Chris Licht

CNN’s media reporter Oliver Darcy took a blowtorch to one of his network’s rival outlets for daring to host a Republican presidential debate and “collaborating” with so-called extremist partners, like a YouTube competitor and a massive radio company that used to host his former boss, Glenn Beck. “NBC News has made its decision,” Darcy fumed in a blog post about the network’s partnership with Rumble and Salem Media... which CNN has previously partnered with for multiple Republican primary debates. “Now it’s up to other news organizations to do so as well.” Awkwardly for Darcy, as of the time he published his article, his own network was working to secure the exact same kind of partnership with the Republican National Committee.

No doubt Rupert Murdoch breathed a sigh of relief when Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s decision to launch his presidential campaign on Twitter proved disastrous. The announcement, hosted by Elon Musk, was derailed by technical glitches, leading to twenty minutes of awkward silences interrupted by occasional hot-mic moments of frustration. Even after Musk and his team at Twitter got things going, the highly anticipated event drew a meager audience of just 300,000 live listeners. The second stop of the DeSantis campaign, immediately afterward, was at Fox News, for an interview watched by an average of 2 million viewers.

One year into his tenure as the CEO of CNN, Chris Licht is taking a battering. Ratings are dwindling, viewers are outraged and an internal rift is widening. The mountain of problems facing the embattled CEO erupted into public view last week in the wake of the network’s town hall with Donald Trump, an event that sparked outrage inside and outside the CNN newsroom. “It feels very bleak,” one CNN journalist told me. “Staffers are nervous about the future.

“Thanks to the woke police, in 2023, Mark Twain would never win the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.” This David Spade joke isn't exactly L-O-L funny — it sounds more like something a crotchety senior citizen would growl at the TV about those wokey hokey cancel culture snowflakes. But nonetheless, people, particularly comics should feel able to speak freely. But sadly, there's some truth to Spade's gag, which he delivered on March 19 as part of his remarks at the awarding of the 2023 Kennedy Center’s Mark Twain Prize for American Comedy to his longtime collaborator Adam Sandler. It’s 2023 and that means that certain ideas are viewed as unfit for wider consumption.