Two years ago, shortly after David Zaslav engineered his $43 billion Discovery-WarnerMedia masterstroke and elevated himself to the rarefied stratosphere of legit media moguldom, he received some unsolicited advice from fellow traveler Brian Roberts, the chairman and chief executive of Comcast. As Zaslav would later recount to friends, Roberts had told him that the cable news business, with its partisan politics and outsized egos, could be a major distraction in the grand scheme of operationalizing his then-$200 billion market cap multinational telecom and media conglomerate. Cable news, so the story goes, accounted for a mere single-digit percentage point of overall revenue and a disproportionate amount of the company’s narrative and his executives’ anxiety. In time, Zaslav would embrace the line as his own, and add some playful embellishment: CNN was some 6 percent of his business, he would tell friends, and 90 percent of his headaches.

It’s a sentiment that many media executives can sympathize with, especially this week: Rupert Murdoch—spotted in the wilds of Manhattan on Tuesday, and looking quite healthy, by the way!—evicted his most influential star from Fox News due in part to his embrace of dangerous conspiracy theories and alleged vulgar missives about senior executives, which were apparently unearthed via litigation discovery. And Zaz himself has seen CNN’s heavily marketed new morning show self-immolate thanks to, depending on who you ask, Don Lemon’s petulance, bad chemistry among the co-hosts, or the programming shortcomings of his hand-picked lieutenant, Chris Licht.