CNN is facing pressure to boost its fortunes ahead of the US election in 2024

Whenever questions have arisen about CNN’s declining ratings over the past year, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav has urged patience. Just last month, he endorsed the work Chris Licht, chosen to lead CNN, is doing to revitalize the news network.

But when Zaslav last week installed David Levy, a longtime confidant at CNN, as chief operating officer, it was seen as a sign that his patience may be coming to an end, current and former employees said. A former senior employee said, “They are now down in ratings, down in financial performance, down in employee morale and they are down in public perception.” “This is clearly not the right business strategy.”

CNN’s position became even more urgent shortly after Levy’s appointment was announced, when a damning profile of Leach was published by The Atlantic magazine. The 15,000-word article published Friday depicts Licht as stretched thin, isolated and struggling to find a strategy to reverse the network’s sharp ratings decline. It went like a bombshell in the American media world.

Although he was not scheduled to start his new role for another two weeks, Levy worked the phone through the weekend, calling and reassuring CNN reporters. “It’s interesting that Levy is reaching out to a lot of talent directly,” a veteran CNN staffer said over the weekend. Confidence in Licht, this person added, was “completely absent” within the newsroom.

Licht apologized to CNN employees on Monday morning, vowing to “fight like hell” to regain the employees’ trust, which had eroded before the article was published. Only weeks earlier, CNN hosted a controversial town hall meeting with Donald Trump, who insulted the network’s moderator to applause from an audience packed with supporters of the former president. CNN reporters were furious, but Licht defended the decision, saying that “America has benefited greatly from what we did”.

Licht’s comments were in line with Zaslav’s goal of turning the cable news pioneer into a less “activist” network than in the Trump years, a stance also advocated by cable billionaire and Discovery board member John Malone.

But Malone’s criticism of CNN’s journalism—he said in a 2021 CNBC interview that it would be “unique and refreshing” if the network “actually had journalists”—is lodged in the minds of many of the network’s journalists.

Into this heated environment stepped Levy, who was working at Discovery when Zaslav became chief executive in 2006. The two have been close allies for the past 17 years, with Levy serving as a confidant through last year’s $44bn merger of Discovery and Warner Bros.

In the early 1990s, Levy served as personal assistant to Dee Dee Myers, press secretary to former President Bill Clinton. He later earned his stripes as a communications officer during the conflict in Kosovo and joined Discovery in 2000.

His brief assignment now is to run the commercial, operational and promotional activities of CNN Worldwide, leaving Licht to manage the network. Levy will report to Licht under the new structure, although Levy will remain on Zaslav’s leadership team.

Licht, who earned a reputation as a strong programmer on MSNBC and Stephen Colbert late Show, CNN has at times struggled in its efforts to reshape it. He moved Don Lemon, a presenter who had been an open critic of Trump, from an evening slot to a newly configured morning show; Lemon was fired in April.

According to Nielsen, CNN’s ratings have been on a troubling downward trend, reaching an average of only 535,000 primetime viewers in the first quarter. This contrasts with CNN’s annual average of 1.7mn viewers in the 2020 election year – a figure that fell to 687,000 in primetime last year, compared with 2.2mn for Fox and 1.1mn for MSNBC. It occasionally slips to fourth place behind Newsmax, a right-wing cable channel.

Licht is now planning to move Trump town hall moderator Kaitlan Collins from the morning show to the 9 p.m. slot, which has already been a problem since his arrival. If it works, it could boost the viewership of CNN’s ill-fated evening.

Media analyst Claire Anders said the new COO’s parachuting in was a “clear sign” of further cost-cutting coming to the broadcaster.

“CNN has a global scale in news, as does the BBC, but thankfully has a business model connected, even if it didn’t once. Warner Bros. Discovery, however, is underwhelming everywhere due to rising debt costs.” Cutting costs. Unfortunately, the cost of covering news is rising, especially as conflicts escalate.

Insiders say next year’s US presidential election is an opportunity to claw back the audience, but they acknowledge that Licht and Levy will need to get operation humming soon if it’s going to turn a profit.

“There is pressure from above to shut it down,” said one official. “Elections are a chance to pull back the audience. We have to shut it down and tidy it up before the elections.

Additional reporting by Daniel Thomas