Soledad O'Brien: CNN Firing 'Worked Out Best for Everyone'

CNN recently canceled Soledad O’Brien’s morning show, Starting Point, but the anchor is now saying she’s not at all unhappy about it.

“I think it has worked out best for everyone,” O’Brien told reporters.

The anchor reports that she realized she had creative differences with CNN’s new chief, Jeff Zucker, and complained that her show never got “a lot of support” from CNN executives during its one-year run.

This is a far different world than that when Starting Point debuted. Then-Executive Vice President and Managing Editor of CNN Mark Whitaker said in a press release that the launch of O’Brien’s show was “an exciting time to be relaunching our morning show.”

“With CNN’s global reach and this unique cast of superb journalists as anchors, we have the opportunity to do something truly fresh and different,” Whitaker said in November of 2011.

Whitaker himself is also now out at CNN.

O’Brien’s morning show never made much headway in ratings, garnering only an average of 234,000 viewers on a typical day last year.

Apparently O’Brien will continue as an outside producer of reports and documentaries for CNN but will not be a direct employee. One TV watcher noted that this means she can pitch all the stories she wants while CNN will likely say, “don’t call us, we’ll call you.”

CNN is scheduled to replace Starting Point with a new morning show built around the recently hired Chris Cuomo.