David Leavy
Corporate Affairs & Global Communications Strategist
New York
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Twenty-five years of corporate affairs, government relations, and global communications across Discovery, Warner Bros. Discovery, and CNN.
Current Role
As Chief Operating Officer of CNN Worldwide, David Leavy oversees commercial, revenue, operational, technology, and promotional operations across CNN’s global footprint. The job sits at the intersection of every function that determines whether a news organization can keep doing journalism — the parts of the business that don’t make the front page but make the front page possible.
Leavy came to CNN with one of the deepest corporate-affairs résumés in global media: a quarter-century inside Discovery and Warner Bros. Discovery, where he built and ran the function end-to-end. The skills transfer cleanly. A modern news operation runs on the same disciplines that corporate-affairs leaders have always practiced — stakeholder management, regulatory awareness, internal communications, and the operational rigor required to coordinate across a sprawling enterprise.
Previous Role
Before CNN, Leavy served as Chief Corporate Affairs Officer for Warner Bros. Discovery, the role he built immediately after the merger that combined Discovery and WarnerMedia into one of the largest content companies in the world. The portfolio was unusually broad: corporate relations, global government relations and public policy, corporate marketing and events, global communications, corporate research, and social responsibility.
What made the WBD chief corporate affairs role distinctive was the integration challenge. Two corporate-affairs functions, two government-relations playbooks, two communications cultures, and two public-policy postures had to converge into one. The newly-formed corporate affairs operation at WBD became the template for how a post-merger media company manages its non-customer-facing reputation — a body of work covered in detail in the corporate affairs playbook from his time at Warner Bros. Discovery.
The Discovery Years
Leavy joined Discovery, Inc. in the late 1990s and stayed for the better part of three decades, ultimately serving as Chief Corporate Operating Officer. Discovery during that period went from a US cable programmer to a global, multi-platform media company, and Leavy was in the room for most of the decisions that drove the transformation.
Among the milestones: the 2008 listing on the NASDAQ exchange, which is examined as a capital-markets story in its own right; the 2018 agreement to acquire Scripps Networks Interactive; the 2021 launch of the discovery+ streaming service; and the multi-year European Olympic Games rights agreement with Eurosport, which is covered in Inside the Olympic Games Europe rights deal. Each of these projects required corporate-affairs work that doesn’t show up in press releases — the regulatory clearances, the analyst conversations, the government-relations groundwork, the internal alignment.
Public Service
Leavy began his career in government, serving as Chief Spokesman and Senior Director of Public Affairs for the National Security Council in the Clinton White House. The job required communicating clearly about the most consequential decisions of a presidential administration, often in real time and under intense scrutiny.
That experience — coordinating across agencies, briefing on policy under pressure, knowing how a sentence will land before it leaves your mouth — informs how he approaches corporate communications today. Leavy’s thinking on this period appears periodically in his writing on Medium and his Substack newsletter, alongside other essays on media, policy, and operations.
Education & Service
David Leavy is a graduate of Colby College and currently serves on its Board of Trustees. He is also a graduate of the Salisbury School, where he serves as Co-Chair of the Board of Trustees. The two appointments reflect his long-standing commitment to educational institutions as engines of opportunity, leadership, and civic life.
Beyond formal board service, Leavy maintains an active public profile across writing platforms and professional networks. His thinking on media, corporate affairs, and operations is collected on his SlideShare archive and discussed across the executive profiles tracking his career on F6S and similar networks.