The most vocal critic of Chris Licht and the “new” CNN — Keith Olbermann — is taking his victory lap Thursday.
During Countdown with Keith Olbermann, the former cable news host — who has frequently shared he believed Licht “ate paste” while the pair worked together at MSNBC — nearly took a somber tone in discussing Licht’s removal as the CEO of CNN.
Olbermann claimed that Licht was “doomed from the beginning” because he was “chasing a white whale” — being a cable news channel directed at the political center of the country, while maintaining strong ratings — at the direction of Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav.
“There is no middle in American cable news. And the pursuit of that middle was doomed from the beginning and it could not have been successful under some other kind of Chris Licht from a different dimension who wasn’t a schmuck and didn’t know what he was doing. One can argue that the premise of going to the middle with people who think Bret Baier of Fox was the middle was a cover story for throwing CNN hard right. And I think that’s true, but it’s not really central to the key point. There is no middle. There’s no real middle in cable television news and there is no pretend middle. Nobody wants to watch that.”
The former cable news host then used a fledgling cable network as his example that there simply isn’t a mass audience for “down-the-middle” cable news coverage.”
“Ask the folks at NewsNation — formerly WGN America — which claims ‘unbiased U.S. news’ as its pretext, and which has been on the air for more than two years now with a lineup I have previously described as the Nick at Night of cable news. Chris Cuomo? Ashley Banfield? Dan Abrams? Elizabeth Vargas? And occasionally Bill O’Reilly?
“The audience for a given half-hour or hour on NewsNation is smaller than the audience for the podcast you’re listening to right now. And thank you for your confidence in me and don’t get me wrong, but if a TV news network cannot outdraw me, on a podcast, there’s something wrong with the premise.”
