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Does anyone know where to read the Atlantic article on CNN's Chris Licht for free?
I am not into signing up for "free trials" that somehow slip into being not-free and not-trial.
Thanks
19 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
didn’t finish. I got a warning as I read stating it was my last free article so I copied and pasted the rest of the article to my notebook for later reading. A few excerpts follow. But to summarize: Licht is basically a Republican puppet under CNNs David Zaslav. Licht doesn’t admit he’s a Republican but it’s apparent. He throws around the word truth a lot but in the context having “conversations” with both sides mostly about truths of right wing talking points. 
These snippets were pretty hard to extract to make sense of it. But here goes …
I asked Licht to explain that mission to me, as plainly as possible. “Journalism. Being trusted. Everyone has an agenda, trying to shape events or shape thought. There has to be a source of absolute truth,” he told me. “There’s good actors, there’s bad actors, there’s a lot of shit in the world. There has to be something that you’re able to look at and go, ‘They have no agenda other than the truth.’” I told him that some journalists, myself included, believe that truth itself needs to be advocated for. “No one is suggesting in any way that we shy away from the truth,” he replied. “Do you believe in absolute truth?” I asked. “That’s a weird question,” he said, rumpling his brow. It wasn’t that weird. He had used the phrase in one of our prior interviews, but, it seemed, hadn’t given much thought to its usage in the context of modern media. “Absolute truth. Hmmm,” he said, stroking his chin. Finally, he shrugged. “It’s that analogy again, right? Some people like rain; some people don’t like rain. You can’t tell me it’s not raining [when] it’s raining.” He leaned across the table. “Your beliefs can be different, but there’s only one truth,” he said. “And we have to be able to ask questions and have conversations that help people understand what’s happening … We have completely lost the ability to have difficult conversations without being demonized or labeled. It’s okay to ask questions, to have difficult conversations. You can strongly believe in something at your core, but that doesn’t affect the truth.”
… Licht told me, the pandemic had exposed the degree to which his network had lost touch with the country. “In the beginning it was a trusted source—this crazy thing, no one understands it, help us make sense of it. What’s going on?” he said. “And I think then it got to a place where, ‘Oh wow, we gotta keep getting those ratings. We gotta keep getting the sense of urgency. … COVID, COVID, COVID! Look at the case numbers! Look at this! Look at this!” Licht said. “No context. And, you know, the kind of shaming. And then people walked outside and they go, ‘This is not my life. This is not my reality. You guys are just saying this because you need the ratings, you need the clicks. I don’t trust you.’” Were they wrong? “They were not,” he said.
Right on cue, one of Luntz’s students asked Licht about the trap of false equivalency. … There is, she reminded him, “one truth” on some fundamental questions facing the country. Trump had lost the 2020 election; Barack Obama had been born in the United States; we know how many deaths have been caused by COVID. Licht pounced. “Wait a second. We don’t know how many deaths there were from COVID,” he said. She frowned at him. “No, really, we don’t,” Licht said. As the son of a doctor, he believed there were “legitimate conversations” to be had about the death toll attached to COVID-19. Perhaps some patients had been admitted to hospitals with life-threatening illnesses before the pandemic began, then died with a positive diagnosis, Licht postulated. “Where we run into trouble is when you say, ‘No. Come on. We’re not even having that conversation,’” he told the students. “That goes to trust as much as anything else. If you’re solid on your facts, then you should be able to entertain that discussion.” … It had been unfair, he said, to paint everyone who had questions about the accuracy of death counts as “COVID deniers.” It was dishonest to frame the final pandemic-era bailout as “You’re either for this rescue bill, or you hate poor people.” He gave them his favorite analogy: We can debate whether we like rain or we don’t like rain, as long as we acknowledge when it’s raining outside.
Everyone at CNN had long ago come to realize that Licht was playing for an audience of one. It didn’t matter what they thought, or what other journalists thought, or even what viewers thought. What mattered was what David Zaslav thought. Over the previous year, people who knew Zaslav—and who had observed his relationship with Licht—had depicted him as a control freak, a micromanager, a relentless operator who helicoptered over his embattled CNN leader. Zaslav’s constant meddling in editorial decisions struck network veterans as odd and inappropriate; even stranger was his apparent marionetting of Licht. In this sense, some of Licht’s longtime friends and co-workers told me, they pitied him. He was the one getting mauled while the man behind the curtain suffered nary a scratch.
I asked Licht whether there was anything he regretted about the event. The “extra Trumpy” makeup of the crowd? (No, Licht said, because it was representative of the Republican base.) Devoting the first question to his election lies? (No, Licht said, because nothing else, not even the E. Jean Carroll verdict, was as newsworthy as Trump’s assault on the ballot box.) Allowing the audience to cheer at will? (No, Licht said, because instructing them to hold their applause, as debate moderators regularly do, would have altered the reality of the event.) … He gave no ground on anything else—not even the presence of Representative Donalds … an election denier who used his place on that panel to question the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s victory in 2020.”
