The profile of CNN CEO Chris Licht from The Atlantic continues to reverberate around the news media world, but SiriusXM host Megyn Kelly questions why Licht is the one taking all of the blame for CNN’s struggles.
During The Megyn Kelly Show Tuesday, the former Fox News host said she believes former CNN head Jeff Zucker is responsible for where the network currently finds itself, and took issue with comments he made to The New York Times.
“Jeff Zucker is…clearly trying to say ‘Chris Licht sucks and that all the CNNers are calling me saying how bad he is’. But Jeff Zucker is the one who ruined CNN,” Kelly said. “Chris Licht isn’t the one who ruined it, he’s just the one that’s struggling to fix it again.”
She then argued that while Licht isn’t responsible for the recent downturn in CNN’s ratings, the mission he has been put on by Warner Bros. Discovery head David Zaslav to return the network to its strictly news-gathering roots is a difficult one because Americans haven’t forgotten the shift CNN took during the Trump presidency.
“What Chris Licht is trying to do is take a bunch of avowed leftists, and make them fair and balanced reporters now, and stop them from being themselves,” Kelly argued. “He’s trying to undo the programming that Jeff Zucker let loose before realizing that all he had left was a bunch of wannabe MSNBC anchors and now those horses have left the barn.
“And now Chris Licht is trying to shove those horses back in the barn and fool the American people that they never left the barn and that they’re totally fair and balanced and you should trust them because now they’re going to say the right things. None of it works. It’s a recipe for disaster, and the ratings are showing it.”