CNN oust­ed chief ex­ec­u­tive Chris Licht af­ter a tu­mul­tuous year lead­ing the strug­gling news net­work that cul­mi­nat­ed in a damn­ing mag­a­zine pro­file and the grow­ing re­al­iza­tion that he’d lost the con­fi­dence of the net­work’s jour­nal­ists.

The change was an­nounced at CNN’s ed­i­to­r­i­al meet­ing Wednes­day morn­ing and came just two days af­ter Licht said he would “fight like hell” to earn the trust of those around him.

David Za­slav, CEO of CNN par­ent com­pa­ny Warn­er Bros. Dis­cov­ery, ap­point­ed a four-per­son in­ter­im lead­er­ship team, and said at the ed­i­to­r­i­al meet­ing that he would con­duct a thor­ough search for Licht’s re­place­ment.

Licht had a man­date to try and make CNN more palat­able to both sides of the coun­try’s po­lit­i­cal di­vide; Re­pub­li­cans had be­come in­creas­ing­ly sus­pi­cious of the net­work fol­low­ing re­peat­ed at­tacks by for­mer Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump.

But some at the net­work saw Licht’s man­date for change as a re­pu­di­a­tion of their past work, and a live town hall in­ter­view with Trump last month drew wide­spread crit­i­cism.

Ear­li­er in the year, Licht re­vamped the net­work’s morn­ing show, but that proved un­suc­cess­ful and led to the fir­ing of long­time per­son­al­i­ty Don Lemon. Ef­forts to build a new prime-time line­up moved slow­ly, with Kait­lan Collins on­ly re­cent­ly ap­point­ed to fill at 9 p.m. hour with­out a per­ma­nent host since Chris Cuo­mo was fired in De­cem­ber 2021.

Licht over­saw lay­offs last year fol­low­ing Za­slav’s de­ci­sion to shut­ter the CNN+ stream­ing ser­vice on­ly weeks af­ter it had start­ed.