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For one of the first times since his high-profile exit, former CNN CEO Chris Licht is reflecting on what led to his ouster from the cable news giant.
Licht sat down for an interview with ESPN host Stephen A. Smith at the New York Press Club over the weekend and shared some of his insights into why he wasn’t a fit for the network.
He was fired by Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav last year amid tumbling ratings and internal turmoil after an expose in The Atlantic by Tim Alberta called into question whether he was still capable of leading the brand.
Licht was tasked with returning CNN to its strictly newsgathering roots and reinvigorating trust in the brand. He says the trust aspect was something he failed it inside the company’s offices.
“When you try to change something dramatically, you can’t do it alone. You’ve got to build the trust of the organization. They have to believe in you. And I did not build that trust,” Licht said. “I was not able to — in the time that I was there — build trust so that people would tune out the noise and sort of follow me into that.”
Chris Licht later added that “there’s a fine line between confidence and arrogance” and that he was “sometimes on the wrong side of that.”
One of the decisions Licht made that caused internal strife was a town hall event with Donald Trump — hosted by Kaitlan Collins — that led employees to pushback against the direction the network was taking. He told Stephen A. Smith that, despite the strong reactions, he believes it was still the correct decision.
