8/3/2023 0 Comments Trending news today cnnCNN will always stand up for democracy and call out lies, regardless of their origin.” CNN declined to comment on specific employment matters.Ī senior CNN staffer familiar with Licht’s thinking told me the CEO “really likes Stelter as a person,” but he “didn’t like the show” they guessed that Licht “didn’t love Harwood as a reporter.” The senior staffer suggested that if a few on-air personalities, like Stelter and Harwood, “were the only reasons people were tuning in to CNN, then the rest of the 4,497 of us should just pack up and go home.” “We will continue to focus on trust and tone while engaging a diverse set of perspectives on stories that matter to our audiences. We make decisions to support our core strength and mission-objective journalism, presented in a fair and compelling way,” a CNN spokesperson said in a statement to Vanity Fair. “This is not about any individual, a shift from left to right, or a pursuit of centrism. What is missing since Jeff’s absence is a singular, central voice telling us what to do every day.” In the meantime, they said, people are trying to “read into the mandate and act accordingly,” but “nobody really knows what that is.” It feels like everyone’s trying to read tea leaves and figure out what’s going on. ![]() “It just feels a little chaotic right now. “You have this external narrative happening, and there’s no public pushback against it,” a CNN staffer told me. That feeling was echoed by others inside the network. I don’t think it’s as simple as he’s a liberal, so let’s cut back on liberals.” Rather than believing a, quote, unquote, “purge” is the problem, this producer sees the issue being the lack of communication coming from the top, which has left staffers to speculate. The producer continued: “The White House unit is obviously the most visible and most high-pressure unit in the place, so it’s hard to know what the dynamics are. “The purge of two?” one CNN producer scoffed when I reached out this week. Some CNN staffers have bristled at such ominous language. Trump, perhaps sensing an opportunity, posted Sunday on Truth Social that “if ‘low ratings’ CNN ever went Conservative, they would be an absolute gold mine, and I would help them to do so.” He recently embarked on a “Capitol Hill diplomacy tour,” as Axios put it, meeting with both Democrats and Republicans, including House leader Kevin McCarthy, one of the 147 members of Congress who last year voted to overturn the presidential election results. Licht reportedly wants CNN to turn down the decibel levels from the Jeff Zucker years and focus on straight news. And calls to “boycott CNN” flooded social media after Harwood’s exit, with Dan Pfeiffer, a former Obama adviser and a Pod Save America cohost, jumping off the news Wednesday to argue that “corporate media won’t save democracy.” ![]() Stelter has reportedly told people that he was made a sacrificial lamb to signal to the right that the network was changing course. ![]() Nevertheless, the high-profile departure came on the heels of new CNN chief Chris Licht firing Brian Stelter, who literally wrote the book on Donald Trump and Fox News’ “dangerous distortion of truth,” and axing Reliable Sources, a media-criticism show that was also the longest-running program on the network. Harwood’s exit was not tied directly to what he said on Friday-I’m told he was informed weeks earlier that the network wanted to go in a different direction. ![]() Many, many Republicans are rallying behind his lies about the 2020 election.”Ī couple hours later, Harwood announced he was leaving the network, a move interpreted by many as more evidence that CNN was shifting away from aggressively calling out the GOP and right-wing media for undermining democracy and instead moving into what could be perceived as politically neutral territory. The Republican Party right now is led by a dishonest demagogue. “But that’s not what we’re talking about. “We’re brought up to believe there’s two different political parties with different points of view, and we don’t take sides in honest disagreements between them,” Harwood said. On Friday morning, John Harwood, a veteran White House correspondent who spent decades reporting for top outlets like The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and CNBC before joining CNN at the beginning of 2020, told viewers that President Joe Biden was right to call out the MAGA-fied Republican Party’s threat to democracy-and explained why journalists might be uncomfortable admitting it.
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