The staff shakeups at CNN under new management and ownership continue. White House correspondent John Harwood announced Friday that “today’s my last day at CNN,” tweeting that he looks “forward to figuring out what’s next.”
Harwood came to the network in Jan. 2020 after spending 13 years at CNBC as a Washington correspondent, where he broke the news in 2008 that John McCain had picked Sarah Palin as his running mate. In 2015, he made a name for himself as a harsh Donald Trump critic after clashing with the then-candidate in a GOP primary debate—a reputation that continued at CNN.
His departure comes shortly after the network’s chief media correspondent Brian Stelter—long an antagonist of right-wing media—was terminated and his show canned.
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Harwood appeared three times on CNN Friday morning, and apparently knowing that this was his last day, took the opportunity to deliver a parting message about the challenges facing journalism—and CNN itself—when covering the current state of politics.
“The core point he made in that political speech about a threat to democracy is true,” Harwood said on CNN’s Newsroom about President Joe Biden’s “Soul of the Nation” address the night before. “Now, that’s something that’s not easy for us, as journalists, to say. We’re brought up to believe there’s two different political parties with different points of view and we don’t take sides in honest disagreements between them. But that’s not what we’re talking about.”
Harwood continued: “These are not honest disagreements. The Republican Party right now is led by a dishonest demagogue. Many, many Republicans are rallying behind his lies about the 2020 election and other things as well. And a significant portion—or a sufficient portion—of the constituency that they’re leading attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, violently. By offering pardons or suggesting pardons for those people who violently attacked the Capitol, which you’ve been pointing out numerous times this morning, Donald Trump made Joe Biden’s point for him.”
This commentary was similar in tone to what he said during a recent segment on Stelter’s now-canceled media analysis show Reliable Sources. During the June 20 appearance, Harwood said, “We should not take sides on liberal versus conservative,” but rather the “spectrum is truth on the one side and lies on the other side” right now.
Network insiders recently told The Daily Beast’s Confider that staffers feel that right-leaning billionaire John Malone, a key Warner Bros. Discovery board member, was behind Stelter’s firing in an effort to make CNN more “centrist.”
Additionally, staffers feel that Malone is “indirectly dictating an agenda” to new CNN chief Chris Licht and fear more layoffs and cutbacks down the road to make the network “more vanilla.”
Neither Harwood nor a network spokesperson immediately responded to a request for comment Friday.
