Poppy Harlow Parts Ways With CNN After Morning Show Exit
Poppy Harlow and CNN are parting ways after the news outlet put the veteran correspondent through a whirlwind era as one of the co-anchors of an ill-conceived morning program that was ultimately scrapped.
CNN executives “have been wonderful and have given me the space to make this decision,” Harlow said in a memo to colleagues Friday. “I am very grateful to them.”
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The decision to leave was Harlow’s, according to people familiar with the matter. CNN executives had come up with a handful of ideas for a new role following the network’s decision to cancel the A.M. program she had been anchoring, most recently with Phil Mattingly. Mattingly has since been named a national correspondent. Harlow felt she wanted to take a break and survey other options that might be available to her, according to one of the people familiar with the situation.
She could probably use some time off. Harlow was named in 2022 to co-anchor a new morning program with Don Lemon and Kaitlan Collins as part of a bid by CNN to compete more directly with other morning-news options, which include everything from NBC’s “Today” to Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends:” and MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” Under previous CEO Chris Licht, CNN envisioned the program as something that would offer a broad take on breaking stories, burnish CNN’s news resources and shy away from some of the political posturing for which the network was becoming increasingly known.
Instead, the concept blew up. Lemon clashed with producers and his co-anchors, and ratings did not improve. Ultimately, CNN executives ousted Lemon, deployed Collins to primetime, and left Harlow to soldier on.
Harlow joined CNN in 2008 after working as an anchor for the Forbes Video Network and NY1 News. She has developed a reputation for being exceedingly well-prepared and often used that ability to interview CEOs and other business notables, along with the usual newsmakers.
In 2021, Harlow took a hiatus to pursue Yale Law School’s one-year Master of Studies in Law, a program aimed at people who are not attorneys but want to become more familiar with legal studies and apply knowledge of the law to the work they do. She was eager to use the education in her reporting, she told Variety at the time, but also hoped the program would have the added benefit of making her feel closer to her father, a former attorney who is now deceased. She said she hoped the law course would prove ” “additive to everything I do on a daily basis here, making a little bit of difference and that’s not a bad thing.”
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