NEW: Poppy Harlow to Exit CNN
CNN anchor Poppy Harlow is leaving the network, network chief Mark Thompson announced on Friday’s 9 a.m. editorial call.
Harlow, a veteran of CNN who spent nearly two decades on the air, will be departing in May, a CNN spokesperson confirmed to Mediaite. The news of her departure was first reported by Vanity Fair.
In her years at CNN, Harlow served primarily as an anchor on the dayside schedule. Highly-regarded inside the network, she also hosted a podcast on business titans that featured interviews with everyone from Jamie Dimon and Gwyneth Paltrow.
The beginning of the end of her time at CNN came when she was named the co-host of CNN This Morning, conceived by ex-CNN boss Chris Licht as the network’s flagship morning program, alongside Don Lemon and Kaitlan Collins. The show would go down as perhaps the biggest failure of the short-lived Licht era at CNN. Marred by on-air drama and behind-the-scenes tensions, the show finally collapsed when Licht fired Lemon and moved Collins to a slot in prime time. The next edition of the show saw Harlow hosting alongside Phil Mattingly, but under the leadership of Thompson, CNN This Morning was broken down and both hosts were moved into different roles.
“When I walked in the door at CNN in 2008, I was 25 years old and had never been on live TV. Green is an understatement!” Harlow said in an internal note to colleagues that was obtained by Vanity Fair. “I passed those three iconic red letters in the hall on day one and thought how lucky I was to be here.”
“There’s been plenty written about what’s wrong with journalism, and the challenges our industry faces,” she wrote. “And it does. But there is also so much right with it. At the heart of everything we do is the pursuit of truth – it is the core of CNN. I remain CNN’s biggest fan and I’ll be watching and cheering you on every day.”
She did not reveal her future plans, saying only, “For now, my plan is to walk our children to school and pick them up (hopefully they won’t get sick of me!), and to support the evolution of journalism in every way I can, while preserving the human(ity) in it.”
