Change doesn’t always happen overnight… sometimes it takes an entire year. And you don’t have to be an expert reader of tea leaves to recognize that 2024 has been a pivot point for TV news.
The steady accumulation of resignations, promotions, job changes, and corporate reorgs—as well as a few notable passings of celebrated journalists—over the past 12 months confirm that a very different landscape awaits the industry beyond that proverbial revolving door in 2025.
To kick off the last full week of 2024, TVNewser looks back on some of the biggest departures, career relaunches, and shake-ups of this calendar year—and how they contributed to the larger climate of change around TV news.
January—March
- Medhi Hasan was the first prominent journalist to depart their outlet at the top of 2024. In January, the former MSNBC anchor announced that he would be exiting the network following the cancellation of The Medhi Hasan Show the previous November. Hasan later went independent by launching the Substack-based media organization Zeteo—a move that other Newsers would follow as the year unfolded.
- Former CBS Sunday Morning host Charles Osgood passed away at age 91 on Jan. 23, eight years after he retired from the program. Osgood’s soothing voice defined Sunday mornings for many viewers during his 22-year tenure on CBS and evoked a bygone era of broadcasting. “He was one of the best broadcast stylists and one of the last,” his friend and current CBS Sunday Morning host Jane Pauley observed in a statement.
- CNN began its transformational year under CEO Mark Thompson in February by overhauling its weekday morning schedule. Early Start was rebranded as CNN This Morning—with Phil Mattingly and Poppy Harlow departing the previous version of the latter show (Harlow left CNN entirely in April)—while CNN News Central moved earlier in the AM. Thompson would later outline his larger plans for the network, including a renewed emphasis on digital products.
- Elon Musk telegraphed his rightward shift early in the year, abruptly terminating former CNN anchor Don Lemon‘s much-heralded partnership with X, formerly Twitter. Lemon interviewed Musk ahead of the launch of The Don Lemon Show and asked questions that his new employer clearly didn’t care to answer. “We had a good conversation,” Lemon wrote after Musk cancelled his yet-to-debut series. “Clearly he felt differently.” Lemon deactivated his X account in November following the presidential election.
- In another short-lived tenure, former RNC chair and vocal Donald Trump supporter Ronna McDaniel was hired and then fired by NBC News in the span of five days in March. Her impending arrival created a furor among prominent MSNBC hosts—most notably Rachel Maddow—and swiftly led NBCUniversal Group Chairman Cesar Conde to cut ties with McDaniel. The incident reflected MSNBC’s attentiveness to its largely progressive audience as the election cycle kicked into gear.
