FROM PRIDE TO HUBRIS: SOME MEN'S JOURNEY

CNN's Chris Licht lost his job today after giving a chest-beating interview to The Atlantic. With so much of the media in free fall, why do dudes still do that?

I looked up ‘hubris’ online, this came up from a Scrabble site and it’s perfect.

My last post was about women’s relationship to pride; I couldn’t have expected that I’d be on to dudes and hubris seven days later. In the dictionary, “hubris” has a tidy definition: “excessive pride or self-confidence.” And that’s what’s been on display, billboard style, in the media this week.

Now this is a bit inside baseball (which is, after all, the media’s favorite sport), but I’ve been absolutely riveted by the Chris Licht situation at CNN. To summarize (for the most of you who lead a full life and don’t breathlessly read network newsletters), Licht was a superstar producer who ran Scarborough Country with Joe Scarborough from 2005, then developing Morning Joe with Joe and Mika Brzezinski before leaving for CBS in 2011. He launched CBS This Morning in 2012, then moved to The Late Show With Stephen Colbert in 2016. The Late Show became a huge success, consistently winning its time slot. Then, last spring, Licht was offered the role of CEO of CNN. It was a giant job and an even bigger leap, especially following in the footsteps of hugely popular former CEO Jeff Zucker, who had left the network after not disclosing a relationship with his CMO Allison Gollust.  

Anyway, it did not go well: Licht made innumerable missteps, most crucially airing a disastrous town hall in May with Donald Trump, packed with a howling MAGA crowd, which essentially served as a campaign ad. He moved his office away from the CNN newsroom, failing to read the room. He also seemed obsessed with his own press, which led to him fatefully agreeing to an all-access profile in The Atlantic (including early morning, grunty weight-lifting sessions at the gym, as if to prove he was a Big Strong Man) which turned into a 15,000-word evisceration. The profile came out last Friday. This morning, Licht was fired from CNN.

Now, I’m sure Licht is a decent guy – after all, Stephen Colbert is an absolute gent and, I would assume, a great judge of character (he also told Licht not to take the job). Colbert wouldn’t have a total douche running a five day a week evening show. But it got me thinking about Those New York Media Men, and how dated all that hubristic behavior is.

Of course, there is Jeff Zucker, who’s been playing the industry like a fiddle for 30 years and probably still calls Page Six (remember Page Six?). Today Show anchor Matt Lauer (eek, too soon?) But do you remember Ron Galotti, the Condé Nast publisher on whom Mr Big from Sex and the City was modeled? Graydon Carter at Vanity Fair throwing golden party after party, and those young male Condé editors of Details and Bon Appetit, getting high on their headline and expense supply?

They’ve all gone; either let go, left, closed down or canceled. (Galotti now lives what seems to be a bucolic existence on a farm in Vermont). Carter is still around, running his online publication Air Mail and still determined to show he can throw a better party than anyone else. It was striking that the co-host for Carter’s swishy ‘do at the Cannes Film Festival was Warner Bros Discovery CEO David Zaslav (thee current punching bag for striking Hollywood writers and who, ironically, just fired Licht from CNN).

There has been no greater humbling than in the media in the last decade. Look at all the layoffs – tens of thousands in digital media, tech, the gobbling up and spitting out of local newspapers and editors being replaced for half their salaries. So, it’s honestly gob smacking when you see someone like Licht who behaved with no humility at all, like it was 2004 all over again.

But these days, Mr Big has become Mr Medium. In 2023, he’s a man without a crown, but still, for some reason, prancing about in his robes. Why do dudes do that? (I’ll ask Elon Musk. Hold pls…).

That said, the thing most people in the media love is good press - or any press - and that can become intoxicating. Hey, when I started as Editor in Chief of InStyle in 2016, I loved my first profile in The New York Times where the writer followed me to fashion shows and seemed to think I had, one, friends and two, a brain. I totally loved talking to New York Magazine’s The Cut about “how I get it done,” or Grub Street about my irrational love for SmartFood. It was awesome if a reporter thought I was stylish, had a clever point of view or threw a fun party. Who doesn’t like to feel acknowledged, who doesn’t like to feel cool?

But if you run any sort of platform (even your own), every day is an exercise in calibration. If you’re going to promote yourself, you better have something to show for yourself. For me at InStyle, it was a new issue, a cover, a particular stance the magazine was taking (I was EIC through Trump, the summer of #BLM and Covid, so there were stances aplenty). Because every day in the media there are headwinds – rumors, gossip, social media flak, or God forbid, especially in uber-sensitive 2020, “cancelation.”

To describe the daily editorial environment, I always used the analogy of a rowboat in a bay. You get in the little boat at the wharf. You start rowing further out, the clouds darken and the water gets rougher. Shit, maybe you’ve rowed out of the bay entirely. You break into a sweat and furiously paddle, making it back into the bay and anchored at the wharf. You didn’t capsize, which means it was a good day.

I don’t miss that, to be honest. Even though I knew I did great work at InStyle, and before that, Harper’s BAZAAR, the daily exposure to all that was still, at its baseline, stressful. What I learned though is if you own your talents, and do work that you’re proud of, you should be able to talk about it, engagingly and with confidence.

Just do the job, read the room and don’t invite a journalist to watch you weight lift. Because the weight might fall on you.