Chris Licht Was Tasked with Bringing Viewers Back to CNN. And Then It Lost Way More

Chris Licht maybe never stood a chance at CNN, but he sure didn’t do himself any favors either.

Licht was handpicked by Warner Bros. Discovery President & CEO David Zaslav to turn CNN around. Together, they immediately cut bait on the CNN+ disaster — a good call — and set about returning the linear cable news channel to its former glory. Focusing on breaking news, not playing politics, and reporting the facts down the middle was supposed to fix the problem of poor TV ratings. It decidedly did not accomplish that, and Licht was unceremoniously fired on Wednesday, just 13 months into the very-unfinished job.

To be fair to Licht, he inherited a loser. Pre-Licht, CNN was averaging 753,000 primetime (8 p.m. to 11 p.m.) viewers of any age, according to 4/26/21-1/30/22 (a year before Licht’s start to the end of Jeff Zucker’s tenure) Nielsen data made available to IndieWire; 171,000 of them came from the key 25-54 demographic, which is the favored age range for advertisers on news programming. That was already far worse overall than chief competitor MSNBC (1.255 million total viewers), though CNN was 14,000 viewers ahead in the demo. That’s the only metric by which CNN, still hanging on to that one slight edge over MSNBC for dear life, is not in last place among the Big 3 cable news channels.

Under Licht (4/25/22-6/05/23), CNN fell to 628,000 primetime viewers (-16.6 percent); of that average, 139,000 (-18.7 percent) people tuning in were between 25 and 54.

Over the same time period, MSNBC declined just 4.8 percent overall; its key-demo audience dropped hard, however, by 21 percent. That means MSNBC lost some viewers on a net basis, but to a larger degree its (relatively) young audience was replaced by (relatively) older viewers. Fox has a similar story — and the first-place podium.

This whole time, the conservative Fox News Channel has just been in a whole ‘nother stratosphere than its liberal counterparts. B.L., “before Licht,” Fox News averaged 2.310 million primetime viewers, more than 3x CNN.

Like MSNBC (and this is probably the only thing Fox and MSNBC have in common), Fox’s primetime audience declined single digits (-9 percent) over the past year or so, but its demo drop was significant (-24.5 percent). Hey, everybody gets old. Or at least, the young viewers go to digital.

It’s not just a primetime-ratings problem CNN has struggled with: those general 1, 2, 3 standings above remain the same when taking all 24 hours of a given day’s programming into consideration. In summation, 24/7, CNN was losing — and the losses only got worse under Licht.

Of course, it wasn’t only the Nielsen numbers that sunk the short-lived regime. There was also a parade’s worth of missteps in his 13-month tenure. A few: the morning show debacle, what many considered to be the mishandling of Don Lemon’s firing, and the disastrous Donald Trump town hall.

Last week’s all-access Licht profile in The Atlantic appears to have been the nail in the coffin, though the handwriting had been on the wall for a while. In permanent marker.