Joe Scarborough Blasts ‘Weak’ Firing of Chris Licht

Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough tore into CNN’s parent company for firing the network’s ex- CEO Chris Licht on Friday morning, musing that he would “die before” he let “a magazine article determine who I was going to hire and fire.”

Licht was fired by Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav — previously Licht’s biggest booster — earlier this month after the The Atlantic‘s Tim Alberta published a critical profile of Licht.

Scarborough weighed in on the decision without mincing words:

And let me just say this about my friend Chris Licht at CNN. Chris made mistakes, right? He made mistakes and as I said, he learned from mistakes. Zaslav decided to fire him or to let him go. That’s Zaslav’s decision.

Let me just tell you, though: let’s take Chris and Zas out of this. If I were a CEO, I would die before I let a magazine article determine who I was going to hire or fire. I would call him in and say “You screwed up, shut your mouth, keep your head down, do the job I hired you for, and we’re going to put this behind us.”

And what happens is, just like we’ve talked about with Nike, just like we talked about with the NFL, you don’t let people dictate your terms. If if people are pissed off about Bud Light — you know, it’s so funny, Chris quoted me in the Alberta piece, “scared money never wins.”  It applied to his firing! That’s scared money. Keep your head down and don’t let other people tell you what to do with your blanking company.

And I know that’s like Budweiser. Let’s talk about Bud. Okay, you’re letting people do things, they do things, and then you’re going to suspend them or fire them. By the way, it wasn’t even a TV ad! It was a social media ad. How weak are you as a leader if you panic because Kid Rock gets an AR-15 and shoots beer cans? It’s like I say about Twitter. If you’re scared of Twitter, you don’t deserve a voting card. If you’re afraid of Kid Rock taking a video from shooting Bud Light cans, you don’t deserve to run the damn company.

Licht helped create and launch Morning Joe, and served as the show’s executive producer for several years. Scarborough had previously defended his former colleague by citing CNN’s poor ratings even prior to Licht’s arrival at the network.

“This idea that it was a ratings juggernaut when it just wasn’t before Chris walked through the door, that’s just… that’s just bad reporting,” argued Scarborough. “It wasn’t, it was in third place.”

Watch above via MSNBC.

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