CNN names former New York Times CEO Mark Thompson as its chief

Published

1 year ago

August 30, 2023

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Mark Thompson is stepping in as the next CEO and chairman of CNN.

Parent company Warner Bros. Discovery said Wednesday it appointed Thompson as the next leader of the cable news network, a few short months after the ouster of Chris Licht.

Thompson previously served as president and CEO of The New York Times from 2012 to 2020, as well as director-general of the BBC from 2004 to 2012. Thompson’s first day at the CNN office will be Oct. 9, he told CNN staffers in a memo.

“I am confident he is exactly the leader we need to take the helm of CNN at this pivotal time,” Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav told staff in a note Wednesday. “Big thanks to all of you for your patience, commitment, and hard work. Simply stated: the real strength of CNN is its people, and you continue to set the highest standard in all that you do.”

The appointment of Thompson, a 40-year news veteran who was recently knighted for his services in media, occurs just as the presidential campaign cycle in the U.S. accelerates.

Thompson takes the reins of CNN as cord cutting has ramped up for the traditional TV bundle and ratings have lagged behind other cable news competitors. Last week, Warner Bros. Discovery announced it would add CNN to its Max streaming service beginning Sept. 27. It will serve as the network’s answer to streaming as a 24/7 live news hub.

“As everyone knows, TV journalism is approaching peak disruption. We face pressure from every direction – structural, political, cultural, you name it. Like many other media organizations, CNN has recently felt some of the uncertainty and heartache that comes with all of that,” Thompson wrote to CNN staff. “There’s no magic wand that I or anyone else can wield to make this disruption go away. But what I can say is that where others see threat, I see opportunity – especially given CNN’s great brand and the strength of its journalism.”

His hiring also follows what has been a tumultuous time for the cable news network, especially for its leadership.

In early 2022, longtime leader Jeff Zucker resigned after failing to disclose a romantic relationship with a high-ranking colleague – who also once served as communications director to ex-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Zucker’s resignation came as a shock to staffers. Shortly after, prime-time host Chris Cuomo was fired after CNN said it obtained new information about his controversial role in advising his brother.

Soon after Zucker stepped down, CNN’s parent company ownership changed hands with the merger of Warner Bros. and Discovery. Before closing the deal, Zaslav had appointed Licht as CNN’s CEO, who was previously the chief executive behind the “CBS This Morning” news program and “Morning Joe” on MSNBC. At the time, Zaslav called Licht a “dynamic and creative producer, an engaging and thoughtful journalist, and a true news person.”

One of Licht’s first moves was the swift closure of CNN+, the cable news network’s then-newly launched streaming platform that was failing to garner viewership in its early days.

Licht’s time at CNN was short, however. In June, Licht departed CNN after leading the network for little more than a year that included a series of programming missteps and rock-bottom ratings. He had also drawn criticism in the weeks before his ouster after CNN hosted a town hall with Donald Trump that was packed with tons of fans who cheered on the former president as he pushed election lies and insulted host Kaitlan Collins.

Shortly after, The Atlantic published an unflattering 15,000-word profile of Licht titled “Inside the Meltdown at CNN,” which likely sealed his fate. Although Licht apologized to CNN staffers it wasn’t enough and his departure was announced in the ensuing days.

While network executives Amy Entelis, Virginia Moseley, Eric Sherling and David Leavy led CNN since Licht left CNN, Warner Bros. Discovery brass searched for a replacement for the leadership role.

Read Zaslav’s memo to staff:

All,

I wanted to tell you first that we will be welcoming a new leader for CNN Worldwide. Shortly, we will announce that highly respected news executive Mark Thompson will be joining our leadership team as Chairman and CEO, effective October 9, reporting directly to me. Mark has been in the news business for more than four decades and, as many of you are aware, he has an exceptional track-record of innovation and excellence. I am confident he is exactly the leader we need to take the helm of CNN at this pivotal time.

