When he took the helm of CNN, in May 2022, Licht had promised a reset with Republican voters-and with their leader. Licht had known the risks inherent to this occasion: Trump had spent the past six years insulting and threatening CNN, singling out the network and its journalists as “fake news” and “the enemy of the people,” rhetoric that had led to death threats, blacklists, and ultimately a severing of diplomatic ties between Trump and CNN leadership.īut that had been under the old regime. Licht, the 51-year-old chair and CEO of CNN Worldwide, had spent the past hour and a half inside a trailer behind the building, a control room on wheels from which he’d orchestrated a CNN town hall with Trump. We were standing in the lobby of the Dana Center, on the campus of Saint Anselm College. “Well,” Licht said, “ that wasn’t boring!” Normally brash and self-assured, Licht was pale, his shoulders slumped. S even months later, in Manchester, New Hampshire, I came across Licht wearing the expression of a man who had just survived a car wreck. We know that we’re getting played, so we’re gonna resist it.” “I think they know that he’s playing them-at least, the people in my organization. “The media has absolutely, I believe, learned its lesson,” Licht said. Now, just a few months into his job running one of the world’s preeminent news organizations, he claimed to have a “simple” answer to the question that might very well come to define his legacy. Until recently Licht had been producing a successful late-night comedy show. This was the first of many on-the-record interviews that Licht had agreed to give me, and I wanted to know how CNN’s new leader planned to deal with another Donald Trump candidacy. “H ow are we gonna cover Trump? That’s not something I stay up at night thinking about,” Chris Licht told me.
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