The move comes less than a week after Atlantic magazine published a critical report on the light.
Chris light
(Portal) CNN chairman and CEO Chris Licht has left the media company effective immediately, parent company Warner Bros. Discovery said Wednesday.
The company said that in the process of finding Licht’s successor, it assembled an interim leadership team including Amy Entelis, executive vice president of talent and content development; Virginia Moseley, EVP of the Editorial Board; and Eric Sherling, executive vice president of US programming, and David Leavy, director of operations, on the business side.
The move comes less than a week after Atlantic magazine published a critical report on the light.
In an email to employees Wednesday, Warner Bros. chairman and CEO David Zaslav of Discovery wrote that the company would conduct an extensive search for a new head, both internally and externally.
“This job has never been easy, especially during a time of great upheaval and change, and Chris put his heart and soul into it,” Zaslav wrote.
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He added, “Unfortunately, it didn’t work out the way we hoped and that’s ultimately my fault.”
Licht, who most recently served as EVP of Special Programming at CBS as well as executive producer and showrunner on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” took over in May 2022 from Jeff Zucker, who was forced to step down after failing to disclose a consensus agreement. . relationship with a colleague.
Among other things, Licht was criticized for the network’s decision to air a May 10 town hall meeting with former Republican President Donald Trump, at which Trump repeated falsehoods about his defeat in the 2020 election and said he would forgive many supporters if elected would be convicted of participation. in an attack on the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, calling CNN host Kaitlan Collins an “evil person.”
CNN’s ratings are falling even as the company tries to attract more Republican viewers. Its profit fell to less than $1 billion in 2022 and is expected to be slightly higher this year at $938.6 million this year, according to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence. These estimates are for CNN networks operating in the United States, including CNN en Español and CNN International.