I’ll share more about Mark in a moment. But before I do, I want to say that I recognize change is not easy, and I know you’ve been through a lot of it. Big thanks to all of you for your patience, commitment, and hard work. Simply stated: the real strength of CNN is its people, and you continue to set the highest standard in all that you do.

I want to give a special thanks to Amy, David, Virginia and Eric for the exceptional job they’ve done leading CNN and moving the business forward during this interim period. They pulled together as a team and really delivered, and I am personally grateful for their hard work and sacrifices, as they added significant responsibilities on top of their substantial functional roles. I know they’ll be a huge help to Mark when he comes on board.

Mark has led and transformed two of the world’s most respected news organizations. Most recently, he served as president and CEO of The New York Times from 2012-2020, building the company into a digital-subscription powerhouse. In fact, under his leadership, the Times increased its paid digital subscriptions tenfold and more than doubled its total digital revenues.

Before that, Mark served as director-general of the BBC from 2004-2012, where he presided over one of the world’s biggest newsrooms as well as scores of national and international TV and radio services and extensive global digital news assets. He led the development of the BBC iPlayer, the world’s first streaming service from a major broadcaster, expanded web and smartphone services from news to education to entertainment, and oversaw coverage of the biggest events of the time from the global financial crisis of 2008-09 to the 2012 Olympic Games in London. Before becoming a senior executive, Mark was a working researcher, director, field producer and award-winning showrunner in the BBC’s news division.

I’ve long admired Mark’s transformative leadership and his ability to inspire organizations to raise their own ambitions and sense of what’s possible… and achieve it. I’ve spent a lot of time talking with him over the last few weeks and couldn’t be more excited for all that’s in store.

Please join me in welcoming Mark to the team!

David

Read Thompson’s note to CNN staffers:

Dear all,

No doubt you’ve heard the news and read David Zaslav’s message confirming that I’m to be CNN’s next Chairman and CEO. I just wanted to add a few words of my own.

I can’t tell you how pleased and proud I am to be joining you after so many years of watching – and envying – your work from the outside. Over the decades, I’ve bumped into CNN teams on story after story from Washington, DC to Tiananmen Square. Two months ago I spent a day watching CNN’s spell-binding coverage of the Wagner rebellion, and I watched and read our major competitors too. That day confirmed an old truth to me: when it matters most, CNN is the best place to find out what’s happening. You always rise to the occasion.

As everyone knows, TV journalism is approaching peak disruption. We face pressure from every direction – structural, political, cultural, you name it. Like many other media organizations, CNN has recently felt some of the uncertainty and heartache that comes with all of that. There’s no magic wand that I or anyone else can wield to make this disruption go away. But what I can say is that where others see threat, I see opportunity – especially given CNN’s great brand and the strength of its journalism. I’ve spent most of the past twenty years figuring out with colleagues at some of the world’s other great news operations not just how to survive the revolution, but to thrive in it and gain new audiences and revenue streams. I aim to do the same at CNN. It won’t be myplan that wins the day but our plan, the plan we devise and implement together. Which is why, particularly in the early weeks, you’ll find me doing a lot more listening and learning than holding forth.

I want to add my personal thanks to the interim leadership team. Amy, David, Virginia and Eric have done a terrific job steering the ship over the past couple of months and I look forward to working with them.

My first official day in the office is 9 October but I’m planning to pop in a few times before then. So if you see a tall figure with an English accent and a loud laugh, you’ll know who it is.

All the best,

Mark

Technology

Mark Zuckerberg slams Apple on its lack of innovation and ‘random rules’

Published

15 hours ago

January 11, 2025

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Mark Zuckerberg slams Apple on its lack of innovation and 'random rules'

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg appears at the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California, Sept. 25, 2024.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg slammed rival tech giant Apple for lackluster innovation efforts and “random rules” in a lengthy podcast interview on Friday.

