It was two days after the polls had closed. Donald Trump was still raging about the early results, Joe Biden was daydreaming about his Oval Office decor, and millions of Americans were fixated on the cable news channels. Steve Kornacki, a bespectacled election wonk and one of the main faces of MSNBC’s “Road to 270” coverage, was gesticulating in front of an interactive touchscreen—the Big Board in MSNBC jargon, not to be confused with CNN’s Magic Wall—breaking down the nail-biter in Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, over on the West Coast, Leslie Jones was snacking on something that sounded delicious (if her enthusiastic chomps were any indication), her eyes glued to the TV.

“This is how I like my reporters to look: disheveled and concerned,” the former Saturday Night Live star said between bites. “I love this dude.” Jones pointed her phone at the TV and recorded the Kornacki segment while narrating along. Then she tweeted the video to her more than 1 million followers. From that moment, Jones’s MSNBC obsession became a must-watch daily spectacle in its own right. She was a relatable superfan, and her side-splitting commentary was a symptom of what one veteran producer described to me as “peak cable news.” The Trump soap opera was captivating viewers like nothing else, and we were witnessing its disastrous finale in real time.

Over the next three months, Trump’s “Stop the Steal” circus played out like a bad horror flick, complete with Rudy Giuliani ranting about imaginary widespread voter fraud while a substance that looked like brown hair dye oozed down his face. In the background, there was cable news, narrating the minute-by-minute chaos, feeding our nonstop information addiction, keeping us hooked, lest we miss what happened next. And in the background of that was Jones, gushing over her favorite hosts, critiquing the commentariat’s remote-work scenery, and sometimes weighing in with impassioned diatribes of her own. “You remember these bitches when it’s time to vote again,” Jones urged her followers in a 23-second video on January 4. She was excoriating the dozen Republican senators, pictured onscreen in an MSNBC graphic, who were planning to oppose Biden’s certification. “This is who y’all remember: the dirty-ass 12.”

Two days later, MAGA fanatics invaded the United States Capitol. They ransacked the halls of government, disrupted the Electoral College count, and endangered hundreds of congresspeople, journalists, and staff. Five people died. As the melee unfolded, the nation watched in horror. Jones, who pleaded for the 25th Amendment while making a video of Rachel Maddow and Nicolle Wallace, was one of more than 4,006,000 watching MSNBC that day. Another 2,988,000 were tuned in to Fox News. CNN clobbered them both, with 5,221,000 viewers, making January 6 the most-watched day in the network’s 40-year history.

Even combined, those numbers pale in comparison to a megawatt special on one of the broadcast networks, like, say, Oprah interviewing Harry and Meghan, which netted a whopping 17.1 million American viewers. (Never mind the 95 million who watched the O.J. Simpson chase back in 1994.) But in cable news terms, the ratings were gangbusters. If this was peak cable news, you could call January 6, as dark and awful as it was, the peak of the peak. As the veteran producer put it, “You may never see those numbers again.”

In the days and weeks after President Biden’s inauguration, without endless provocations from the man who occupied such a vast swath of our attention for the better part of five years, news consumption started to feel more and more, what’s the word—healthy? Liberated? Sane? It’s not as if there was suddenly a shortage of major news, not least of all a pandemic that continued to kill thousands of Americans every week. But as the normalcy of the Biden administration sank in, the average person’s media diet began to feel further and further away from the nonstop tweets, the constant controversies, the soul-sucking turmoil.

Bit by bit, the Trump gold rush slowed to a trickle, and people began to break their cable news addictions. There were, after all, plenty of other things to watch. Another industry veteran recalled a conversation he’d just had with a friend who said it used to be that “after work, they would come home and put on Rachel Maddow or put on CNN because they had to get caught up on whatever crazy thing had happened that day. Now they come home and decide what to stream.” (By the last week of March, Jones was spending an evening tweeting live video commentary of Zack Snyder’s Justice League.)

