Inside CNN’s Epic PR Failure Over Chris Licht’s Profile

Matt Winkelmeyer/GA/The Hollywood Reporter via Getty Images

• The Atlantic published a really hard piece about CNN executive Chris Licht.
• CNN’s blunder allowed The Atlantic reporter so much access for so long.
• Who thinks this is a good idea?

So who screwed the pooch at CNN?

The disaster I’m referring to is Tim Alberta’s devastating profile of CNN chairman and CEO Chris Licht published Friday.

Alberta Licht’s long description has a big idea — to make CNN more independent of partisanship again. But according to the story, Licht failed to articulate a plan to CNN’s staff and stars on how to do that in a way that would attract viewers and make for good, responsible broadcast journalism.

The dimmer light is Trump’s town hall, which followed months of Licht telling people how easy it would be to cover the former president, the story reveals.

And maybe, the story suggests, that’s because that big idea isn’t really Licht’s plan at all, but the plan foisted on him by his boss, the Warner Bros. executive. Discovery David Zaslav.

Also, the story makes Licht look tiny. Someone who comes across as a tough guy but is aloof and avoids open conversations with his people. There’s a really gross moment where Licht is in the gym doing a workout and says, “Zucker couldn’t do that,” referring to his predecessor, Jeff Zucker.

The day it was published, a bunch of Licht’s peers and other newsroom leaders from across the industry shared their horror with me at the story.

“I should have stopped reading. It’s like watching a snuff movie,” one told me. Others were just as shocked.

What went wrong at CNN, specifically their communications shop, to allow such a story to come to light?

I’ve spent the last 26 hours talking to several people with direct knowledge of Alberta’s presentation to CNN about the story. They know how the project got the green light in the late summer of 2022 and watched in horror as it spiraled wildly out of control over the following winter and spring.

Those sources declined to comment on the record. And guess what? These people are professional spinners trained in crisis communications and they very cleverly tried to spin the crap out of me. Keep that in mind as you read what follows.

That said, I was able to put together a basic timeline of how this thing happened.

Licht got the job in May 2022 and made it clear that his plan for CNN was to make it less biased and better again at “Capital J Journalism.”

Alberta genuinely believed that Licht’s ambition for CNN was good. In late May or June, he ran a story on CNN News “about whether trust in the media can be restored,” told through the lens of Licht’s first year at CNN.

Over the summer, Alberta and Licht and the CNN people talked about what the story might look like. Licht was particularly enthusiastic, I’m told.

In August, CNN hired a new executive vice president and head of global communications, Chris Corati Kelly.

Kelly, Licht and her deputy named Matt Dornick decided as a team to make the story. Several sources tell me Kelly was skeptical about whether it was a good idea, Dornick was happy to do whatever, and Licht really, really wanted to do it.

But you won’t catch Kelly throwing anyone else under the bus. Sources say Dornick feels like he’s going to be blamed for everything and may try to throw anyone else under the bus who seems to be coming for him. (“He’s Hugo from ‘Inheritance,'” says one source.)

Evan Agostini/Invision/AP

So the story was approved.

But this decision did not actually lead to disaster.

Many profiles are written by reporters who are given lengthy interviews. They are usually fine.

The really damaging ones are often the ones where reporters are given deep access over a long period of time. The reason it’s so dangerous is that it just creates a lot more opportunities for something bad to happen that the reporter will have to put into the story.

The most famous example is how Michael Eisner, when he was at the top of Disney, allowed James B. Stewart deep and wide access to the company for such a long period of time that before it ended, Eisner was engaged in a proxy war that would lead until its removal. Stewart’s book The Disney War describes him as an out-of-touch and delusional CEO.

Team Alberta has its own story here. As one media executive told me:

“It was doubly shocking to me that they thought Team Alberta was the best idea for this. The last big piece he did was this masterful takedown of Nikki Haley it continues to define and define her. Like Licht, she gave him plenty of access. Like him (I presume), she began to regret it.”

There’s a universe where CNN could have given Alberta a lot of access in a short period of time, maybe just a day or a week or a month or even two, and his story wouldn’t have had so many damning anecdotes and details.

Which means the real question is: Why the hell did CNN’s communications team give Alberta so many long interviews with so many people over such a long period of time? Couldn’t they have foreseen that bad events were heading for CNN?

Cable news as an industry is basically screwed and getting worse because most old people watch it and they don’t live forever. Also, the news media is currently reeling from a post-pandemic, post-Trump environment where normal people are really happy not to care about current events for the next while.

So how did CNN screw up the weather?

Again, I asked a bunch of people with first-hand knowledge and again got so many different answers that I was reminded of what it’s like to work with professional spinners who spin for their own careers in the background.

Multiple CNN insiders told me they understood the original plan for the story was to run in the fall of 2022 and mostly relate to the launch of Licht’s brainchild, “CNN This Morning.” .

These people say Licht intended his masterstroke to move the highly biased and popular #Resistance Don Lemon from the opinion-focused primetime hours to a lighter morning show setting. The move, and its supposed triumph, was what CNN hoped would be the point of the story.

But then, as things stalled, they say, Alberta was forced to go on a long-planned work leave, and by the time he returned, the morning show was an apparent disaster, and CNN was forced to give him more access for months to come.

Giving him more access only gave the universe more time and opportunity for inevitable disasters, including layoffs at CNN. So, under this version of events, the team continued to give Alberta more time and more access, hoping that he would eventually be able to report a victory for CNN. But that never happened and here we are.

This is a neat narrative and would explain a lot!

Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure this is a story someone out there is telling to cover their ass, and it’s being accepted as the truth or close enough to the truth by a number of other people out there willing to cover that person’s ass, because no no i want to see them fired.

Fair enough! These are just communications people doing their jobs in a company that has many challenges beyond their control. It was actually kind of heartwarming to see sources that could kill each other in such tight ranks and want to protect each other when SOMEONE definitely screwed up.

Anyway, while I was reporting all of this, I saw evidence to show that the folks at CNN and The Atlantic expected all along that the story would break sometime in mid-2023.

Also, a person with direct knowledge of the publication process discussed by multiple people at both CNN and The Atlantic told me that both sides knew from the beginning that this story was originally scheduled to be published in printing in the summer of 2023. The publication schedule only moved up recently, this person says, because the disastrous town hall was such great news.

So if at this point you are like: Okay, but who the hell is to blame for this? I was right there with you after talking to all these people.

But then I remembered that there’s no way in the world a story like this could happen without Licht himself being super stupid about it all. The deep access, the long timeline, everything.

Nothing I’ve heard from sources suggests he wasn’t, and a lot of what’s in the story and what I’ve been told suggests he was. He could stop it at any time by breaking a promise to Alberta and closing access.

Alberta demonstrates exactly how an executive can do this when, in his piece, he tells the story of how, after months of persuasion, he was finally scheduled to have a taped interview with Licht’s boss, WBD CEO David Zaslav. And then, the night before, Zaslav’s personal communicator reached out to say oops, never mind, it’ll be “in the background.” Alberta in turn rejected this offer because she wanted the interview to be recorded or be arrested, and the conversation never took place. Zaslav saved himself from saying something in print that he might regret.

It was a move Licht could have made at any time as well, but he didn’t. This turned out great for the readers! But not so much for the CNN boss himself.