“On the one hand, [the iPhone has] been great, because now pretty much everyone in the world has a phone, and that’s kind of what enables pretty amazing things,” Zuckerberg said in an episode of the “Joe Rogan Experience.” “But on the other hand … they have used that platform to put in place a lot of rules that I think feel arbitrary and [I] feel like they haven’t really invented anything great in a while. It’s like Steve Jobs invented the iPhone, and now they’re just kind of sitting on it 20 years later.”

Zuckerberg added that he thought iPhone sales were struggling because consumers are taking longer to upgrade their phones because new models aren’t big improvements from prior iterations.

“So how are they making more money as a company? Well, they do it by basically, like, squeezing people, and, like you’re saying, having this 30% tax on developers by getting you to buy more peripherals and things that plug into it,” Zuckerberg said. “You know, they build stuff like Air Pods, which are cool, but they’ve just thoroughly hamstrung the ability for anyone else to build something that can connect to the iPhone in the same way.”

Apple defends itself from pushback from other companies by saying that it doesn’t want to violate consumers’ privacy and security, according to Zuckerberg. But he said that the problem would be solved if Apple fixed its protocol, like building better security and using encryption.

“It’s insecure because you didn’t build any security into it. And then now you’re using that as a justification for why only your product can connect in an easy way,” Zuckerberg said.

Zuckerberg said that if Apple stopped applying its “random rules,” Meta’s profit would double.

He also took shots at Apple’s Vision Pro headset, which had disappointing U.S. sales. Meta sells its own virtual headsets called the Meta Quest.

“I think the Vision Pro is, I think, one of the bigger swings at doing a new thing that they tried in a while,” Zuckerberg said. “And I don’t want to give them too hard of a time on it, because we do a lot of things where the first version isn’t that good, and you want to kind of judge the third version of it. But I mean, the V1, it definitely did not hit it out of the park.”

“I heard it’s really good for watching movies,” he added.

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNBC.

Technology

Why Meta had to ‘bend the knee to Trump’ ahead of his inauguration

Published

22 hours ago

January 11, 2025

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Why Meta had to 'bend the knee to Trump' ahead of his inauguration

Jakub Porzycki | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement this week that Meta would pivot its moderation policies to allow more “free expression” was widely viewed as the company’s latest effort to appease President-elect Donald Trump.

More than any of its Silicon Valley peers, Meta has taken numerous public steps to make amends with Trump since his election victory in November.

That follows a highly contentious four years between the two during Trump’s first term in office, which ended with Facebook — similar to other social media companies — banning Trump from its platform.

As recently as March, Trump was using his preferred nickname of “Zuckerschmuck” when talking about Meta’s CEO and declaring that Facebook was an “enemy of the people.”

With Meta now positioning itself to be a key player in artificial intelligence, Zuckerberg recognizes the need for White House support as his company builds data centers and pursues policies that will allow it to fulfill its lofty ambitions, according to people familiar with the company’s plans who asked not to be named because they weren’t authorized to speak on the matter.

“Even though Facebook is as powerful as it is, it still had to bend the knee to Trump,” said Brian Boland, a former Facebook vice president, who left the company in 2020.

Meta declined to comment for this article.

In Tuesday’s announcement, Zuckerberg said Meta will end third-party fact-checking, remove restrictions on topics such as immigration and gender identity and bring political content back to users’ feeds. Zuckerberg pitched the sweeping policy changes as key to stabilizing Meta’s content-moderation apparatus, which he said had “reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship.”

The policy change was the latest strategic shift Meta has taken to buddy up with Trump and Republicans since Election Day.

A day earlier, Meta announced that UFC CEO Dana White, a longtime Trump friend, is joining the company’s board.

And last week, Meta announced that it was replacing Nick Clegg, its president of global affairs, with Joel Kaplan, who had been the company’s policy vice president. Clegg previously had a career in British politics with the Liberal Democrats party, including as a deputy prime minister, while Kaplan was a White House deputy chief of staff under former President George W. Bush.

