Chris Licht is out at CNN, leaving network at a crossroads

At 7 a.m. on Wednesday, as a cloud of smoke enveloped Manhattan, Chris Licht left his apartment building and strolled half a block to Central Park for a meeting with his boss, David Zaslav.

The men had taken this park walk before. In early 2022, Zaslav used the same verdant setting to offer a job that Licht would later describe as a “calling”: the chairmanship of CNN, which Zaslav’s corporate empire was about to acquire in a media megadeal.