It wasn’t long before dire prognostications began to swirl. “Trump predicted news ratings would ‘tank if I’m not there.’ He wasn’t wrong,” declared a March 22 headline in The Washington Post, which reported drops at all three of the leading cable news channels (CNN the most and Fox News the least). The previous week, a chart created by Variety’s business intelligence service was circulating on Twitter. It compared the total audience for each prime-time show for the first week of March versus the first week of December (a comparison network executives would argue is ridiculous, but that’s another story). Don Lemon and Anderson Cooper saw losses of a little more than 30 percent and Chris Cuomo a little less. The losses for Chris Hayes and Lawrence O’Donnell were in the neighborhood of 17 percent. Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, and Rachel Maddow were each down 10 percent, give or take. Tucker Carlson held onto more of his viewers than anyone else, with a dip of just under 5 percent. “The next opportunity for Trump to dominate the headlines will be if he declares as a candidate for the 2024 elections,” the Variety analysis concluded. “In the meantime, the left-leaning networks will have to rely on politicians making the occasional gaffe and just get used to the post-Trump slump.”

It’s worth noting that CNN, MSNBC, and Fox have a wide array of digital and streaming endeavors, which means you either believe that cable news will eventually fizzle out as traditional cable viewers flee, or you believe the strength of these brands creates an opportunity to establish new viewing habits and find audiences on new platforms. But conversations I had with a range of executives, producers, journalists, agents, and analysts painted a stark reality nonetheless. “We’re unlikely to reach that peak of Trumpified interest in cable news again,” one source told me. “What the networks are now trying to figure out is, how do they quickly make that okay?” Another said, “Look back before Trump, before the man ran for office, and look at where the trend lines were going. These last five years have been an anomaly.”

Rich Greenfield, a media analyst with LightShed Partners, echoed that sentiment. “It honestly feels like we’re back to the run-up to the 2016 election, like we’re going back in time five years to when cable news was really about old people,” he said. “The volatility, the anger, the hatred that was spewed across cable news over the last few years, from both sides, clearly brought an audience. I would feel very comfortable saying I don’t think we’ll ever see sustained full-year ratings like we’ve just seen.”

One of the stars forged in the crucible of peak cable news was Abby Phillip. She joined CNN from The Washington Post in 2017 and worked as a White House correspondent for most of the Trump presidency, doing the dirty work of shouting out inquiries at press gaggles and enduring the president’s bilious retorts. (“What a stupid question,” Trump sneered when Phillip asked if he wanted Robert Mueller reined in.) During the postelection period, Phillip was given a prominent role in the network’s prime-time specials. Night after night, she appeared alongside Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, a fresh young face of 32 offering sharp and measured analysis on the latest political havoc. Then came a glowing New York Times profile. Then a promotion to a Sunday morning political show. Then, in March, a stylish photo shoot for The Cut, accompanying an interview in which Gayle King gushed, “I’m thrilled to be sitting here talking to you. I’m not kidding, I just adore you.”

Phillip is now one of the most prominent Black journalists on television. She’s someone who represents the next generation of cable news talent. She’s also someone who will be on the rise in the coming years as the number of people watching cable is expected to fall. She broke out during a moment when it was easy to get viewers fired up and excited, to keep them coming back for more. Only a few years earlier, CNN producers were pulling rabbits out of hats to figure out how to fill a whole day’s worth of air, wringing every last bit of drama from a marooned cruise ship or a missing Malaysian airliner.

“I don’t think the days of the missing airplane are coming back,” Phillip told me. “There’s still a lot of interest in politics. People are still watching political news, but now we have to give them more than just, what did Trump do today?” The hair-raising interregnum of November 2020 through January 2021 could very well go down as one of the most exhilarating times of Phillip’s career, but it wasn’t sustainable. “We can’t always be in this heightened state—of anxiety, fascination, amusement, whatever it is,” she said. “How do we make people feel like they understand better what’s going on in their country and not just be outraged by it all the time? That’s the post-Trump challenge.”

In terms of ratings, CNN would argue that its falloff looked dramatic because the network gained so much audience during Trump, and that no one expected all of those people to stick around long term. Privately, CNN president Jeff Zucker has acknowledged that Trump hurt CNN with Republicans, but he’s also said the only numbers he really cares about are the ones that advertisers care about, adults ages 25 to 54, and in that metric, CNN emerged from the Trump cycle basically neck and neck with Fox.

