Earlier this week, I reported that Chris Licht, the beleaguered chairman and C.E.O. of CNN, has been pitching a number of on-air talents from the worlds of news, entertainment, sports and comedy about hosting weekly, news-oriented prime time shows on his network—a move that might ostensibly reverse his fortunes, and those of CNN, after an early tenure beset by layoffs, budget cuts, ratings declines, failed programming experiments, sapped morale and bad press. Licht’s plan, I’ve been told, is to thread together a rotating lineup of star-helmed shows, interspersed with regular programming and some big special events, into a programming patchwork that eschews the traditional one-host, five-nights-a-week strategy for something more akin to broadcast entertainment: one lineup on Mondays, another on Tuesdays, and so on.
It sounds risky, but at this point every risk may be worth taking. Furthermore, risks are required and preferable in an industry where the status quo has been fundamentally broken for the better part of a decade, despite the warm bath of the Trump boom. CNN’s viewership has been at record lows since Licht took over, a fact that was driven home this week after the network came in last behind Fox, MSNBC, and the big three broadcast networks for coverage of Biden’s State of the Union address.
But, of course, Licht can’t be reckless. Sure, the entire linear television industry is in inexorable decline, but there’s still a brand to uphold, and hundreds of millions of dollars to be gained by simply increasing ratings by, say, a couple hundred thousand more viewers in the demo—a masterstroke of the Zucker era, when CNN made $1.2 billion in profits. As I reported on Wednesday, CNN is targeting about $900 million in profits this year, up from $750 million in 2022, the year of the rapid CNN+ concoction and subsequent unwinding. Without improving ratings, there are only so many other levers to pull—and the most obvious, of course, is more budget cuts and layoffs. Licht, a super programmer, presumably knows that ratings won’t be the answer to all of the network’s challenges, but it’s a necessary endeavor regardless, especially after a year of basically putting prime time out to pasture.
