Last year, before the creation of Warner Bros. Discovery—before Jeff Zucker’s dramatic ouster from CNN, even before John Malone called on the network to “evolve back to the kind of journalism that it started with”—David Zaslav began informally soliciting advice from Chris Licht, a longtime friend and then-executive producer of CBS’s “Late Show,” about what to do with CNN. One of Zaz’s preoccupations, sources with knowledge of their discussions said, was disrobing the liberal reputation that the network had acquired during the hyper-partisan Trump era, and re-imbuing it with the sort of non-polarizing, utilitarian vibes that defined its Atlanta-based years under Walter Isaacson. It didn’t seem to matter that Zucker had made the network more profitable than ever and a cultural icon, restoring it from the Piers Morgan and Eliot Spitzer days. Instead, Zaz seemed interested in envisioning a lower-volume CNN for the post-Trump era.