In February, after months of intrigue regarding his future, Zucker told employees that he expected to move on at the end of 2021. Zucker transformed CNN during his eight years running the network, and he’s widely revered by CNN journalists. As one of them told me right before Zucker announced his intention to step down, “In 40 years of CNN, the place has never been defined by its leader like it is right now.” Referring to the late former leader of Fox News, the journalist added, “It’s like Roger Ailes without the sexual abuse and hush money.”

Several well-connected sources suggested that the real question is not who will replace Jeff Zucker, but rather who will own CNN. “I think it gets sold by the time they have to make a decision on who will run it,” said one. There’s been an uptick in speculation that debt-ridden AT&T will put CNN on the block, perhaps as a package deal with the Turner entertainment networks or possibly even WarnerMedia as a whole. Former Turner CEO John Martin, who is friendly with Zucker, casually explored the possibility of buying CNN through a special-purpose acquisition company, sources told me. Within the past year, Zucker has been approached by suitors interested in buying CNN, according to people familiar with the matter, but his response was, “You’ve gotta talk to AT&T.” (The Wall Street Journal has previously reported on Zucker’s dealings with potential suitors.)

Whoever ends up in the driver’s seat will be running a network that emerged from the Trump era as a different place than it was going in. Not only did Trump give Ted Turner’s pride and joy its best ratings in 25 years and record profits north of $1 billion annually, he also gave CNN a reason to have a point of view. Hosts were suddenly emboldened to call a lie a lie, to say that something is crazy when it sounds crazy, not to mask their incredulity or even their abject disgust at the most shocking and destructive impulses of those in power. A talent agent I was chatting with put it like this: “Trump forced CNN to become a television network as opposed to a wire service on television.”

Some say CNN is now a liberal network, but the brass would vigorously dispute that, pointing out that CNN’s journalists are tough on politicians from both sides. (Chris Cuomo took a lot of heat for sitting out his brother’s various scandals after interviewing the governor nearly a dozen times during the height of New York’s COVID-19 crisis, but hosts like Tapper and Brianna Keilar dove in with blistering Andrew Cuomo segments.) Still, the perception might be hard to shake. A former CNN executive told me, “Roger Ailes wanted CNN to be known as a left-wing network, and where Ailes didn’t fully succeed, Trump did.”

At 3:30 p.m. East Coast time on March 4, Lachlan Murdoch, CEO of Fox News’s parent company, Fox Corporation, logged on for a virtual “fireside chat” as part of Morgan Stanley’s annual media and telecom conference. He beamed in from Fox’s Century City headquarters in Los Angeles, sitting at a conference table in front of some muted office art, wearing a crisp white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a surfer-chic bracelet on his right wrist. After a few warm-ups about the media industry, corporate strategy, and the streaming wars, Morgan Stanley analyst Ben Swinburne got to the good stuff.

“For investors in Fox who are anxious about Fox News’s leadership position, and relevance, as we look forward, what’s your message?”

Lachlan leaned back and cleared his throat. “Look, it’s pretty simple. We’ve been in this business a long time,” he said. “What we didn’t foresee was the news cycle post the election. The president not accepting the results, the second impeachment trial, and then of course the riots in Washington, D.C. So just while our audience was disappointed with the election results and taking a pause, and we started to see that dip, we saw our competitors…have these big spikes with those news cycles. That’s come back down to earth…. We’re number one again in prime time and we’re sort of neck and neck with MSNBC in total daytime viewers…. The main beneficiary of the Trump administration, from a ratings point of view, was MSNBC. MSNBC had the biggest lift relative to where it was before, and relative to its peers, through the Trump administration.” He paused before saying the thing that was bound to generate a cascade of headlines. “That’s because they’re in sort of loyal opposition, right? They called out the president when he needed to be called out. That’s what our job is now with the Biden administration. And you know, you’ll see our ratings really improve from here and will do so for at least the next four years.”

The creator of Fox News, Lachlan’s father, Rupert Murdoch, who turned 90 on March 11, had long desired a relationship with a sitting U.S. president of the kind he’s had with leaders in the U.K. and Australia. He made at least a bit of headway with Barack Obama in the run-up to the 2008 election. It included a series of Sunday-night phone conversations that August, focusing on topics like education and the economy, according to someone with knowledge of the 45-minute calls, who told me Murdoch “was impressed with Obama. He saw the benefits of access to power and what it could mean for his company.”

