Several of them indicated an early miscue from on high that reproduced early skepticism — and undercut Mr. Licht — with the CNN staff prior to the merger of Discovery and WarnerMedia, CNN’s business parent, was even total.
In an interview on CNBC in November 2021, a popular Warner Bros. Discovery board member, the cable television leader John Malone, appeared to denigrate CNN and appreciation Fox News while discussing his own expect CNN under the brand-new business structure.
“Fox News, in my opinion, has followed an interesting trajectory of trying to have news news, I mean some actual journalism, embedded in a program schedule of all opinions,” Mr. Malone said. “I would like to see CNN evolve back to the kind of journalism that it started with, and actually have journalists, which would be unique and refreshing.”
It was taken as a small to what was, in reality, a news organization teeming with prominent reporters. Many of them revered Mr. Zucker, who was displaced in February 2022 after stopping working to report a romantic office relationship.
“His suggestion that CNN’s thousands of journalists were not real was deeply insulting,” said Brian Stelter, the network’s previous leading media reporter and a previous press reporter at The New York Times. (Under Mr. Zucker, Mr. Stelter had actually become the personification of the network’s often combative defense versus “fake news” attacks that Mr. Trump waged versus the network, and a routine target of conservative criticism. He would turn into one of the very first prominent anchors Mr. Licht cut.) “I think the takeaway for many CNN staffers was that Malone wanted CNN to be more like Fox.”
Mr. Stelter preserves that the network was already recalibrating for the post-Trump period when Mr. Zaslav took control of. Many team member concurred with Mr. Licht on the basic idea that the network ought to play it directly, and he and others saw the brand-new management as “punching at a straw man.”
For circumstances, something Mr. Zaslav and Mr. Licht explained was that they wished to reverse Republican resistance to appearing on CNN. “Republicans are back on the air,” Mr. Zaslav stated at a media conference in May. “Republicans weren’t on the air.”