CNN Synergies, McCarthy’s Mandate, & the Oligarch Asset Crash

Happy Wednesday from Puck. You’re reading The Daily Courant, our afternoon guide to all the latest and most provocative journalism on our platform. 

Today, we lead with Dylan Byers‘ fresh reporting from inside CNN, where incoming network boss Chris Licht appears to have won a no-bid contract to implement his hybrid Zaslav-Zucker vision for streaming-era success.

Plus, below the fold, William D. Cohan scrutinizes ex-Spotify, ex-Netflix executive Barry McCarthy‘s plan to turn around Peloton. And Brian Morrissey examines the profound transformation of the digital publishing landscape as individual creators replace institutions.

SPONSORED BY

The Licht Regime Begins at CNN

Chris Licht may share Jeff Zucker’s super-producer past, but his reign over CNN is likely to be quite a bit different—though not in the ways you might assume.

Back in the fall, a New York media executive posed a question to me: Was Jeff Zucker sacrificing the integrity of CNN’s brand, built over decades, in a bid for short-term ratings gains during the hyper-partisan, hair-on-fire, occasionally-democracy-on-fire Trump era? For years, after all, Zucker had positioned CNN as the network de la résistance against Trump and his loyalists in the G.O.P. and at Fox News. He encouraged the likes of Chris Cuomo, Brianna Keilar, and Jim Acosta to speak out vehemently against the president and his party, and ran marketing campaigns that cast CNN as one of the last bastions of truth in a world threatened by lies and misinformation. Economically, it worked. CNN was approaching a billion dollars in annual profit by the end of the Trump years. But it did seem shortsighted, especially as the media industry was reconfiguring itself in the streaming era.

ADVERTISEMENT

Money. Romance. Tragedy. Deception. Hulu’s limited series “The Dropout,” the story of Elizabeth Holmes (Amanda Seyfried) and Theranos, is an unbelievable tale of ambition and fame gone terribly wrong. How did the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire lose it all in the blink of an eye?

Indeed, during that time much of CNN’s traditional, just-the-facts journalism—the kind of journalism that has been on display this week in Ukraine—took a back seat to a sort of self-righteous, grandstanding, chest-thumping opinionation machine that largely blanketed primetime. Arguably, this played right into Trump’s hand, and gave his supporters evidence that the network had the politics and credibility of the Huffington Post.

The executive’s question was rhetorical, of course, and contained the seeds of a thesis…

FOUR STORIES WE’RE TALKING ABOUT