Even while the United States suffers under the Biden administration’s mismanagement, a rebellious quip is becoming truer all the time: “Get woke, go broke.” Former President Donald Trump even coined his own more scatological version of the gibe.
Now the network stars of CNN, one of the establishment media’s citadels of wokeness, might be facing consequences for their reckless partisan agendas.
Chris Licht, the network’s new president, is reviewing the performance of notable personalities at the news channel to see if they are too tainted by ideology to act as journalists, Axios reported on Tuesday.
Ultimately, their jobs are on the line.
“If talent cannot adjust to a less partisan tone and strategy, they could be ousted, three sources familiar with the matter tell Axios,” the outlet reported.
Licht is said to want less of the propaganda and theatrics for which CNN is known and more “traditional journalism.”
He took over at CNN last month and immediately started making changes at the network, according to The New York Times.
“CNN’s ubiquitous ‘Breaking News’ banner is gone, now reserved for instances of truly urgent events,” the outlet reported Sunday. “Snarky on-screen captions — ‘Angry Trump Turns Briefing Into Propaganda Session,’ for instance — are discouraged. Political shows are trying to book more conservative voices, and producers have been urged to ignore Twitter backlash from the far right and the far left.
“A month into his tenure as the new leader of CNN, Chris Licht is starting to leave his mark on the 24-hour news network.”
Would you watch CNN if it replaced its left-wing hosts and embraced traditional journalism?
Licht replaced Jeff Zucker, who resigned in February. The official story was Zucker stepped down because of a covert relationship with a female CNN executive, Allison Gollust.
However, many factors probably contributed to Zucker’s downfall. CNN was a troubled operation for years.
In December 2021, network host Chris Cuomo was fired. The early version of that story was Cuomo gave inappropriate assistance to his brother, disgraced former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. It was later reported Chris Cuomo was accused of sexual assault.
Also in 2021, two CNN producers were implicated in crimes against children, as reported by Fox News.
Network host Don Lemon was embroiled in a lawsuit alleging he had sexually assaulted a bartender in 2018. That suit was dropped in May after the supposed victim recanted his story.
Another host, Brian Stelter, was publicly lambasted for CNN’s bias at a college event. On his popular YouTube channel, actor Russell Brand mocked Stelter’s overwrought presentation style.
The rollout of pay service CNN+ was a disaster. It crashed and burned in a matter of weeks.
Despite its outsized reputation in the establishment media, the network struggles in viewership. In figures from May, Fox News dominated news channel ratings, with MSNBC a distant second. CNN was a humiliating third.
Licht has his work cut out for him.
Scott Faulkner, the director of personnel for Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign, once said, “Personnel is policy.”
Licht’s decision to potentially remove poorly performing partisans could make a difference.
It’s hard to imagine how unhinged left-wing hacks such as Lemon, Stetler and Jim Acosta could ever be considered objective reporters based on the reputations they’ve earned.
If CNN is to survive as a network, it likely needs to do so without many of its current hosts.
