avalon
Antwan Scott
- Joined
- Mar 29, 2011
- Messages
- 18,724
- Reaction score
- 1,361
Long, but good read:
Inside the Meltdown at CNN
CEO Chris Licht felt he was on a mission to restore the network’s reputation for serious journalism. How did it all go wrong?
I asked Licht to explain that mission to me, as plainly as possible.
“Journalism. Being trusted. Everyone has an agenda, trying to shape events or shape thought. There has to be a source of absolute truth,” he told me. “There’s good actors, there’s bad actors, there’s a lot of shit in the world. There has to be something that you’re able to look at and go, ‘They have no agenda other than the truth.’”
Given the very public calls from senior leadership to pivot right, and the open attempts to court Republicans, this just reads like he's trying to copy Fox's old "fair and balanced" tagline.
But I think the thing that makes this piece art is this spin:
It didn’t make sense. Matt Dornic offered to translate. Dornic, who was accompanying us in his capacity as CNN’s senior vice president of communications—and, I would learn, as a mainstay of Licht’s small entourage—explained that what upsets the new boss isn’t harsh coverage of him personally, but rather bad press about CNN’s journalists.
Followed throughout the story with stories of Licht focused on his phone reading articles critical of him.