If you are the least bit tuned in to the world of US media, then you likely know of the Atlantic profile of Chris Licht, the chief executive of CNN, which hit last week and sent shockwaves through this insular community. Licht, the onetime media wunderkind who piloted Morning Joe, The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, and CBS This Morning, took the helm of the original cable news network a little over a year ago, and starting last November, he gave reporter Tim Alberta a boatload of access, granting him numerous on-the-record interviews, allowing Alberta to accompany him to rehearsals of CNNās new morning show, and even permitting Alberta to witness his workout sessions with a private trainer named Joe Maysonet, who works in a gym that caters to magnates, athletes, and actors. (āLicht jumped off the [work-out] machine. At Maysonetās instruction, he squatted down to grab a long metal pole lying flat on the ground. ā[Former CNN chief] Jeff Zucker couldnāt do this shit,ā Licht said through clenched teeth, hoisting the pole with a grunt.ā)
The result is devastating for Licht. One anecdote after another, one interview after another, indicates that he’s floundering at CNN and doesnāt have a handle on the networkās problems and challengesāor, more important, his own failures.
Licht may not be the right person to run CNN. Thatās not only because when he came aboard he dumped some of the networkās most conscientious journalistsāBrian Stelter and John Harwoodābecause they were too tough on Donald Trump. Or because he quickly tried to make nice with the election deniers and pro-Trump disinformationalists of the GOP. Or because he orchestrated that awful Trump town hall that provided a supportive audience and useful platform for a man who tried to sabotage American democracy and overturn an election. These actions can all be dismissed as moves adopted to implement a grand plan to render the network more amenable to Fox-ish viewersāa questionable strategy, but one established by Lichtās corporate overseers. Worse, the Atlantic profile shows that Licht suffers from a lack of judgment.
Licht was, to be blunt, a fool to allow a reporter to trail him as he has attempted to remake CNN and deal with a flood of internal turmoil. Whether this vision for a new CNN made sense or notāand was implementable or notāhe knew it would be a tough mission. (Joe Scarborough and Colbert told him not to take the job.) Plenty of eggs would have to be broken. Andāto use another culinary clichĆ©ārejiggering the sausage-making would not be pretty. Transparency and accountability are wonderful values, but permitting a reporter to observe all this was an act of hubris. It suggests that Licht was so confident in his own abilities and ideas that he could not see how his controversial decisions and stir-up-the-pot notions might come across to others. Opening the door wide for Alberta indicates that he was overly concerned with his own PR and believed his own press too much. Successful journalists need to be more skepticalāparticularly about themselves. In a stunning fashion, Alberta has taken us inside the world of big-media journalism. Licht, by participating in this exercise, offers us a troubling insight about Licht.
Just before the Atlantic story came out, CNN announced that David Leavy, the chief corporate operating office of Warner Bros Discovery, the parent of CNN, would become the cable networkās chief operating officer. Leavy is a close confidante of David Zaslav, the top dog at Warner Bros Discovery, and this move triggered speculation that Lichtās days at CNN may be numbered. One thing the article made clear was that CNNās pivot toward Trumpland was not only Lichtās idea but a desire at the top of the corporate pyramid. That means that whether Licht stays or goes, CNNās major problem will likely remain.
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The Watch, Read, and Listen List
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65. Iām a sucker for time-travel and dinosaur movies. So when I was in a mood for a dumb popcorn movie, I fired up the new Adam Driver action film, 65, which I thought was about an inadvertent time-traveler who finds himself and his spaceship back in the age of the dinosaurs. But to my dismay, there was no time-skipping in this tale. Driver plays a space pilot named Mills who lives on the planet Somaris in some far-off galaxy when the date on Earth is roughly 65 million BC. His civilization is advanced enough to have the ability to explore vast regions of the cosmos in sleek flying machines, but hereās the bad news: Health care is still difficult to obtain. His daughter is sick, and he must take a long-haul assignment (two years!) to earn enough pay to cover her treatments. Off Mills goes, with a load of cryogenized passengers. Long into the journey his vessel encounters an uncharted asteroid belt. The ship is battered and crash-lands on Earthāwhat for him and his folks is an alien planet. With dinosaurs.
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None of the human cargo survive except for a 9-year-old girl named Koa who speaks a language Mills doesnāt understand. (Conveniently for us, Mills speaks English.) Though Mills has a version of a smartphone that can tell him whatās happening kilometers away and even create holograms of these events, it cannot translate Koaās sentences for Mills. Bad break. The other bad break: The escape pod that could get them off this rock is in a debris field 10 miles away. There are plenty of dino-nasties in between here and there. Oh, that fiery object in the sky thatās getting closer? Thatās an asteroid, a very big asteroid. What a coincidence. Mills and Koa picked the worst day in Earthās history to get stranded on this orb.
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The trek to the escape pod is a not-too-pleasant stroll through Jurassic Park, with many familiar features from Steven Spielbergās franchise. Mills and Koa, of course, bond, as they experience one narrow escape after another. Velociraptors, T. rexesāweāve seen this before. 65 eschews the paleontology controversies the Jurassic Park films employed to gussy themselves up and is essentially one long chase between various prehistoric beasts and two humans, offering a few clever chills and thrills. Ultimately, it doesnāt do much to advance the genre of dino-flicks. And you never get to really know the dinosaurs. Then again, why bother? Look up. Theyāre not going to be around long.
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āWeāre All Gonna Die,ā Joy Oladokun. Last December, at the White House signing ceremony for the Respect for Marriage Act, Joy Oladokun, an Americana singer-songwriter, performed alongside Cyndi Lauper and Sam Smith. The daughter of Nigerian immigrants who was raised in Arizona, the 31-year-old Oladokun initially won critical acclaim as a Black queer artist in the vein of Tracy Chapman, who happened to inspire Oladokun to learn guitar when she was a child. Sheās written songs about LGBTQ issues and Black experiences. NPR listed her tune āI See America,ā a BLM-spurred exploration of systemic racism, as one of the 100 best songs of 2020. Sheās been compared to John Prine. But with her new album, Proof of Life, Oladokun has expanded her horizons to encompass pop and rock sensibilities.
This is especially true with a track the New York Times dubbed an āemo-punk anthemā: āWeāre All Gonna Die.ā Itās a bouncy number about the inevitability of death. The song focuses on the basic shared feature of humanity: the impossibility of understanding why the hell weāre here. The tune is quite catchy, with a Beatlesesque strings intro and bridge. Itās hooky refrain: āWeāre all gonna die tryna figure it out.ā In a recent interview, Oladokun, a fan of the Beatles, BeyoncĆ©, the Beach Boys, and Radiohead, said, āI would like to be the Black Bruce Springsteen.ā For Oladokun, who has been quite open about confronting her assorted demons through therapy, figuring how to do that will be quite the mission.
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