CNN’s Jake Tapper will return to hosting The Lead at 4:00 p.m. Eastern Time after a less-than-month-long stint anchoring CNN Tonight with Jake Tapper at 9:00 p.m.
“As part of a special lineup, Jake agreed to anchor the 9 pm hour through the midterm elections. At the completion of that schedule, he’ll be returning to his award-winning program ‘The Lead.’ We will announce post-election plans for that time slot in the coming days,” a spokesman for CNN told Semafor.
A source close to Tapper told the outlet that the arrangement had always been temporary in nature.
Tapper’s primetime debut on October 11 — which featured interviews with President Joe Biden and actor Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson — pulled in just 854,000 viewers, a far cry from the close to 1.6 million MSNBC’s Alex Wagner drew and the 2.6 million that Fox’s Sean Hannity boasted on that same evening.
Since then, the gap has only grown. Over the course of the month, CNN Tonight averaged 691,000 viewers per night, fewer than The Lead averaged over the same timespan.
Tapper’s move to primetime was thought by some observers to be a tryout of sorts for the anchor, who many believe is favored by Chris Licht, the relatively new head of CNN, to be the face of the news network. Licht has reportedly put an emphasis on returning to down-the-middle news coverage after his predecessor, Jeff Zucker, steered the ship to the left during Donald Trump’s presidency.
While Tapper is a loud, unabashed critic of Trump, he has long been thought to be one of the more centrist anchors at CNN, due to his tough interviews of Democrats as well as Republicans.
Licht’s course correction puts his network — and Tapper — in an awkward spot, as its viewership is predominantly liberal after Zucker’s turn at the helm, and seems to be resistant to change.
Commentator Keith Olbermann captured this frustration in September, calling Licht a “TV fascist” last month.