Amid all the schadenfreude over Chris Licht’s ouster as CEO at CNN, Joe Scarborough argued that Warner Bros. Discovery head David Zaslav should have kept Licht on for the full term of his two-year-contract.
“Zaslav gave Chris two years; I wish Chris had been given the two years Zaslav promised him,” Scarborough told The New York Times.
“The best of Chris was still to come. He learned a lot. He’s going to succeed and be much better because of what he learned there,” said Scarborough of Licht, who co-created MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” with him.
On Wednesday, Scarborough also tweeted: “Chris will be better for what he has learned through this painful process. We learn more from our failures than our victories. Any winner will tell you that.”
Scarborough had earlier in the week praised the now ex-CEO for vowing to “fight like hell” to earn his staff’s trust back after a damning profile of Licht in The Atlantic, saying, “That’s exactly what you want from somebody that made a mistake.”
Before his brief CNN run, Licht was also a showrunner for “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” at CBS.
