When It Rains, It Amanpours
On Wednesday afternoon, CNN’s revered chief international correspondent Christiane Amanpour took the lectern to deliver the commencement address at Columbia Journalism School, in Morningside Heights. The setting, fittingly, was Roone Arledge Auditorium, named after the legendary news executive, who happened to be Bob Iger’s mentor. Just a few minutes in, however, Amanpour seemed to be addressing another news executive, CNN C.E.O. Chris Licht, as she took direct aim at her network’s decision to host a live town hall with former president Donald Trump.
Amanpour said she had met with Licht this week to convey her belief that CNN should not have allowed Trump “to appear in that particular format,” and criticized his decision to broadcast Trump’s remarks live before an unruly audience. Licht acknowledged that “the execution was lacking a little,” Amanpour said, but he maintained that the network “did the right thing,” and that the town hall was “a service to the American people.” Amanpour respectfully disagreed: “We know Trump and his tendencies, everyone does,” she told the students. “He just seizes the stage and dominates, no matter how much flack the moderator tries to aim at the incoming. It doesn’t often work.”
As is obvious by this point, Chris Licht has a difficult job. He was thrown into a seismic mess in which he had to simultaneously replace a legend, oversee a global news organization during a time of foreign war and a looming presidential election, manage through the exigencies of a fresh corporate merger… oh, and oversee a unit of thousands of journalists, many of whom are world famous, some of whom are prima donnas, and some more of whom are indifferent to managing up, his vision, etcetera. And as the contretemps over Oliver Darcy’s recent newsletter lede criticism of the town hall clearly manifested, these are journalists: it’s their job to speak truth to power, even when it’s their boss. Amanpour’s public criticism channeled the widely held frustrations of so many CNN anchors, correspondents, producers and reporters in the wake of the Trump town hall, which I noted last week. But it was especially notable that it came from Amanpour, herself, a highly decorated journalist who has been with the network almost since its inception, and who, coincidentally, is the paragon of Lichtian-Zaslavian vision for New CNN.
Source: Puck
