Sigh with relief: As was expected, the Chris Licht era at CNN is over.

The CNN CEO will be departing the company after only a year.

Warner. Discovery CEO David Zaslav confirmed the news to CNN staff on the news organization’s daily editorial call. Zaslav praised Licht for his “amazing career” but acknowledged that his leadership at CNN was not successful. “I take full responsibility,” Zaslav told CNN staff on the call.

CNN’s interim leadership will be Amy Entelis, the longtime head of talent and content development, head of editorial Virginia Mosely, programming chief Eric Shearling, and David Leavy, the incoming COO of CNN.

 

Zaslav told staff that the company is now beginning the search for a new CNN chief, and will be looking both internally and externally. The search “will take a while” he said, adding that he was not in a rush to find a successor.

“The job of leading CNN was never going to be easy, especially at a time of huge disruption and transformation, and he has poured his heart and soul into it,” Zaslav said. “While we know we have work to do as we look to identify a new leader, we have absolute confidence in the team we have in place and will continue to fight for CNN and its world class journalism.”

The decision to part ways with Licht follows a town hall with president Donald Trump that drew backlash from viewers and employees, declining linear ratings despite reworked programming.]

Then there was an Atlantic article that demoralized staff, forcing Licht to apologize on Monday’s editorial call.

Licht, a longtime producer on shows like MSNBC’s Morning Joe, CBS This Morning, and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, joined CNN last May with a mandate to “rebuild trust” in the cable news channel. Licht, and Zaslav, had argued that CNN had lost its way during the Trump years, becoming more of an “advocacy” channel rather than a news channel, and were on a mission to once again make the news the star, and a “purveyor of facts and truth,” as David Zaslav told CNN staff in a town hall earlier this year, hearkening back to a term from the Ted Turner era.

“Even when the ratings were good, the overall brand, the perception of the brand was left leaning,” Zaslav said at a MoffettNathanson conference May 18.

However, Licht was not a frequent presence in the newsroom, opting to work out of an office on an executive floor rather than alongside the journalists he oversees (his predecessor, Jeff Zucker, had a comparably modest office right off the newsroom floor).

That was a stark contrast to Zucker, who closely monitored CNN programming, and would suggest questions to anchors mid-interview.

And some staff were confused by the mission, fearing that higher-ups conflated serious, unbiased journalism with advocacy based on the reception from Trump or other Republican political figures.

Licht always knew that his time leading CNN would be temporary. At a Paley Center event April 20, he told the lunchtime crowd that internally “we talk a lot about that whoever’s sitting in my chair, you are a temporary occupant, you are a caretaker of that chair.”