Licht was fired by his boss David Zaslav after a little more than a year at the helm.
Licht tried to take the network and its viewers out of the liberal bubble, but it didn't work. It's not what CNN viewers wanted.
"People tune into cable news to get precisely what Zaslav and Licht were trying to get away from — advocacy journalism," writes Goldberg.
"Unless it's a story about the first shots fired in a foreign war, or about terrorists attacking Americans on 9/11, viewers don't tune in to get down-the-middle, straight news reporting. They tune in to get their own biases validated by famous people on TV."
And under Licht, CNN wasn't giving its viewers as much of what they wanted. Instead, it gave them a Trump town hall with an audience full of rowdy MAGA supporters — a move, Goldberg notes, that was "widely criticized, inside and outside the network."
There were also criticisms of Licht's management style, which some characterized as aloof.
But it was political tribalism that did him in — not just the media's, but the public's too.
As Goldberg notes, "[the public] may scream and yell about bias in the news, but, when all is said and done, bias in the news is just what they want. That's why, despite CNN's good intentions a year ago, their experiment was bound to fail."
Read the op-ed at TheHill.com.
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