Can Licht Make the Cuts?

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Good evening, I’m Dylan Byers.

Welcome back to In The Room, my biweekly private email on the inner workings of the American media industry. In today’s edition, exclusive reporting on the immense scale and likely casualties of the cuts that Chris Licht has initiated at CNN following David Zaslav’s order to pare $100 million from the network’s budget.

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Can Licht Make the Cuts?

A brutal $100 million financial engineering effort begins at CNN.

DYLAN BYERS

When Chris Licht became chairman and chief executive of CNN, back in May, his boss David Zaslav asked him to conduct a six-month review of the 4,500-person global news business. During the early months of that review, Licht would repeatedly tell members of his staff that the broad cost-cutting effort that was taking place across Warner Bros. Discovery would not result in layoffs at CNN. The parent company had more than $50 billion in debt, of course, and Zaz had promised to identify at least $3 billion in cost-cutting synergies across his new media empire, but Licht repeatedly assured staff that CNN would be spared: “As it relates to CNN, there are no layoffs per se,” Licht said at one staff-wide event...

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