It wasn’t until Trump came along that Murdoch finally forged his long-coveted Oval Office alliance. Fox News and its sister channel, Fox Business Network, became mouthpieces for the Trump administration through their opinion hosts, even as Trump was challenged by journalists involved in Fox’s news coverage. The mythical stolen-election narrative that fueled the Stop the Steal sideshow got plenty of oxygen from the likes of Fox personalities like Jeanine Pirro, Maria Bartiromo, and Lou Dobbs, and the company was hit with defamation lawsuits from two voting-systems firms to a combined tune of $4.3 billion. The network called the suits “meritless” and “baseless” and said, “Fox News Media is proud of our 2020 election coverage, which stands in the highest tradition of American journalism.”

While some of the opinion hosts gleefully spread Trump’s election disinformation, other Fox figures were tethered to reality. It was the network’s decision desk, after all, that had enraged Trump by calling Arizona for Biden. Numerous Fox journalists told the audience there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud. Carlson did a memorable segment demanding that unhinged Trump attorney Sidney Powell furnish proof of the alleged election theft. The most devout Trump viewers didn’t like what they were seeing. In January, Fox News slipped into third place for the first time in two decades, even after closing out 2020 as the most watched cable news network for 19 years straight. There were now other channels whose hosts were telling the MAGA faithful exactly what they wanted to hear.

The more formidable of these was Newsmax, a seven-year-old competitor that no one ever thought would beat Fox in any metric until it actually did. “We’re here to stay,” Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy said in December when his channel first eked out a narrow victory over a Fox News show one night. Like everyone else, Newsmax’s ratings fell back to earth after all the drama cooled down, but for Ruddy, it was still a win. “When I started getting into TV in 2014,” he told me, “I just thought, if we just get a small percentage of Fox’s market share, we’ll be successful. We’ve more than gotten that now. We’re going to continue to grow.”

As Biden took office to the dismay of loyalists like Hannity and Ingraham, Fox’s dayside arm was eager to put Trump behind them. Someone in touch with staffers there told me the feeling heading into the new administration was, “It’s over, the viewers were pissed at us, let’s go back to doing the news.” In the evenings, when the fire-breathers come out, Fox started giving its viewers the red meat they craved as the country veered in a direction that looked increasingly threatening to them. The hosts took up arms in the culture wars, whether it was Hannity bemoaning the “cancellation” of Dr. Seuss or Carlson fulminating on the “privileged” life of New York Times tech reporter Taylor Lorenz and raging about immigrants supposedly diluting his voting power, a segment that was condemned by the Anti-Defamation League. Carlson in particular, with his nativist bona fides, intellectual pedigree, and willingness to go against the grain, had become a total Fox News phenomenon—not just the network’s highest rated host, but someone buzzed about as a 2024 hopeful. Fox signed up Trumpy contributors like Mike Pompeo, Lara Trump, and Kayleigh McEnany (Newsmax has Jason Miller, Sean Spicer, and Andrew Giuliani), and it was inevitable that Trump himself wouldn’t be able to quit Fox for too long. On March 16, he gave a call-in interview to Bartiromo, evincing a rare show of genuine public service by encouraging his vaccine-skeptic voters to get the coronavirus jab: “It’s a great vaccine!” The ratings have rebounded.

As with CNN, the future of Fox News’s ownership is the stuff of fervid speculation. Lachlan Murdoch’s center-left younger brother, James, departed the family business in 2019 to start an investment fund, and his antipathy toward Fox News is well known. As Rupert Murdoch became a nonagenarian in March, a pair of articles in the Financial Times and the Economist floated the prospect of James teaming up with the elder Murdoch sisters, Elisabeth and Prudence, to re-exert influence over the network after their father dies. (The same gossip was aired in Brian Stelter’s Fox News book last year.) Asked about the chatter, someone in the Murdoch orbit told me, “James has no desire to oversee Fox News, but he does recognize that the property is a menace to democracy.”

