Welcome to a special edition of The Best & The Brightest, Puck’s newish daily politics email. I’m Dylan Byers. Tonight, a close look at how a trio of legacy cable networks are navigating a once-in-a-generation news event, while simultaneously managing the inexorable decline of their very own industry.

In any event, the momentary shakeup is indicative of notable turmoil in the cable news landscape. Fox News, historically among the most-watched networks on cable and the most influential force in conservative media, has indeed struggled since Tucker’s ouster in late April, often barely outperforming MSNBC in prime time. Conventional wisdom posits that the right-wing juggernaut can endure the loss of any top-tier talent—it endured the loss of Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, and Megyn Kelly—and, indeed, that may eventually prove to be the case. The network has yet to announce its new primetime lineup, though as I’ve reported in the past all signs point to Sean Hannity and Jesse Watters assuming leading roles.

Fox’s decision to draw a line at such brazen political incivility may offer some solace to the mainstream, but it’s also exactly the kind of move that further alienates an audience already dubious about the network’s treatment of Tucker, its 2020 Arizona call, and its unwillingness to fully align itself with the twice-indicted former president.

How consequential is the post-Tucker malaise? We’re living in a screwy media environment in which Fox Corp, with a market cap of some $16 billion based on news and sports assets, is somehow more valuable than Paramount Global, a company with historic assets that has an $11 billion market cap due to its sinking Viacom cable portfolio. So the Murdochs aren’t sweating yet. But let’s see what happens when Fox no longer owns the right wing, and can no longer provide a thresholding function in the Republican party. Paramount at least has a number of built-in suitors in a post-Lina Khan regulatory environment. Fox? Maybe not so much, which makes the cable assets matter more than they should.

The fact that CNN came in a distant third behind both MSNBC and Fox News during such a major news event suggests that tribalism wins on cable—a direct rebuke to the quixotic David Zaslav/John Malone non-partisan fantasy. In Trump’s first term, CNN competed with MSNBC’s aggrieved liberals rubbernecking at Trump’s latest affront to civil and political norms. Needless to say, that’s not what Zaz wants.

On the other hand, the more important challenge for CNN will be undoing the damage Licht did to the brand through his inept programming decisions and turgid egomania. One can hardly blame American news viewers for abandoning a network that had no consistent primetime strategy and an ill-conceived morning show, and whose most notable production was a heavily-derided Trump town hall that devolved into a campaign rally.

It’s possible that the new management team stewarding CNN will elegantly drift leftward during the election, or at least let the talent reassume some of that Zucker-era incredulity (this week, Jake Tapper rightly called a statement from a Trump spokesperson “a lot of crazy”). And the WBD management will likely let them migrate thusly. After all, the WBD overlords have recognized the complexities and nuances of both CNN and the skills required to manage its thousands of journalists. Licht’s ouster provided addition by subtraction, and it’s unlikely that anyone in Burbank or on Park Avenue South wants to risk another headache. They’ll let CNN be CNN. Which is welcome news at CNN.

At the same time, it invested in its marquee talent—coughing up $30 million a year to keep the Maddow patina in primetime; extending Joe & Mika across the mornings, etcetera, while CNN was throwing some of its most notable talent out the door in ham-handed fashion. In retrospect, Zaz likely wishes Licht had expelled Don Lemon on day one. (Meanwhile, Lemon’s current penchant for tweeting out MSNBC articles, rather than CNN articles, suggests that’s where he might like his next act to play out.)

Finally, to their great credit, Cesar Conde and Rashida Jones have let the talent lead out front and succeeded in (mostly) staying out of the headlines. A recent Semafor scatter chart comparing ratings and news mentions, on which both Conde and Jones fared quite well, rightly noted that “having people talk about your network and having people watch it are entirely different things.”

But the industry’s obsession with ratings belies the much more significant challenge that all networks face during a time of accelerated cord cutting. This week, my ever-insightful partner Julia Alexander rightly noted that CNN’s real challenge isn’t its ratings, but its business model. “In the long run,” she noted, “CNN will likely need to become a standalone, direct-to-consumer product that subscribers can add to their streaming bundle, either as an individual app or as a tile within Max.” (The piece made its way around the CNN c-suite.) The same is true for MSNBC (on Peacock, presumably), and perhaps for Fox News. The Wall Street Journal made similar observations in an article published earlier today.

Of course, CNN had a stand-alone, direct-to-consumer product in CNN+, which Zaslav killed the moment he took over the company. That decision was palatable enough to industry critics who mocked the somewhat uninspired content slate (the Tapper book club, yada yada) and wondered, as Howard Stern had, why anyone was going to pay $5 a month for something they already didn’t watch for free. In retrospect, the streaming gamble always seemed destined to collide with Quibi-era schadenfreude.

What the critics miss, however, is that CNN+ was at least directionally right. Just as Bob Iger, Kevin Mayer, and John Skipper had identified the need to build an ESPN+ streaming infrastructure that would one day house their flagship sports networks—a transition that will take place within the next few years—Zucker and then-WarnerMedia chief Jason Kilar anticipated that CNN’s own future would be direct to consumer, as well. Dismissing CNN+ as an ancillary product for Tapper’s literary passions is about as insightful as dismissing ESPN+ as the home of Premiere League Lacrosse. It will more likely soon be home to Monday Night Football, the CFP Championship and the NBA Finals, as well as SportsCenter and PTI. Could CNN+ have one day glided the network from linear to streaming? And if so, wouldn’t that have more than justified its extraordinary capex? These are the known unknowns.

CNN’s intention to move its own linear feed onto CNN+ as early as 2027 was stated in the business plan, sources with knowledge of the document have told me. Moreover, CNN+ was never intended to be a mere streaming service, but rather an entire subscription product, à la The New York Times, complete with video, podcasts, newsletters, live events, etcetera. Whether it would have failed or succeeded is up for debate; its acolytes suggest that, had it not been killed in the crib, it would now boast more than 2 million paying subscribers.

Alas, we’ll never know. But with the carriage fees that sustain this industry heading for a cliff in a few years time, CNN’s ratings at historic lows, and annual profits off more than 35 percent from their Trump-era highs, it would be wise for Zaz & Co.—and, indeed, the entire industry—to figure out what they’re going to do instead.