Five years ago, in the still early days of Donald Trump’s presidency, when the news industry was riding high on the nation’s endless fascination and angst regarding the former Apprentice star’s rise to power, then-CNN president Jeff Zucker sounded a note of caution. In a Q&A session with staff at the network’s Los Angeles bureau, where I was a reporter, Zucker noted that the Trump-fueled surge in ratings that had been so lucrative for CNN and its rivals was ultimately an oasis in the desert, a mere mirage of hope amid the otherwise irreversible secular decline of the linear television business. 

After all, the micro news event wasn’t enough to overtake the macro-economic forces: cord-cutting, the rise of mobile, disintermediated content, the profusion of affinity-driven brands, and, frankly, the fact that TV news was a hallmark of the Boomer life experience that just didn’t fundamentally translate to Millennials and Gen Zers. (Trump, himself, was living proof of this fact.) When Trump left office, Zucker intimated, the ratings would fall back down to earth and then continue their downward trend.