The Licht Show & WaPo Politics

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Welcome back to In the Room, my biweekly private email centered on the inner workings of the media industry. Tonight, news on the fallout at CNN from Chris Licht’s pre-layoffs mea culpa tour. Plus updates on emerging executive tensions and faultlines inside the Washington Post.

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The Licht Show & WaPo Politics

The latest news on Chris Licht’s attempts at CNN transformation, and the biggest story inside The Washington Post.

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“The last thing I want to be is another gut punch,” Chris Licht, the chairman and C.E.O. of CNN, said in a town hall address to his staff this week, “and I know what I’m doing right now is another gut punch.” Thus began Licht’s mea culpa for the latest drama at CNN. When he first arrived at the network, earlier this year, he quixotically signaled that he would not implement layoffs at CNN despite a number of countermanding inexorable forces—a worsening economy, the decline of linear, and the $50+ billion debt load strapped to the ankle of his boss, the heralded Warner Bros. Discovery C.E.O. David Zaslav. Alas, Licht has since learned a lesson from the Jack Welch school of management: don’t promise what you can’t deliver. As I have reported...

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