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The Worldwide Leader in Zaz

It’s been a year since CNN has been under Zaz rule—a mixed bag of earnest repositioning and depolarization, to be sure, but also rough headlines, rougher ratings, and high-profile departures. Chris Licht’s post-Zuckerification wasn’t going to happen overnight, but how long will it take?

David Zaslav tells friends that CNN is some 6 percent of his business—and 90 percent of his headaches.
David Zaslav tells friends that CNN is some 6 percent of his business—and 90 percent of his headaches. Photo: Ethan Miller/Getty Images
Dylan Byers
April 26, 2023

Two years ago, shortly after David Zaslav engineered his $43 billion Discovery-WarnerMedia masterstroke and elevated himself to the rarefied stratosphere of legit media moguldom, he received some unsolicited advice from fellow traveler Brian Roberts, the chairman and chief executive of Comcast. As Zaslav would later recount to friends, Roberts had told him that the cable news business, with its partisan politics and outsized egos, could be a major distraction in the grand scheme of operationalizing his then-$200 billion market cap multinational telecom and media conglomerate. Cable news, so the story goes, accounted for a mere single-digit percentage point of overall revenue and a disproportionate amount of the company’s narrative and his executives’ anxiety. In time, Zaslav would embrace the line as his own, and add some playful embellishment: CNN was some 6 percent of his business, he would tell friends, and 90 percent of his headaches.