Mark Thompson

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Mark Thompson took over at CNN in 2023 and is tasked with helping the network, which revolutionized an industry at the end of the 20th century, respond to the revolution the industry faces in the 2020s.

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Mark Thompson is a journalist by training who in the 21st century became singularly successful at transforming stodgy journalistic institutions for the digital age. He spent more than three decades at the BBC before moving to the United States to run The New York Times. In 2023 he was named CEO of CNN, where he was tasked with revitalizing the network that had disrupted broadcast news with its creation in 1980 but which found itself being disrupted by a digital revolution.

Thompson was born in London to an Irish mother and an English father. As a boy, he adopted his mother’s Irish accent, which his parents trained out of him with elocution lessons. He described them as “quite an ambitious immigrant family” who did not want their son’s future hurt by anti-Irish prejudice. He attended Stonyhurst College, a prestigious Jesuit Roman Catholic school, before graduating from Merton College, Oxford, where he ran the student newspaper.

After his Oxford graduation Thompson joined the BBC as a production trainee. For the next 33 years he worked solely in broadcasting, most of it at the BBC. By the age of 30 he had become editor of the network’s flagship nightly Nine O’Clock News. He was known for his deep commitment to news, which enhanced his reputation at the BBC and would serve him well later in his career. He worked as a reporter and a senior editor before being named director general, the most senior news executive, of the BBC in 2004.

He held that role until 2012, and his tenure was marked by steep job cuts but also transformation. He brought the traditional broadcast television giant into the digital era with a strategy that included expansion into mobile and streaming services, while adhering to journalistic principles. He did ruffle feathers in the newsroom when in 2010 he said that in the past the BBC had a “massive left-wing bias.”

After leaving the BBC in 2012, Thompson joined the New York Times Company as CEO and president. Although his selection surprised many—he was not a newspaper journalist and had never worked in the private sector—his ability to develop new technology was seen as highly advantageous for a company facing financial stringency and rapidly changing audience habits. During his tenure the company experienced a dramatic turnaround, as the hard-news–focused Thompson expanded the company’s reach beyond news to cooking, product reviews, sports, and games. But Thompson acknowledged in a 2021 Press Gazette interview that he faced “skepticism inside the building” when he arrived at the Times Company as the top business-side executive. Still he recognized the quality—as well as the weaknesses—of the product, saying, “We weren’t using data properly.” When Thompson arrived at the Times Company, The New York Times had fewer than 700,000 digital subscribers; when he left in 2020 that number had grown nearly tenfold, to 6.7 million. Some of that growth was a result of the controversial and newsworthy presidency of Donald Trump, but Thompson’s strategy allowed the company to take advantage of what was known in media circles as the “Trump bump.”

One of Thompson’s biggest supporters at the Times Company was Dean Baquet, who became executive editor of The Times in 2014. Of Thompson, Baquet has said that “he’s good at identifying the big questions that have to be answered and then he’s good at figuring out who should be in the room when the questions are asked.” Thompson stepped down from the Times Company in 2020. In his early 60s, he became chairman of the board of directors at Ancestry, a genealogy company, and seemed ready for retirement.

In early October 2023 the soon-to-be-knighted Thompson was given another title: chairman, CEO, and editor in chief of CNN Worldwide. He took over at a time of sagging ratings and low morale for the legendary news operation, but he was undeterred, telling the staff, “What I can say is that where others see threat, I see opportunity—especially given CNN’s great brand and the strength of its journalism.”

Within a year of Thompson’s arrival at CNN, the reality of the opportunity was clear. As he had at the BBC, he announced layoffs, but he also sketched out a subscriber-focused strategy for CNN that mirrored what he had implemented at The Times. He also reorganized the newsroom to eliminate silos between broadcast and digital staffs. The network’s, and Thompson’s, commitment to news, however, did not waver.

In 2024 CNN aired one of the most consequential presidential debates in U.S. history. The stumbling performance on the stage by Pres. Joe Biden against former president Trump led Biden to withdraw from the race weeks later. The second Trump administration saw CNN at odds with the president. White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins, in particular, was a regular subject of the president’s ire, as she had been during his first term, when she was briefly banned from a White House event after asking a tough question. In September 2026 the president banned CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House, a move that sparked court action and outcry from press freedom activists.

This all played out as Thompson’s future at CNN came into question with the October 2026 acquisition of the network by Skydance Corporation. The deal created an unprecedented situation in which CBS News and CNN would have the same owner. Speculation about merging the newsrooms—particularly in light of the tumultuous tenure of Bari Weiss at the head of CBS—created concerns within the newsroom and among free-press advocates about the continued independence of CNN. Thompson’s departure would have been seen as a huge blow to the network. But Thompson allayed those concerns with his decision to stay, writing to the staff, “I really do believe we’ll be working alongside a team who don’t just have real vision and real energy, but real values as well.”