Opinion

CNN’s Chris Licht showed the problem with anti-woke centrism

In a roughly 15,000-word profile published last week by the Atlantic, CNN chief executive Chris Licht, who has complained that the network’s journalists were too opinionated when Donald Trump was president, gave a lot of, well, opinions.

He expressed skepticism about defunding the police and about using trans-inclusive language when referring to people who give birth to children. He implied people of color with Harvard degrees don’t add diversity to newsrooms and suggested that the news media should have more reporters who are religious, who own guns and who lived on food stamps as kids. He speculated that covid-19 deaths might have been overcounted by public officials. He said journalists should not “virtue signal” and that it’s hard to have “difficult conversations without being demonized or labeled.”