Chris Licht has had nothing but time since leaving CNN nearly a year and a half ago.
The veteran news and media executive said Tuesday that he has been doing some consulting, taking meetings (about 275, to be precise), teaching a class at Syracuse University on the future of media, spending time with his family and trying to get his pilot’s license. But he also sounds like he is ready to get back into the media business, though in what form remains to be seen.
“Whatever I do next, I don’t want it to be something that isn’t building and forward looking, but no one really knows where things are headed,” Licht said at the Yahoo Finance Invest conference in New York Tuesday. “There’s a lot of people working on satiating what is a massive desire to consume content, whether it’s in entertainment or news, and finding ways to do that outside the current legacy system. Eventually, some of these things will bubble up and be either co-opted by the legacy companies, or will just propel past them. But there’s really smart, interesting people that are, I think, going to be the future of where the business goes.”
While Licht is “bullish” about the news and information business overall, he also acknowledged that the current moment is fraught, and that cable news business is likely to continue its decline.
“There isn’t a media executive that doesn’t know that there’s a problem. There isn’t a media executive that isn’t actively working on that problem,” Licht said. “The facts are that people have lost trust in legacy media. That’s not me saying that. That’s a demonstrable fact that has not happened in the last six months … So can legacy media reinvent itself in a way that then can reconnect with people and become relevant in their lives again and become trusted?”
“You can’t exist in a low trust society, which is where we are right now. And I think it’s important to delineate between two things,” he continued. “There is trusted sources of information, and then there’s trusted opinion. And I think those two worlds need to be very separate. And I think part of the problem is they’ve kind of commingled. And you know, media organizations will try very hard to say, no, no, this is our news gathering and this is our opinion. But in the world, people don’t have distinction.”
“We used to have one set of facts, and then you could have 30 discussions around that set of facts,” he added. “Now you have 30 sets of facts and 1,000 discussions around those sets of facts. And that has to change, or we’re in big trouble as a society.”
In fact, Licht argued that in a world where opinion and fact are increasingly intertwined, facts could become a commodity into themselves.
“Perhaps there becomes like a Bloomberg Terminal for truth?” Licht hypothesized. “That people who operate in the world, whether you’re in finance or government or you operate where you actually have to know what’s happening, that can almost be a wholesale product. I think that’s the direction we’re moving in. If you’re one of these talents that could then take that truth and interpret it for your people that are in your community, that will be the pathway to success.”
And he noted that with a second Trump presidency looming, such a product could become even more urgent, though he added that “these are issues that are larger than just a Trump presidency.”
Instead, he says “my completely unsolicited and I’m sure annoying advice is swing at the pitches that are thrown.”
“There will be enough things that are going to be controversial, but he and his people know exactly what they’re doing when they try to gin up what one of my former colleagues called ‘outrage porn.’” he continued. “You know, if everything is an 11 and everything is outrageous, then you’re able to kind of slip through some things that actually should create that outrage.”
As for the future of cable news, Licht believes that it will survive in some form, though exactly how it finds its way into homes remains to be seen.
“I think it’s like the death of radio, right? I think it will absolutely decline, the sub fees will decline, and that’s why you’re seeing cost cutting,” he said. “I think there’s a floor. I don’t think that one day you’re going to wake up and there is zero cable subscriptions. But there might be different ways to distribute said signal, because at its heart, news is a passive it’s something you have on in the background.”
And asked if he would do things differently were he to take over CNN today, Licht said “oh yes … that’s really between me and my therapist.”
“In all seriousness, I have spent an enormous amount of time not worrying about the situation I was in. But how could I have handled those situations differently, the things that I could have controlled?” he added. “Remember, I left the greatest job in the world with Stephen Colbert, and I never wanted to get back into news. And I did it because I felt it was a calling, and because I’m a journalist at heart, it’s devastating to me that it didn’t work out.”