Chris Licht, the chairman and CEO of CNN, has left the media organization with immediate effect, CNN’s parent company Warner Bros. Discovery said on June 7th.
According to Warner Bros., an interim leadership team was put in place, consisting of David Leavy, chief operating officer on the business side, Amy Entelis, EVP of talent and content development, Virginia Moseley, EVP of editorial, Eric Sherling, EVP of US programming, and Eric Sherling, EVP of editorial.
Licht had only been working at the company for 13 months when he was fired.
The action was taken little than a week after a negative article about Licht appeared in the Atlantic magazine.
Licht came under fire for CNN’s decision to air a town hall with former Republican President Donald Trump on May 10. During the event, Trump repeated lies about his loss in the 2020 election, declared that if elected, he would pardon many of his supporters who had been convicted of taking part in an attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and referred to CNN moderator Kaitlan Collins as a “nasty person.”
Despite the company’s efforts to attract more Republican viewers, CNN’s ratings have been declining over the last few years.
Warner Bros. Discovery President and Chief Executive David Zaslav informed the workforce in an email on Wednesday that the business would be launching a thorough internal and external search for a new leader.
“This job was never going to be easy, especially at a time of great disruption and transformation, and Chris poured his heart and soul into it,” Zaslav said.
“Unfortunately, things did not turn out as we had hoped, and ultimately that’s on me,” he continued.
