Back in the fall, a New York media executive posed a question to me: Was Jeff Zucker sacrificing the integrity of CNN’s brand, built over decades, in a bid for short-term ratings gains during the hyperpartisan, hair-on-fire, occasionally-democracy-on-fire Trump era? For years, after all, Zucker had positioned CNN as the network de la résistance against Trump and his loyalists in the G.O.P. and at Fox News. He encouraged the likes of Chris Cuomo, Brianna Keilar, and Jim Acosta to speak out vehemently against the president and his party, and ran marketing campaigns that cast CNN as one of the last bastions of truth in a world threatened by lies and misinformation. Economically, it worked. CNN was approaching a billion dollars in annual profit by the end of the Trump years. But it did seem shortsighted, especially as the media industry was reconfiguring itself in the streaming era.

Indeed, during that time much of CNN’s traditional, just-the-facts journalism—the kind of journalism that has been on display this week in Ukraine—took a back seat to a sort of self-righteous, grandstanding, chest-thumping opinionation machine that largely blanketed primetime. Arguably, this played right into Trump’s hand, and gave his supporters evidence that the network had the politics and credibility of the Huffington Post.