After Lachlan Murdoch referred to MSNBC as the “loyal opposition,” the network fired back with a statement: “Our role, and the role of any legitimate news organization, whether it includes an ‘opinion section’ or not, is to hold power to account, regardless of party.”

It is the Democratic Party, of course, that aligns with MSNBC’s audience, as well as the network’s own ideological leanings. A question for MSNBC moving forward is whether its programming will reflect the fissures now tearing at the Democrats themselves.

How will the network position itself in the intraparty battle? Will it lean further to the left, or less so? Is it the network of Biden, or of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? Some of MSNBC’s biggest names, like Joe Scarborough and Nicolle Wallace, not to mention an array of the network’s paid political analysts, are erstwhile Republican heavyweights who drifted from the GOP as it was consumed by Trumpism. Where will these people land as we venture further into the post-Trump landscape?

“I’m not looking to have a prescribed direction,” MSNBC boss Rashida Jones told me. “It’s no secret that some of our hosts lean into a progressive point of view. People are not looking for us to advocate. We’re still in the early stages of this administration, but I think your best examples are the Nicolle Wallaces of the world. I have no doubt that as this administration goes on, Nicolle will continue to ask questions, continue to poke at things that don’t make sense, and to highlight things that are good for the country. I don’t think any of that changes.”

Jones was promoted to the top job in December at age 39, making her one of the youngest network news presidents in the history of American television. She’s also the first Black woman to run a major TV news network. We were on a video call one Thursday afternoon in March, Jones’s first interview since succeeding longtime MSNBC president Phil Griffin. She was speaking to me from an office at 30 Rock outfitted with some nice-looking exposed brick that might have scored points with Room Rater, or Leslie Jones, for that matter.

If CNN has edged a bit closer to the MSNBC vibe in prime time, as some would argue, MSNBC has begun to look more like CNN during the day. For the past few years, the network has been trying to make itself more competitive on breaking news, and Jones is now doubling down on that mandate. This spring, dayside coverage was rebranded “MSNBC Reports” to differentiate it from the distinctly opinionated prime-time lineup. I asked Jones if MSNBC viewers see the network in those terms. Is that really what they’re tuning in for?

“We’re continuing to narrow the gap with CNN in our hard news coverage, and part of that is being disciplined and reinforcing to the audience that we are a place to go when breaking news happens,” she said. (CNN says its breaking-news ratings are still well ahead of MSNBC’s.) “The audience needs to know what to expect from us. There’s got to be a clear understanding both ways.” Jones is also pushing MSNBC more into premium documentaries and originals. It’s a space in which CNN has been highly successful under Zucker’s leadership, most recently with Stanley Tucci’s Searching for Italy, which is now the most watched series in CNN history, bigger even than Anthony Bourdain. MSNBC wants to capture some of that same mojo, but “only projects that fit our brand, that fit our identity,” Jones said.

The Trump presidency gave rise to lots of new faces at MSNBC. But at the end of the day, the two biggest franchises are Morning Joe and Maddow. And in reality, a lot of people would say that it’s really all about Maddow, who has the highest ratings and most rabid fan base of the whole bunch. What if she decides she’s ready to just chill at her 19th-century farmhouse in western Massachusetts, spending her days fishing, writing some more books? As Trump’s wild ride begins to look like a distant memory, as more viewers cut the cord, as the Maddows of the world become fewer and farther between, what then? “The eyeballs may shift to different platforms and people may shift to consuming content in different places,” Jones said. “We have a strong bench, an incredible slate of people. At any given moment, we’ve got an army that we could move up in the ranks.”

On March 30, the networks put out their ratings for the first quarter of 2021, which included the Capitol insurrection, Biden’s inauguration, and Trump’s second impeachment trial. Fox News said it was “the most-watched network in primetime in all of basic cable” during the period, and CNN was “#1 in all of cable this quarter among adults 25–54,” according to their respective press releases. MSNBC’s bragging rights were that it was “#1 across all of cable in total viewers” for the first time ever. Such were the spoils of peak cable news. I circled back to Jones with a follow-up: Will MSNBC ever see a milestone like that again? Is this as good as it gets? “It’s a great feather in our cap,” she said, “but going forward, the metrics we’ll all be measuring ourselves by will be much broader than just how many people are watching us on TV.”

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