LICHT
Chris

• 1. Early life and education
• 2. Career
• 3. Awards
• 4. Personal life

Christopher Andrew Licht is an American television newsman and producer. Since April 2016, he has been the showrunner and executive producer of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, as well as CBS's executive vice president of special programming. He is best known for having launched Morning Joe on MSNBC and the reboot of CBS This Morning. He will depart CBS sometime in May 2022 to become the chairman and CEO of CNN.

Early life and education

Licht was born to Susan Licht and Dr. Peter Licht of Newtown, Connecticut. He graduated from Syracuse University's S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications in 1993 with a bachelor's degree in broadcast journalism and political science. In 2014, one of the TV news control rooms at Syracuse's Dick Clark Studios and Alan Gerry Center for Media Innovation was named in his honor.

Career

Licht began his career at KNBC in Los Angeles around the time of the O.J. Simpson trial. He also worked with local NBC affiliates in LA and San Francisco markets.

In 2005, he joined MSNBC as the executive producer for Scarborough Country and later was the founding executive producer of Morning Joe, which he and host Joe Scarborough helped create prior to its launch in 2007.

He joined CBS in 2011 and was named vice president of programming at CBS News. Licht was the executive producer of CBS This Morning starting when the show launched in 2012, and later joined The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in 2016. While in charge of CBS This Morning, he was credited with making the show unexpectedly successful, giving CBS its most competitive place in the morning show race in almost 30 years. This success occurred partly because Licht allowed the show's hosts Gayle King, Charlie Rose, and Norah O'Donnell, to talk freely about news events and about themselves. A month after he was named executive producer and showrunner of The Late Show, the show saw its largest weekly audience since February 19 of that year. As executive producer, he focused on management issues that host Stephen Colbert had previously handled, as well as shortening the opening credits and adding a comedy sketch immediately before them.

After the abrupt resignation of CNN president Jeff Zucker in February 2022, Licht was named his successor on February 26, 2022.

Awards

While Licht was executive producer of CBS This Morning, the series won a Peabody Award and three Emmy Awards (one Daytime Emmy Award and two News & Documentary Emmy Awards). As CBS This Morning's executive producer, he was co-nominated for three Emmy Awards in 2015: one for Outstanding Investigative Journalism in a Regularly Scheduled Newscast, one for Outstanding Feature Story in a Regularly Scheduled Newscast, and one for Outstanding Continuing Coverage of a News Story in a Regularly Scheduled Newscast. The following year, the series won an Emmy for Outstanding Investigative Journalism in a Regularly Scheduled Newscast for a story on fraud at compounding pharmacies, which he co-executive produced with Steve Capus.

Personal life

On April 28, 2010, Licht was in a Cadillac Escalade on the way to a hotel in Washington, D.C. when he had a near-fatal cerebral hemorrhage. He later wrote a book about the resulting experience, What I Learned When I Almost Died: How a Maniac TV Producer Put Down His BlackBerry and Started to Live His Life, which was published in 2011. Joe Biden, the then vice-president and a survivor of an aneurysm himself, cold-called Dr. Vivek Deshmukh, a highly recommended neurosurgeon, to care for Licht.

As of 2017, he lived in Manhattan with his wife, Jenny Blanco and their two sons. Jenny worked at CNN for several years as a producer for Anderson Cooper and then as a director of talent recruiting and development. Licht began dating her while they both were on assignment at the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens and got married in April 2006 at the L'Auberge Del Mar, in Del Mar, California.