Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the people and power centers in the Biden administration. With help from Allie Bice. Send tips | Subscribe here | Email Eli | Email Lauren The firing of CNN boss CHRIS LICHT Tuesday marked a stunning and abrupt end to a disastrous 13-month tenure. But while it was clearly the product of some questionable choices Licht himself made (more on those later), it also marked the biggest casualty to date of a problem hampering much of the media: How to balance the coverage of the last two White House occupants, DONALD TRUMP and JOE BIDEN? In a way, Licht, like Biden, sought to steer us back to a more traditional time — an era where politics could be covered with a down-the-middle, unemotional approach; where the White House wasn’t the central stage around which all of cable turned. He took KAITLAN COLLINS — his chief White House correspondent and the network’s biggest rising star — off the Biden beat to co-anchor a morning show that dissolved quickly (she’s since moved to primetime); pushed to tamp down the critical Trump coverage by issuing new editorial directives; let go of some of the network’s most prominent Trump-critical voices; and put the former president on a high-profile town hall. The moves may have been driven by certain realities: Biden is comparatively boring — and intentionally so, delivering on a campaign promise to return the presidency from daily reality TV antics to a more traditional, process-heavy and predictable mode of operations. Conservatives had lost faith in CNN. Costs had to be cut. But whatever its merits in theory, Licht’s approach often seemed misaligned with an America marked by increasingly sectarian political divisions, continued democratic backsliding, a fast eroding trust in news and a cable news audience that’s getting information elsewhere. Sure enough, his efforts to tamp down the endless cycle of cable news outrage we all endured for four years ended up generating outrage anyway — it just came from within his own newsroom and from CNN’s broader audience, many of whom have vociferously tweeted their frustrations over the Trump platforming, the downplaying of the Jan. 6 insurrection, and Licht’s general nonchalance to their concerns. Those viewers may prefer watching MSNBC, where — at least at certain hours of the day — the Trump dramas continue to animate perpetually alarmed hosts and panelists. But MSNBC’s ratings are also not what they were when Trump was actually president. While it’s not helping the news business, Biden has largely delivered on his campaign promise to return the presidency from daily reality TV antics to a more predictable mode of operations. and yes! making the last sentence of that read: While he's far less accessible than Trump, who needs the media’s attention like the rest of us do oxygen, the president has also found that cable networks often wouldn't cover his public events live — a reason why Biden has done fewer evening events in his second and third years, an administration official told West Wing Playbook. Fox News, like its cable competitors, hasn’t quite figured out what to do with Biden in the White House and Trump trying to get back there. The current president, as conservatives often concede, is a poor boogeyman for them: producing relatively dull story lines and seemingly always off-camera. The ex-president, meanwhile, has occasionally been too hot to touch — his election denialism leading the network into a massive defamation lawsuit. There is now open friction between Trump and the Murdochs, with the former accusing the latter of being in the tank for his opponent, Gov. RON DESANTIS. If any cable channel appears to have figured out how to gain ground in the current climate, it’s Newsmax. The long fledgling, more conspiracy-addled stepchild to Fox News, seems to have adopted the mantra that former CBS boss LES MOONVES infamously noted in 2016: Trump “may not be good for America, but [was] damn good” for ratings. Indeed, Newsmax has grown an audience within the GOP base, reaching viewer levels near CNN’s. Those boffo ratings that come from platforming and reacting to every Trump utterance, however, can and often have obscured the broader trend already underway in media. Consumers are shifting from the linear news coverage long found in newspapers and on cable to social media, streaming and other more personalized platforms. That trend was what Licht, with great hubris, believed he knew how to solve. It’s likely why he agreed to sit down with TIM ALBERTA for a devastating profile (published last week) featuring him ranting about his predecessor while side planking, giving more attention to student journalists than he seemed to have for rank and file CNN employees, refusing to take any blame for a string of misbegotten programming and managerial decisions and, ultimately, laughing at his own boss constantly blowing up his cell phone. But, ultimately, he didn’t have the answers. No one really does. It’s a conundrum for interim CEO AMY ENTELLIS and whomever Warner Bros. Discovery chief DAVID ZASLAV chooses as a successor: Can news be dispassionate in an emotional, partisan era? Can networks re-establish trust that transcends political divides? How do you rationalize platforming Trump? Then again, how do you not? MESSAGE US — Are you former CNN correspondent JOHN HARWOOD? We want to hear from you. And we’ll keep you anonymous! Email us at westwingtips@politico.com. Did someone forward this email to you? Subscribe here!
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