Report: Mark Thompson Leading Candidate For Top CNN Job

The former New York Times and BBC chief Mark Thompson is a leading candidate to lead CNN, according to people familiar with the conversations on both sides of the Atlantic, according to semafor.com.

Thompson, who left the Times in 2020 after 8 years, is among a group of candidates in the mix for the job, three people familiar with the recruiting process told Semafor.

Mark Thompson

Since the firing of CNN Chairman Chris Licht in June, CNN has been led by a triumvirate of veteran network leaders as it struggles for a place in a partisan U.S. cable news environment increasingly dominated by MSNBC and Fox News.

According To Ben Smith at Semafor, Thompson’s name has not appeared in voluminous published speculation about the top CNN role, but he has obvious qualifications. He arrived at the New York Times at a desperate moment, and led a spectacular turnaround that turned the company into a dominant player in digital news.

But Thompson’s roots are in TV. Like many top television executives, he began his career as a star producer in the 1980s, and in his 30s led prestige U.K. news programs including Newsnight and Panorama.

Thompson, 66, held top programming jobs at the BBC before becoming chief executive of Channel 4 and then Director-General of the BBC, a high-stakes, intensely political job atop a complex public broadcaster.