Story from Daily Mail:
Three weeks before Chris Licht was shown the door at CNN, Christiane Amanpour, the network's most revered journalist, tore into him publicly.
Amanpour had been asked to speak at the Columbia Journalism School graduation ceremony on May 17.
She took the opportunity to skewer Licht's decision to host a town hall with President Trump on CNN, telling grads that how she had fundamentally disagreed with the format.
'I want to do what's right and empathize with and acknowledge all those who need to trust us at CNN, the most trusted name in news. I understand that the town hall a week ago was for many, an earthquake.
'And indeed, because I'm a reporter, before I came here today, I met with CNN CEO Chris Licht at our NY headquarters. He said it was an earthquake but for slightly different reasons.
'I wanted to hear from him first hand what he'd been thinking. We had a very robust exchange of views. He wanted me to know that he welcomed that exchange of views, and I feel, and I said to him, that this always is a good thing to do - after action reports are great.
'We both agreed that to figure out what hat may or may not have gone right or wrong is essential for knowing how to do it in the future. There will be many more town halls in this political season.
'My management believes they did the right thing, a service to the American people. Some reports have written about important new thoughts and things that we learned from Trump's mouth that night.
'For me, the fact that the American people voted three times against Trump and Trumpism - 2018, 2020, 2022 - also speaks volumes. We've done our duty, we've told the story, we have put that in everybody's awareness and people have had the opportunity to make their choices and they have done.
'I still respectfully disagree with allowing Donald Trump to agree in that particular format,' she said.
Licht's departure was announced today by Warner Bros Discovery CEO David Zaslav who said it was down to a number of 'unfortunate' reasons.
Licht had been tasked with boosting ratings and he vowed to do it by course-correcting the network's predictable anti-Trump, left-wing bias.
Instead, he turned off the hard-left viewers who'd been loyal, enraged staff and failed to attract center-right Americans.