CNN has long claimed to be “the most trusted name in news” but its recent history has seen the rolling US cable news channel court controversy with a shift to the left as the rise of Donald Trump roiled American politics.
But now the channel – under its newly installed chief executive, Chris Licht – is undergoing another rapid change, seeking to row away from some of its well-known anchors’ political partisanship and back to a more nuts-and-bolts approach to journalism.
According to a swath of US media reports, CNN has entered high gear in a reformist effort to phase out overt political partisanship, reduce the frequency of “breaking news” alerts, dissuade non-primetime anchors from airing their views, and broadly to avoid presenting the extremes of political thought of either side, left or right.
“We are truth-tellers, focused on informing, not alarming our viewers,” newly installed Licht wrote in a memo to employees this month, saying there “needs to be room for nuance”.
“You’ve already seen far less of the ‘Breaking News’ banner across our programming. The tenor of our voice holistically has to reflect that,” Licht added.
Among the reforms, Licht directed network anchors and producers to stop using the phrase “The Big Lie” to describe attempts to overturn the result of the 2020 election – in part because it’s a Democratic party catchphrase. He is said to prefer the more specific “Trump’s lie” or “lies about the election”.
Set against a post-Trump identity crisis and a slump in viewers – CNN averages 178,000 viewers in the key 25-to-54 demographic, down 63% from a year ago – the reformist spirit comes as the network’s net advertising revenue fell 2% last year due to lower ratings, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence’s Kagan.
On Friday, Bloomberg reported that Licht was considering seeking brands to sponsor segments on CNN shows. It’s an innovation, the outlet said, that comes from a montage of headlines called the “Eye Opener” on CBS This Morning. Licht was the producer of that show before he later went on to produce The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
The moves, both editorial and commercial, come months after a sex-and-politics scandal at the network that saw the departure of CEO Jeff Zucker who had been having an affair with the marketing chief, Allison Gollust, who had previously worked for former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, whose brother and CNN anchor Chris Cuomo had helped fashion the governor’s response to sex harassment claims.
The effort to turn CNN away from being the story (Donald Trump memorably christened it “Fake News Network”; Anderson Cooper called him “an obese turtle on his back flailing in the hot sun”) to reporting it, comes amid pressure from cable-TV distributors to drop politically contentious cable channels.
Earlier this year, DirecTV, one of the largest US pay-TV providers, announced it would drop One America News Network, the conservative channel criticized for spreading misinformation. John Malone, a major shareholder in CNN’s new owner, Warners Bros Discovery, said that he “would like to see CNN evolve back to the kind of journalism that it started with, and actually have journalists”.
Cable news depends heavily on cable providers; as much as 60% of CNN’s $1.8bn in revenue last year came from the carriers. Fox News, by contrast, had revenues of $12.3bn off a far larger audience. Boosting CNN’s revenues is a priority for new owner Warner Bros Discovery that’s carrying about $59bn in debt and promised shareholders $3bn in cost savings.
“At a time where extremes are dominating cable news, we will seek to go a different way, reflecting the real lives of our viewers and elevating the way America and the world views this medium,” Licht told advertisers last month.
CNN’s attempt to reach an audience lying somewhere in a mythological political center may not be easy to manage. The threat to American democracy by a resurgent Republican party – which could have Trump again vying for the White House in 2024 – has not gone away.
“There is a huge split within journalism and within newsrooms about how to respond to this moment,” said Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of Columbia Journalism Review. “CNN is one example of a bigger battle that’s going to come to a head in the coverage of the midterms and immediately after.”
That split comes down a split over the fears for democracy in America. On one side is the view that this is politics and it should be covered aggressively. On the other, that democracy and a free press is under existential threat, and coverage has to be more muscular and forceful.
Licht, Pope says, is trying to thread two opposing camps as many US newsroom are trying to do. “What’s happening at CNN is not isolated. Newsrooms everywhere are struggling with it.”
But the larger point may be that audiences are no longer as engaged by US domestic politics as they were during the Trump administration when most news organizations grew their audiences significantly. Then came the politically divisive response to the Covid pandemic, a European land war, climate disasters, police violence, mass shootings and now an economic reckoning.
“There are a lot of signs of news fatigue and people are switching off,” says Pope. “Maybe it’s not about partisanship, but they’re just not responding to a crisis every day. So perhaps focusing in on longer pieces, explainers, and not breaking news, the adrenaline center of the news business. It was overused and consumers are exhausted from it.”
CNN’s commitment to centrism and a less intense, more reactive approach, and a more diverse range of political viewpoints, may not suit some of the network’s best-known hosts. Rumors have been circulating this week that more outspoken left-leaning anchors and contributors at CNN could soon be dropped.
There are already signs of change.
Beginning in the fall, the network on Sunday evenings will air the show from former Fox News anchor Chris Wallace that was on the ill-fated CNN+. Wallace, whose show will also be moved to HBO Max, is also helping cover some of the January 6 hearings to cover. Wallace said the committee had put itself in danger of too much “hype” about its findings.
Similarly, the outspoken progressive anchor Don Lemon broke with orthodoxy by asking plainly if Joe Biden, turning 80 in November, had “the stamina, physically and mentally, to continue on even after 2024”. Lemon was trolled on Twitter, but won the praise of Fox News’s Sean Hannity.
The shift at CNN, says Ariana Pekary, CJR public editor for the network, has come under cover, so to speak, of the war in Ukraine. “It was a good time reset. They had gone through a number of PR crises, so going wall-to-wall with Ukraine was something both left and right could rally around. It happened to fit where CNN was going and they really embraced it.”
The success of Licht’s reconfiguration, Pekary says, will depend on whether the bills get paid. “If the numbers turn, then they’ll have to make a decision.”
Correction: This story initially said CNN rehired Wallace, but Wallace never stopped being employed by the network after it folded CNN+, a spokesperson said. The article has been corrected.
