Earlier this week, a report claimed CNN was considering former New York Times CEO Mark Thompson as one of its top choices to replace departed President and CEO Chris Licht. 1210 WPHT’s Nick Kayal wonders why he would even be a candidate.
During Friday’s episode of Kayal & Company, the Philadelphia host questioned CNN’s motives for hiring Thompson, who previously oversaw British television outlets like the BBC and Channel 4.
“When you’re struggling, I don’t know that you want to go and pilfer away people or former people that worked at another struggling entity. It seems like if the Titanic is going down, you don’t want to put more weight on top of the ship,” Kayal said of Thompson and his tenure at The New York Times.
“We know CNN has been on the struggle bus for a couple of years now,” continued Nick Kayal,”But I find this interesting because The New York Times has been losing subscribers and subscriptions and readers for many many years now. We know they are super super left. And the market for that continues to shrink by the day.
“So if you’re CNN, and you’re trying to reestablish yourself and recreate an identity or go back to the quote, glory days, I don’t know that you want to go to a guy from The New York Times who was with the company up until 2020.”
According to a report from Semafor, Thompson is viewed as a leading candidate by Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav due to his experience as a television “turnaround artist” for his work in British television.
