNN’s journalism — he said in a 2021 CNBC interview that it would be “unique and refreshing” if the network would “actually have journalists” — has remained lodged in the minds of many of the network’s reporters.
Into this heated environment steps Leavy, who was working at Discovery when Zaslav became chief executive in 2006. The two have been close colleagues for the past 17 years, with Leavy serving as a confidant all the way through last year’s $44bn merger of Discovery and Warner Bros.
In the early 1990s, Leavy served as a personal assistant to former President Bill Clinton’s press secretary, Dee Dee Myers. He later earned his stripes as a communications official during the conflict in Kosovo, and joined Discovery in 2000.
Now his brief is to run CNN Worldwide’s commercial, operational and promotional activities, leaving Licht to manage the network. Leavy will report to Licht under the new structure, although Leavy will remain on Zaslav’s leadership team.
Licht, who earned a reputation as a strong programmer at MSNBC and Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show, has sometimes struggled in his efforts to reshape CNN. He moved Don Lemon, a presenter who was an open critic of Trump’s, from an evening slot to a newly configured morning show; Lemon was fired in April.
CNN’s ratings have been on a troubling downward slide, reaching an average of just 535,000 primetime viewers in the first quarter, according to Nielsen. This is in contrast to CNN’s annual average of 1.7mn viewers in the election year of 2020 — a figure that had dropped to 687,000 in primetime last year, compared with 2.2mn for Fox and 1.1mn for MSNBC. It occasionally slips into fourth place behind Newsmax, an upstart rightwing cable channel.
Licht is now planning to move Kaitlan Collins, the moderator of the Trump town hall, from the morning show into the 9pm slot, which has been a problem since before he arrived. If it works, it could boost CNN’s ailing evening viewership numbers.
Media analyst Claire Enders said that the parachuting in of the new COO was a “clear sign” of further cost-cutting to come at the broadcaster.
“CNN has global scale in news, just as the BBC does but with thankfully a commercial model attached, albeit not the one it once had. Warner Brothers Discovery, however, is making savage cost cuts everywhere due to rising debt costs. Unfortunately, the costs of covering news is rising especially as conflicts multiply.”
Insiders say next year’s US presidential election is an opportunity to claw viewers back, but they acknowledge that Licht and Leavy will need to have the operation humming soon if it is going to take advantage.
“There’s pressure from above to get this locked down,” said one executive. “Elections are chances to pull audiences back. We have to get it locked and tight before the election.”
Additional reporting by Daniel Thomas
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