On a Saturday morning last October, then-CNN C.E.O. Chris Licht was celebrating his 51st birthday when he received a call from Gunnar Wiedenfels. Gunnar, the chief financial officer at Warner Bros. Discovery, was leading David Zaslav’s $3 billion post-merger cost-cutting effort, and had already earned a reputation as Zaz’s “hatchet man” for scrapping film projects, shelving HBO Max shows, and implementing mass layoffs. Wall Street analysts loved him for it; the creative community, less so.
CNN was initially thought to be immune from that effort—the early death of CNN+ notwithstanding. When Licht took the job, Zaz and Gunnar asked him to conduct a six-month review of the business, but also gave assurances that his journalists would be spared the ax. “As it relates to CNN, there are no layoffs per se,” Licht had told staff in June. “A layoff is a downsizing, where you are given a target, and that is not happening at CNN.”
