Can Anyone Save Cable News?

Ben Smith: “Licht’s departure is on its surface a management debacle and a reminder that you can’t run a television network if you can’t keep your key asset, the high-profile on-air talent, happy. And now it’s a hard management crisis to fix, because WarnerDiscovery chief David Zaslav has been half-running the place all along, and I’m not sure who will want to half-run it with him now.”

“But it’s also a strategic debacle in which cheap talk about shifting CNN from anti-Trump confrontation toward an imagined center simply didn’t find an audience.”

“And the most obvious explanation is the one that people in media have been saying so long we’ve stopped believing it: Cable news is in a broad, secular decline. Even the best managers and executives won’t be able to reverse that.”