I'd recommend any (aspiring) manager/founder to read this piece. So many lessons to be learned from Licht's tenure.

That was interesting, well worth the read.

I want to comment on this article way more than the news he was fired. This article is proof that allowing sleazy journalists unfettered access can never be in your best interests. 90% of the article is informative and seemingly straight reporting. 10% is subtle and brutal undermining of Licht through implication and opinion. Little details, like mentioning the pauses before answering or how he "chews" his lips. All of the subtle details relay a much more biased outlook than the seeming fact-based narrative.

The story the article wants us to believe is that Zaslav setup Licht as a "marionette" (in the article author's words) so that he could push unpopular changes through at CNN. Licht is made out to be impersonal, impotent and naive. He is both forced to tow the line for the execs above him and suffer the humiliation of being undermined by his underlings. There is the implication that even his greatest failures aren't due to incompetence but due to the meddling that was forced upon him. But Licht genuinely appears to have represented an attempt to move CNN back into a trustworthy news organization. The implication is that such a move is impossible due to the meddling of execs and the entrenched politics in the org.

Every time I read an article in The Atlantic I get the impression that I am staring the Ministry of Truth in the face. We are about to see the media landscape once again reshaped. Articles like this are providing the context for some longer narrative arc that is just beginning to take shape. We all hope that discourse in America is going to return to some kind of moderate center and the rifts between partisan sides will be healed. But this article suggests that things are actually being steered away from that. The resistance to extreme populism is being painted as ineffectual.

I can't blame them. Trump running in 2024 is going to cause quite the stir. There is the fear of an escalation of the kind of events we saw on Jan 6. My impression is that rather than calming things down, the sides are preparing to mobilize.