The Atlantic published a lengthy story today offering a behind the scenes view of what has been happening at CNN since Chris Licht took over as CEO, replacing disgraces former CEO Jeff Zucker. If you’ve paid any attention to the media lately you’re probably already aware of some of the issues and controversies CNN has been dealing with, most recently the left-wing backlash over their town hall event with Donald Trump. And before that there was the firing of Don Lemon after several awkward on-air moments.

It turns out that Tim Alberta had been meeting with Chris Licht for a profile while all of this was happening so he got the inside scoop. His piece reads like the downfall of a news company which just can’t manage to get its act together.

When he took the helm of CNN, in May 2022, Licht had promised a reset with Republican voters—and with their leader. He had swaggered into the job, telling his employees that the network had lost its way under former President Jeff Zucker; that their hostile approach to Trump had alienated a broader viewership that craved sober, fact-driven coverage. These assertions thrust Licht into a two-front war: fighting to win back Republicans who had written off the network, while also fighting to win over his own journalists, many of whom believed their new boss was scapegoating them to appease his new boss, David Zaslav, who’d hired Licht with a decree to move CNN toward the ideological center.

One year into the job, Licht was losing both battles. Ratings, in decline since Trump left office, had dropped to new lows. Employee morale was even worse. A feeling of dread saturated the company.

I wrote about CNN’s terrible ratings here. As I pointed out, the decline is mostly the result of a backlash from people on the left who feel that CNN crossed a line with its Trump town hall. The Atlantic story highlights some of that backlash.

“Does CNN count that as an in-kind campaign donation?” the longtime broadcaster Dan Rather tweeted.

Rather’s comment was gentle compared with the torrent of criticism aimed at CNN. “Ready to call it: This was a terrible idea,” the conservative writer Ramesh Ponnuru tweeted, just nine minutes into the event. “CNN should be ashamed of themselves,” tweeted Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “This is an absolute joke,” tweeted former Republican Representative Adam Kinzinger…

When Licht found me in the lobby, commenting on how not boring the night had been, it wasn’t clear how much of the blowback he’d already seen. What was clear was that Licht knew this was bad—very, very bad. Republicans were angry at CNN. Democrats were angry at CNN. Journalists were angry at CNN.

But even before the town hall with Trump, Licht had been struggling with a problem of his own making. Instead of firing Don Lemon, he had made him the centerpiece of a revived morning show which he seemed to want to compete with the big network morning shows, i.e. Good Morning American and Today. Instead of a light-hearted show buoyed by the chemistry between his three co-hosts, what he got was a mess.

Licht frowned and folded his arms, irritation curdling his voice.

“I’m going to tell Don, the biggest mistake is commenting after every single story for the sake of commenting after every single story,” he said, talking to no one and everyone all at once. “Don’t tell me, ‘Oh, that’s horrible.’ We know it’s horrible. If you’ve got a specific insight into something, if you can add something, tell us. But don’t comment on every single fucking story.”…

In the middle of February, several weeks before I joined Licht for his morning workout, Lemon set social media ablaze—and infuriated Harlow and Collins, his co-hosts—by asserting that 51-year-old Nikki Haley “isn’t in her prime.” A woman is only in her prime, Lemon explained, “in her 20s, 30s, and maybe her 40s.” This was just the latest in a string of offenses. For months, Lemon had been making the control room cringe with half-baked opinions, irritating Harlow and Collins by forcing his way into every segment, and angering Licht by adding the sort of superfluous commentary the boss had explicitly warned against. Tensions were already high when, one day in December, Collins started to interrupt Lemon during a news report. Lemon continued speaking and held up a finger to shush her—“stand by, one second,” he said—and then, after the segment, berated her in front of the crew. Their relationship would never recover. By the time Lemon made the “prime” remark, Licht was confronting the reality that his morning show might be a bust.

There was no neat solution to the Lemon problem. Top executives urged Licht to fire him; Licht, knowing it would be seen as a response to the Haley episode, worried about setting a harsh precedent. Lemon pitched an attempt at damage control—a prime-time special on misogyny, which he would host with a roundtable of women—and Licht rejected it. Then, a staffer close to Licht told me, Lemon began telling allies that Al Sharpton, Ben Crump, and other Black leaders would rally to his defense if he were fired, making his dismissal a referendum on CNN’s whiteness. (A spokesperson for Lemon denied this and accused Licht’s team of spreading rumors about him to distract from Licht’s failures at CNN.)

Of course we all know how this turned out. There is a neat solution to the Lemon problem. You fire him.

As the story drags on it becomes clear that Licht might be genuinely interested in helping CNN move toward the center but his own newsroom and readers of this profile probably won’t allow him to do it. There are certain things you’re just not supposed to say and Licht hasn’t been adept at self-censoring.

Licht insisted that his media critiques were not ideological; that he was rebuking not a liberal slant on the news, per se, but rather a bias toward elite cultural sensibility, a reporting covenant in which affluent urban-dwelling journalists avoid speaking hard truths that would alienate members of their tribe…

Licht argued that the media’s blind spots owe to a lack of diversity—and not the lack of diversity that he sees newsrooms obsessing over. He wants to recruit reporters who are deeply religious and reporters who grew up on food stamps and reporters who own guns. Licht recalled a recent dustup with his own diversity, equity, and inclusion staff after making some spicy remarks at a conference. “I said, ‘A Black person, a brown person, and an Asian woman that all graduated the same year from Harvard is not diversity,’” he told me.

A minute later—after noting how sharing that anecdote could get him in trouble, and pausing to consider what he would say next—Licht added: “I think ‘Defund the police’ would’ve been covered differently if newsrooms were filled with people who had lived in public housing.” I asked him why. “They have a different relationship with their need with the police,” he said.

Licht is absolutely right about all of this. There is very little diversity of thought in the mainstream media. There have been surveys done over the years and I’d be willing to bet CNN is no exception. Probably 85% of their reporters are progressives. That doesn’t give the newsroom a very diverse viewpoint on major issues like defund the police.

It’s an interesting profile which suggests Chris Licht really is a different person from Jeff Zucker. Zucker built a brand on Trump and resistance journalism. Licht is trying to change that but the truth is that both the people who work there and the people who watch CNN liked the old brand and many of them are still fighting for it.