Chris Licht is one of the most well-known faces on news television. The television producer has been working in the industry for 30 years now. He is currently the chairman and CEO of CNN, a position he has held since May 2022.
Licht is known for running the shows The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, Morning Joe, and CBS This Morning. Over the course of his three-decade-long career, the producer and journalist has accumulated a huge amount of wealth. Here is everything we know about his net worth and earnings.
Chris Licht Net Worth
As per the website Celebrity Net Worth, Chris Licht has a net worth of $15 million. Almost all of these earnings have come from his journalism and television production career. His annual salary is reported to be around $3 million.
Licht graduated from Syracuse University’s S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications with a degree in broadcast journalism and political science in 1994. Soon after college, he started working at KNBC in Los Angeles before joining NBC affiliates in LA and San Francisco.
In 2005, he began working at MSNBC as the executive producer for Scarborough Country and Morning Joe. In 2011, Licht joined CBS and was made the vice president of programming at CBS News.
The following year, he started executive producing CBS This Morning. Under his leadership, the show reached new heights and saw unprecedented success. In 2016, he was made executive producer of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, which, a month later, saw its largest weekly audience.
Career as CNN Chairman and CEO
Licht was named the chairman and CEO of CNN in February 2022 after the resignation of former president Jeff Zucker. He took over the company in May of the same year. He soon started working to limit the use of the term breaking news to stories with some significant importance. Licht also aimed to change perceptions of CNN among Republicans.
“Sadly too many people have lost trust in the news media. I think we can be a beacon in regaining that trust by being an organization that exemplifies the best characteristics in journalism: fearlessly speaking truth to power, challenging the status quo, questioning group-think,” he said to the employees on his first day.
“And educating viewers and readers with straightforward facts and insightful commentary, while always being respectful of differing viewpoints. First and foremost, we should, and we will be advocates for truth,” he added.
Work as an Author
In 2010, the newsman suffered a cerebral hemorrhage in Washington, D.C. He later recovered and decided to share his experience through a book. In 2011, his work What I Learned When I Almost Died: How a Maniac TV Producer Put Down His BlackBerry and Started to Live His Life was published by Simon & Schuster.
Licht has also won several awards in his career. While he was the executive producer, CBS This Morning won a Daytime Emmy Award and two News & Documentary Emmy Awards. He was also co-nominated for Outstanding Investigative Journalism in a Regularly Scheduled Newscast and Outstanding Feature Story in a Regularly Scheduled Newscast at the Emmys 2015.
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