Happy Friday. Welcome back to In The Room.

Earlier today, I joined my colleague Peter Hamby on The Powers That Be pod to discuss the Bob Iger-Brian Roberts Hulu dance and the latest developments in the Washington Post C.E.O. race. If you haven’t had a chance to listen yet, you can do so here.

In tonight’s email, a postcard from the Polo Bar, where CNN’s Zucker- and Licht-era drama is giving way to a more pivotal, if more mundane, period of transformation under the universally beloved Mark Thompson. Plus, a deeper look at Will Lewis, the man in pole position for the top Post job. And stick around at the end for weekend reads.

Since Licht’s defenestration five months ago, he has told multiple people he suspects that Zucker, Gollust, Sures and Lemon actively and collaboratively conspired to undermine him. One can only imagine what was going through his mind as Dr. Jill Biden, Michael Ovitz, Rita Wilson, Kelly Clarkson, and others stopped by Sures’s table to offer hugs and well wishes.

Alas, the whole scene felt like a postscript to a story that took place long ago, the final denouement that rolls after the credits. The drama that engulfed CNN upon Zucker’s dramatic ouster, in February 2022, and intensified over the course of Licht’s disastrous, thirteen-month tenure—the insecure and tone-deaf leadership, the layoffs, the Lemon debacle, the Trump town hall—now seems a distant memory. In an interview with the FT on Friday, Zucker declined to weigh in on his successor’s tenure, or the infamous Atlantic nuclear weapon: “I don’t think there’s anything I can add to everything that’s been said about that already,” he noted, before adding a bon mot related to that god awful pre-dawn training scene. “I felt,” Zucker said, “that I had to go to the gym.” (Zucker also dismissed the pervasive rumor that he ever wanted to buy CNN, another one of Licht’s recurring suspicions: “Zero truth to it,” he said. “Zero.”)

For the most part, CNN has moved on from all this sturm und drang. The appointment of Mark Thompson as chairman and C.E.O. seems to have restored hope and optimism at the network almost overnight. Sources across the organization are unanimous in their praise of Thompson, whom they describe as thoughtful, smart, genial, engaging, personable, and authoritative. Unlike his predecessor, he has made immediate moves to establish relationships with talent and executive leadership alike, all from a small office on the newsroom floor.

And the Israel-Hamas War has given Thompson and the network an all-consuming story that allows them to focus on the brand’s core mission of fact-first journalism while displaying the best of their international newsgathering resources, all without submitting to the unnecessary and consuming obsessions about political bias. One perk of Thompson’s British philosopher-C.E.O. sensibility is that he encourages staff to not spend too much time second-guessing themselves, whereas Licht’s emphasis on restoring nonpartisanship inspired only paranoia.

In some ways, CNN’s focus on the war—as well as the House Speaker’s race, the Maine shooting, and other pressing storylines—has also provided a cushion for the television veterans who may be uncertain about where they stand in the grand scheme of CNN’s larger, post-linear transformation. Some of those people, including newsgathering chief Virginia Moseley and talent whisperer Amy Entelis, are currently proving to be as instrumental as ever in this moment.

As for Thompson, his ability to run a legacy television network through the most intense news cycle in memory while simultaneously mapping out a long term plan for digital growth, is a reminder of his chops helming both the BBC and the Times Company’s digital transformation. And his early success suggests that the Zaslavian hiring strategy—in which you dispense with the Spencer Stuarts and Suchermans and just go with your gut, or the counsel of close friends—is not necessarily misguided. After selecting the most ill-equipped chief executive to helm CNN, Zaz seems to have subsequently righted the ship by picking the perfect guy.

Despite Lewis’s journalistic bona fides and extensive resume under Rupert Murdoch, which includes running Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal during the Trump era, Lewis is perhaps better known to the British media establishment from whence he came—he was recently knighted, after all—than to the insular world of Washington journalists who often (and that’s being generous) have a hard time seeing the world beyond the Beltway.

In any event, my report catalyzed quite a bit of Google searching among the Post rank and file, who no doubt discovered that, in addition to his myriad accomplishments, Lewis carries a good deal of the baggage that inevitably follows more than a decade’s worth of service in the upper echelons of the Murdoch media empire, the anything-goes U.K. media culture, and a close affiliation with Boris Johnson, to whom he has served as an adviser.

Lewis joined Murdoch’s News International in 2010, while the organization was in the midst of the infamous phone hacking and police bribery scandal, and was soon tasked with helping to oversee the clean-up effort as a member of NewsCorp’s Management and Standards Committee. He drew criticism from some journalists for approving the decision to hand over the names of confidential sources to police as part of the investigation. A decade later, he was accused by some victims of having participated in destroying or concealing emails related to the scandal—a charge Lewis called “completely untrue.” In 2011, Lewis was also accused by his former colleagues at The Telegraph, as well as a private investigations firm, of orchestrating a leak to the BBC to help advance Rupert’s efforts to acquire BSkyB. (Through a spokesperson at the time, Lewis called the accusation “​​a clear attempt to undermine the strong working relationship between News Corp.’s Management and Standards Committee and the Metropolitan Police Service.”)

More recently, Lewis served as an adviser to Prime Minister Johnson—an obviously polarizing and absurdist figure—and subsequently received a knighthood for his troubles. In a recent interview with Bloomberg, Lewis described Johnson as “an incredibly trusting, loyal, clever, witty, important person in Britain,” adding: “I’m not a fair-weather friend. So if I’m your friend, and even if you make mistakes, even if you end up doing things that I fundamentally disagree with, I don’t walk away. And that’s a big thing for me, for good or for bad.”

While being courted by Bezos, Lewis has also been at the helm of one of many groups seeking to acquire the Telegraph. While he told Bloomberg that he has “significant expressions of interest from a wide range of potential backers,” he won’t disclose who those are. In the same interview, he denied a rumor of Saudi funding but said he wouldn’t necessarily reject Middle Eastern financial support.

Obviously, none of this is any surprise to Bezos and interim C.E.O. Patty Stonesifer, who entrusted Sucherman with the search and attendant due diligence and background check. And they may even be grateful that, if they end up going the distance with this guy, my reporting will serve to front-run some edgy elements of his career trajectory to his future charges. Remember, after all, that Arthur Sulzberger’s labored selection of Mark Thompson, a decade ago, was filled with its own headaches. At the time, a large faction of aggrieved Times reporters worried that Thompson’s ostensible proximity to the sordid Jimmy Savile scandal at the BBC would taint his candidacy. (At the time, many Times newsroom figures fancied a C.E.O. who was a composite of Gandhi, Ben Bradlee, and Steve Jobs.) And in that unique manner befitting Times journalists, they pondered and contemplated their concerns aloud to anyone in earshot.

Anyway, look how that all turned out. In the end, nothing stuck to Thompson, Arthur never caved under pressure to defenestrate him, and the Times Company landed a generational leader who reversed the company’s fortunes. If that’s the outcome here, Bezos and Stonesfier will happily put up with some frustrations from their journalists in the meantime.

• At Vanity Fair, Charlotte Klein talks to Washington Post rank-and-file about the paper’s search for an editorial strategy.
• Elsewhere on the site, Joe Pompeo takes stock of the Telegraph auction, where everyone from Murdoch to Mathias Döpfner wants in.
• At the Post, Jesús Rodriguez profiles Jake Sherman, the Punchbowl co-founder and preeminent Capitol Hill reporter.
• At the Times, Jeremy Peters notes that Jewish viewers are finding a refuge in Fox News, and its unflinching support for Israel.
• At The New Yorker, Michael Schulman reflects on the potential twilight of prestige television.

See you next week.