Can New CEO Mark Thompson Steady CNN?

The new CNN CEO Mark Thompson told employees during his first day on the job that the cable news company is “nowhere near ready for the future,” CNN reporter Oliver Darcy and other sources told Deadline.

Thompson met with staffers in a video call Monday, outlining his plan to bring the news organization back to life after its shaky year under its former chief executive, Chris Licht. Thompson told employees its TV news is “too dominant at CNN and digital too marginal.”

The new CEO also told staffers to not get “distracted by complicated arguments about balance or whataboutism or false equivalency.”

Thompson joined CNN just months after Licht was ousted. Licht—who had promised to make the network more politically centrist—was blamed for CNN’s shrinking viewership, launching unsuccessful experiments with its programming and frequently angering staff. His departure from the network followed a splashy and very unflattering profile in The Atlantic outlining his failures in detail. 

But Thompson’s appointment by Warner Brothers CEO David Zaslav could right a sinking ship. Under his eight years as CEO of The New York Times, digital subscribers rose to six million from just half a million. Thompson also helped bring the BBC into the digital age during his eight years as its chief in the early 2000s. 

He comes to CNN just as cable news continues its longstanding existential crisis. Despite a boost in viewership during the Trump presidency, cable news has been slowly but surely dying since at least 2015, data show. CNN, Newsmax and MSNBC all saw their audiences shrink in 2022, while Fox News’ viewership increased. CNN was hit especially hard, with the audience for its prime-time news slot falling a whopping 25% from the prior year, according to Pew Research Center.

“For most people under retirement age, the first place they turn for news is their phones, not their TVs. And news players who can’t or won’t respond to that revolution risk losing their audience and their business,” Thompson told staffers in the same meeting on Monday, a transcript of which was also reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Correction 1:33 p.m. EST: A previous version of this article misspelled Oliver Darcy's name.