CNN Follows Its Journalism Roots To Chart New Path Amid Wartime Footing

If ever there was an opportunity (and crying need) for CNN to find a new way forward, it’s now.

Just as the first Gulf War effectively birthed CNN as a global 24-hour news network, so could the Russian invasion of Ukraine provide a path to its rebirth, with its considerable journalistic muscles and on-the-ground presence seemingly everywhere in the metastasizing conflagration. 

As the invasion was getting underway, the news organization’s future boss, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO-in-waiting David Zaslav, used his likely last earnings call as Discovery Communication’s head to tout CNN’s work. 

“I’ve been watching a lot of CNN,” Zaslav said Thursday as tanks rolled across the Ukrainian border. “This is where you see the difference between a news service that has real, meaningful resources globally, news-gathering resources — the biggest and largest group of global journalists of any media company, maybe with the exception of the BBC.”

Zaslav went on to say, “There’s no news organization in the world that looks like CNN, that can do what CNN does. It becomes very clear as you go around the world and you look at other news channels, where people are sitting behind desks and giving their opinion about what’s going on, there’s a news network with people on the ground with journalists in bulletproof vests and helmets that are doing what journalists do best, which is fight to tell the truth in dangerous places so that we all can be safe and assess what’s going on in the world.”

That boots-on-ground approach is a sharp contrast to eternal cable competitors MSNBC and  Fox News, which have harvested rich ratings rewards for their sharp-elbowed embrace of combative commentary on politics from the left and right respectively. Despite strength there, the other networks’ viewers have been far more likely to turn to CNN during big crises for minute-by-minute coverage, studies have shown for many years. Now comes another chance to do what it does best. 

The great irony, of course, is that though CNN made its reputation for decades covering hard news, it had moved away from that focus. In a successful gambit to revive CNN’s weak ratings, former NBCUniversal CEO Jeff Zucker pivoted the company in the Trump era to a commentary-filled focus. Zucker kept the cameras rolling throughout candidate Trump’s 2016 campaign appearances, and otherwise jumped hard into the partisan culture wars that dominated discourse in the era.

Then came 2021. A defeated Trump reluctantly decamped to Mar-A-Lago, and CNN ratings dropped dramatically without him as conversational foil. Further uncertainty hit when AT&T agreed to spin off CNN parent WarnerMedia into WBD, a $43 billion merger with Discovery. The forced departures of prime-time star Chris Cuomo, then Zucker and his pandemic flame/Chief Marketing Officer Allison Gollust left the organization in further flux. 

Among the big issues: Would the mammoth merger and resulting debt lead to more layoffs and reorganizations for the parent corporation? What would happen with CNN Plus, the subscription service that Zucker championed and for which the company had hired hundreds of staffers? Who would run CNN? What direction would CNN take under new ownership? 

Answers to at least a few of those existential questions have come this week. It sounds terrible to say it – but for a CNN that had been adrift, uncertain about its leadership and future – Putin’s invasion has given CNN a renewed focus, direction and irresistible source of must-watch/can’t-watch programming. It has a purpose. 

It also has a leader. WBD on Monday named Chris Licht – a veteran producer of shows such as CBS This Morning, MSNBC’s Morning Joe and most recently The Late Show with Stephen Colbert – as chairman and CEO of the newly renamed CNN Global. 

Colbert gave Licht, his showrunner, a heartfelt ribbing and send-off on air Monday night that must have been encouraging for his future CNN employees. 

“He arrived knowing what he didn’t know, which was anything about comedy or show business so he approached the job with a level of humility that is rare in executives,” Colbert said. “But here’s the thing. There are bosses and then there are leaders. Bosses tell you what to do. Leaders work as hard as you do to do what needs to be done and that’s what [Chris] did. That’s why he earned the respect from all of us here who live in the clown car. We showed him what we really want to do, which is the show we do now, and he immediately started creating the lines of communication, the lanes of responsibility and the respectful workplace that makes creative ambition at this speed possible. I’m happy that CNN will now benefit from all of his wisdom.”

WBD also clarified how it will handle CNN Plus, making it part of the existing CNN app rather than a standalone offering, which seems prudent given the challenges of getting people to download Yet Another Freaking App. 

One writer joked recently that CNN Plus should be called Parts Unknown Plus, the long-running series hosted by the late Anthony Bourdain that almost certainly will be in heavy rotation on the service. 

That said, the service has made a batch of high-profile hires, including Fox News’ Chris Wallace, NPR’s Audie Cornish and former NBA player Rex Chapman. All will be heading their own shows for the service, across a variety of sectors, which suggests that Bourdain’s beloved travel and food show will be more an amuse bouche than a main dish. 

Also worth noting: plans for a Disney-style bundle that adds CNN Plus to the ad-supported tiers of HBO Max and Discovery Plus. No pricing was announced, but it surely won’t be much more than $16.99, given competing services’ offerings. Eventually, the combined company will offer three tiers of service options, from ad-supported free to ad-free subscription, much as Comcast and Paramount Global do.

Now comes the hard part: continuing the expensive, difficult and dangerous work of covering Europe’s first major land war of the 21st Century while remaining a financially sustainable organization amid changes in leadership, ownership, technology, and economics. But at least it’s possible that CNN has discovered a way forward by treading the path that it originally blazed.

“We didn’t come into this business to build broadband,” Zaslav told Vanity Fair in a recent profile, taking potshots at the tech giants that have bought into entertainment. “We didn’t come into this business to sell phones or to build cloud. The people that came into this business got here because we love telling stories.” 

The question is whether CNN can tell enough stories well, and to the right paying customers.

If CNN can continue to rely on a return to its journalism roots (and avoid gaffes like running that Applebee’s ad right after a lingering shot of Kyiv amid air-raid sirens), the venerable cable news network might just find it’s back in vogue again.