Kaplan, who joined Meta in 2011 when it was still known as Facebook, has longstanding ties to the Republican Party and once worked as a law clerk for the late conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. In December, Kaplan posted photos on Facebook of himself with Vice President-elect JD Vance and Trump during their visit to the New York Stock Exchange.

Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s vice president of global policy, on April 17, 2018.

Niall Carson | PA Images | Getty Images

Many Meta employees criticized the policy change internally, with some saying the company is absolving itself of its responsibility to create a safe platform. Current and former employees also expressed concern that marginalized communities could face more online abuse due to the new policy, which is set to take effect over the coming weeks.

Despite the backlash from employees, people familiar with the company’s thinking said Meta is more willing to make these kinds of moves after laying off 21,000 employees, or nearly a quarter of its workforce, in 2022 and 2023.

Those cuts affected much of Meta’s civic integrity and trust and safety teams. The civic integrity group was the closest thing the company had to a white-collar union, with members willing to push back against certain policy decisions, former employees said. Since the job cuts, Zuckerberg faces less friction when making broad policy changes, the people said.

Zuckerberg’s overtures to Trump began in the months leading up to the election.

Following the first assassination attempt on Trump in July, Zuckerberg called the photo of Trump raising his fist with blood running down his face “one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen in my life.”

A month later, Zuckerberg penned a letter to the House Judiciary Committee alleging that the Biden administration had pressured Meta’s teams to censor certain Covid-19 content.

“I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it,” he wrote.

After Trump’s presidential victory, Zuckerberg joined several other technology executives who visited the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. Meta also donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund.

On Friday, Meta revealed to its workforce in a memo obtained by CNBC that it intends to shutter several internal programs related to diversity and inclusion in its hiring process, representing another Trump-friendly move.

The previous day, some details of the company’s new relaxed content-moderation guidelines were published by the news site The Intercept, showing the kind of offensive rhetoric that Meta’s new policy would now allow, including statements such as “Migrants are no better than vomit” and “I bet Jorge’s the one who stole my backpack after track practice today. Immigrants are all thieves.”

Recalibrating for Trump

Zuckerberg, who has been dragged to Washington eight times to testify before congressional committees during the last two administrations, wants to be perceived as someone who can work with Trump and the Republican Party, people familiar with the matter said.

Though Meta’s content-policy updates caught many of its employees and fact-checking partners by surprise, a small group of executives were formulating the plans in the aftermath of the U.S. election results. By New Year’s Day, leadership began planning the public announcements of its policy change, the people said.

Meta typically undergoes major “recalibrations” after prominent U.S. elections, said Katie Harbath, a former Facebook policy director and CEO of tech consulting firm Anchor Change. When the country undergoes a change in power, Meta adjusts its policies to best suit its business and reputational needs based on the political landscape, Harbath said.

“In 2028, they’ll recalibrate again,” she said.

After the 2016 election and Trump’s first victory, for example, Zuckerberg toured the U.S. to meet people in states he hadn’t previously visited. He published a 6,000-word manifesto emphasizing the need for Facebook to build more community.

The social media company faced harsh criticism about fake news and Russian election interference on its platforms after the 2016 election.

Following the 2020 election, during the heart of the pandemic, Meta took a harder stand on Covid-19 content, with a policy executive saying in 2021 that the “amount of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation that violates our policies is too much by our standards.” Those efforts may have appeased the Biden administration, but it drew the ire of Republicans.

Meta is once again reacting to the moment, Harbath said.

“There wasn’t a business risk here in Silicon Valley to be more right-leaning,” Harbath said.

While Trump has offered few specific policy proposals for his second administration, Meta has plenty at stake.

