Former CNN boss Chris Licht took a swipe at the "hyperbole" from the legacy media leading up to last week's historic victory of President-elect Donald Trump.
Speaking at the Yahoo Finance Invest conference Tuesday, Licht was asked how the media can regain trust as the country embraces a second Trump administration.
His advice to his media colleagues: "Swing at the pitches that are thrown."
"To completely butcher a Chris Rock phrase, if someone kills eight people, don't say they killed nine," Licht said. "[Trump's] going to do enough things that really require scrutiny and sounding the alarm bells. Don't say, 'Well, this means this, and that means that's going to happen.' Say he did this, and then let's discuss what that means. Not, ‘Well this is going to mean this’ because a lot of times the media gets in trouble when they predict things."
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Licht, who was ousted as CNN's chairman and CEO in June 2023 after barely over a year on the job, pointed to the "hyperbole" he had seen as a media observer regarding what a second Trump presidency would bring.
"'It's the end of democracy.' Well, if it's not, if four years from now it's not, then we have a problem with credibility," Licht said. "So instead, 'He's appointed this person, this is this person's track record,' not 'that means he's going to do this,' right?"
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"There will be enough to discuss. There will be enough things that are going to be controversial. But he and his people know exactly what they're doing when they try to gin up what one of my former colleagues called outrage porn. If everything is an 11, and everything is outrageous, then you're able to kind of slip through some things that actually should create that outrage," he added.
Licht was handpicked by Warner Bros. Discovery chief David Zaslav in 2022 to help revive CNN's viewership and restore its journalistic credibility after the network spent years building a reputation for being an anti-Trump news organization under predecessor Jeff Zucker.
CNN's rank-and-file resisted Licht's efforts to remove the spectacle from its coverage. Among his major moves were dismissing prominent liberal on-air figures, including Brian Stelter, Don Lemon and Jeffrey Toobin.
However, Licht had completely lost the trust of CNN staff after the network hosted the now-infamous Trump town hall in May 2023, which sparked unprecedented fury from within the newsroom. Licht was fired by Zaslav weeks later.
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Fast-forward to November 2024 as financial woes and dismal viewership continue to plague the network. Many of Licht's decisions were reversed – Stelter was rehired as a media analyst, and Toobin and Lemon have made multiple appearances as guests – and CNN's anti-Trump coverage came back in a roaring fashion through Election Day.
CNN's current honcho Mark Thompson is now tasked with stopping the bleeding of its dwindling audience and its bottom line. CNN staffers have told Fox News Digital they're "deeply frustrated" as significant budget cuts and layoffs are likely to rock the network in the coming months.
