Kasie Hunt has settled in nicely in the 4 p.m. ET slot on CNN. Since March, her show, The Arena, has covered major stories in real time, leading the broadcast to finish as one of CNN’s most-watched programs.
The show’s format has blended well with the network’s late afternoon and evening offerings. This cohesion has led it to become a significant player in the political space, with top politicians making appearances: “I like to think that that’s why people want to come on and talk to me, because I’m a reporter’s anchor,” Hunt recently told TVNewser.
Well aware that the TV landscape can change in a flash, Hunt is maximizing every opportunity she can get. Following up on TVNewser’s initial interview before the show launched in March, we recently caught up with Hunt to see how things were going for her, so far, inside The Arena.
TVNewser: Five months in, how’s it going in The Arena?
Hunt: Honestly, I’m having a great time. I feel like the longer we’ve been doing it, the more the team has been finding its groove both behind the scenes and on air. We’ve made a lot of progress [and are] starting to feel like we have a groove going, and the viewers can come to the table knowing a little bit more of what to expect. The hardest thing for me was figuring out how to make sure that my energy was peaking at 4:00 in the afternoon instead of six in the morning. My caffeine schedule is considerably different now than it was when I first started. But overall, it’s great.
What is so different about working in the morning versus working in the evening?
The biggest difference is that there is so much news that is still breaking at four in the afternoon, and that’s a very different reality than 6 a.m., when the world is still waking up. There are definitely days when we do a show that we’ve planned and written and thought through, because there wasn’t some big breaking story that changed everything at the last minute. A significant portion of our show is still breaking news or reacting to breaking news, and one of the great things about the format is that it’s well equipped to handle that kind of thing in a flexible way, especially when we can combine it with CNN’s vast newsgathering resources.
Yesterday (07/30/25), for example, we got a verdict in the protein shake poisoning trial right before we came on the air, and they read the verdict right at four. We were able to do that with people that we had pre-positioned, but it wasn’t the conversation we planned to have at the top of the show. But we pivoted quickly and did that.
The other thing that happened was when Kamala Harris announced that she wasn’t going to run for governor of California. That’s the story that’s very much in my wheelhouse as a long-time presidential campaign reporter. When that happened, the conversation immediately was like, “Okay, let’s lead the show with this. What elements are we going to pull? What moments from the campaign should we remind our viewers happened and could inform how they should understand what this decision means?” etc. That ended up being our second conversation.