The White House could create more relaxed AI regulations compared with those in the European Union, where Meta says harsh restrictions have resulted in the company not releasing some of its more advanced AI technologies. Meta, like other tech giants, also needs more massive data centers and cutting-edge computer chips to help train and run their advanced AI models.

“There’s a business benefit to having Republicans win, because they are traditionally less regulatory,” Harbath said.

Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg reacts as he testifies during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on online child sexual exploitation at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, U.S., January 31, 2024.

Evelyn Hockstein | Reuters

Meta isn’t alone in trying to cozy up to Trump. But the extreme measures the company is taking reflects a particular level of animus expressed by Trump over the years.

Trump has accused Meta of censorship and has expressed resentment over the company’s two-year suspension of his Facebook and Instagram accounts following the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

In July 2024, Trump posted on Truth Social that he intended to “pursue Election Fraudsters at levels never seen before, and they will be sent to prison for long periods of time,” adding “ZUCKERBUCKS, be careful!” Trump reiterated that statement in his book, “Save America,” writing that Zuckerberg plotted against him during the 2020 election and that the Meta CEO would “spend the rest of his life in prison” if it happened again.

Meta spends $14 million annually on providing personal security for Zuckerberg and his family, according to the company’s 2024 proxy statement. As part of that security, the company analyzes any threats or perceived threats against its CEO, according to a person familiar with the matter. Those threats are cataloged, analyzed and dissected by Meta’s multitude of security teams.

After Trump’s comments, Meta’s security teams analyzed how Trump could weaponize the Justice Department and the country’s intelligence agencies against Zuckerberg and what it would cost the company to defend its CEO against a sitting president, said the person, who asked not to be named because of confidentiality.

Meta’s efforts to appease the incoming president bring their own risks.

After Zuckerberg announced the new speech policy Tuesday, Boland, the former executive, was among a number of users who took to Meta’s Threads service to tell their followers that they were quitting Facebook.

“Last post before deleting,” Boland wrote in his post.

Before the post could be seen by any of his Threads followers, Meta’s content moderation system had taken it down, citing cybersecurity reasons.

Boland told CNBC in an interview that he couldn’t help but chuckle at the situation.

“It’s deeply ironic,” Boland said.

— CNBC’s Salvador Rodriguez contributed to this report.

WATCH: Meta is returning to free speech tradition, says Facebook’s former chief privacy officer Chris Kelly

Technology

Apple’s market share slides in China as iPhone shipments decline, analyst Kuo says

Published

2 days ago

January 10, 2025

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Apple's market share slides in China as iPhone shipments decline, analyst Kuo says

Jaap Arriens | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Apple is losing market share in China due to declining iPhone shipments, supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo wrote in a report on Friday. The stock slid 2.4%.

“Apple has adopted a cautious stance when discussing 2025 iPhone production plans with key suppliers,” Kuo, an analyst at TF Securities, wrote in the post. He added that despite the expected launch of the new iPhone SE 4, shipments are expected to decline 6% year over year for the first half of 2025.

Kuo expects Apple’s market share to continue to slide, as two of the coming iPhones are so thin that they likely will only support eSIM, which the Chinese market currently does not promote.

“These two models could face shipping momentum challenges unless their design is modified,” he wrote.

Kuo wrote that in December, overall smartphone shipments in China were flat from a year earlier, but iPhone shipments dropped 10% to 12%.

There is also “no evidence” that Apple Intelligence, the company’s on-device artificial intelligence offering, is driving hardware upgrades or services revenue, according to Kuo. He wrote that the feature “has not boosted iPhone replacement demand,” according to a supply chain survey he conducted, and added that in his view, the feature’s appeal “has significantly declined compared to cloud-based AI services, which have advanced rapidly in subsequent months.”

Apple’s estimated iPhone shipments total about 220 million units for 2024 and between about 220 million and 225 million for this year, Kuo wrote. That is “below the market consensus of 240 million or more,” he wrote.

Apple did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

WATCH: Apple has to do something to justify its runup