Good evening, greetings from New York, and welcome to a special edition of In The Room on what has truly been a historic and head-spinning 24 hours in the media world. This morning I was standing outside 30 Rock, waiting to meet with a source about the sudden Jeff Shell ouster, when I was alerted that Fox News was seconds away from firing Tucker Carlson. By the time I’d crossed the street to 1211 Avenue of the Americas, wishfully thinking I might spot a source there, I received yet another text: “You might wanna head to Hudson Yards, I hear something big is about to drop”—and, indeed, minutes later Don Lemon was announcing his own defenestration from CNN. Herewith, the full story on today’s anchormageddon.

But then, in lightning fast succession, came the news that Tucker Carlson and Don Lemon had been defenestrated from their posts at Fox News and CNN, respectively, remaking the cable landscape, entirely, and rendering Shell’s adultery a mundane secondary plot on a Bravo show. In truth, both the Lemon and Carlson ousters are interesting and unique in their own right, though each demonstrated a fair amount of volte-face, and they certainly demonstrated how power is wielded at their organizations.

Last Friday night, Fox Corp. C.E.O. Lachlan Murdoch called Suzanne Scott, the head of Fox News, to set in motion a plan to terminate Carlson, the conservative network’s most popular star. The stunning decision, which Tucker would not learn about until just a few minutes before the news went public, on Monday morning, was made with his father Rupert’s blessing.

But the decision nevertheless rocked the American political and media firmament, as well as the legions of conservatives over whom Fox News and Carlson wield massive influence. It also gave rise to the inevitable question: Why did the Murdochs drop their biggest star—a right-wing celebrity and ratings juggernaut, whose free agency may now threaten Fox’s status as the most influential voice in American conservatism?

One week earlier, of course, the Murdochs had reached a $787.5 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems, whose legal challenge had unearthed hundreds of pages of emails and text messages, as well as pre-trial depositions from Fox executives and on-air talent, including Carlson. Those filings did not, in their heavily redacted form, provide credible evidence that Carlson had defamed Dominion, at least in the Murdochs’ view. But they did lay bare a number of embarrassing exchanges in which Carlson disparaged colleagues and made vulgar statements about government officials, like Sidney Powell, including his inarticulate adjectival use of the c-word. Still, none of these transgressions, alone, compelled the Murdochs to nuke Carlson.

The redacted portion of the filings, themselves, contained far more damaging exchanges, utterances hidden far from public view but visible to the Murdochs and their lawyers—as well as the lawyers for Dominion—in which Carlson further disparaged his colleagues and his bosses and said presumably unseemly things. At the same time, Fox News and Carlson had other emerging headaches. To wit: they are facing a forthcoming lawsuit from Carlson’s former producer, Abby Grossberg, which details several examples of alleged sexism, harassment and a toxic work environment, and which threatens to bring more of Carlson’s alleged past transgressions into view.

The exact texts, emails or deposition remarks that were the catalyst for Carlson’s firing—what’s being referred to inside Fox as “the smoking gun”—have not, as of late Monday night, been revealed. (A Daily Beast report alleges that Carlson’s “most egregious” offense, and a “key factor in his demise,” was his admitting to have frequently used the c-word. I am reliably told that this was not a primary cause for his termination, and I don’t think any credible person would believe that Fox News, which promoted election denialism and MyPillowism, is such a PG-13 culture.)

Tucker has hired Bryan Freedman, the renowned pit bull litigator, to handle the economics of his exit. But it’s hard to observe this whole drama, especially amid the final season of Succession, without wondering the extent to which personalities and egos played a profound role here. Carlson’s platform may have been paved by his right-inflected predecessors, such as O’Reilly and Beck and Kelly, but he has become unquestionably the biggest star to ever inhabit an anchor desk at Fox. (O’Reilly’s side hustle was writing pulp non-fiction, not potentially considering a presidential bid.) And yet late-stage Murdoch, perhaps chastened by his Dominion headache, and all the future litigation to come, may be more focused on enjoying his own twilight days rather than ceding his platform to a born-on-third-base narcissist who privately behaves like he’s bigger than the Fox brand. In the end, as the events of Monday reminded us, there’s still only one guy in charge at Fox.

The indignity was, indeed, even greater. CNN C.E.O. Chris Licht had enlisted his deputies on the talent management side, Amy Entelis and Lisa Reeves, to call Lemon’s agent Jay Sures, who in turn relayed the news to Lemon. CNN P.R. would later argue, via Twitter, that it had given Lemon the opportunity to come in and meet with Licht, but by that point Lemon had taken to Twitter to deal with it on his own terms. (And, also, why would he have ever agreed to that?). In the meantime, he enlisted his friend Allison Gollust, the former CNN comms chief and romantic partner to exiled CNN president and current RedBird investor Jeff Zucker, to handle crisis communications, and, like Tucker, hired Bryan Freedman to handle legal affairs. Lemon had been considering outside P.R. help for some time given his growing tensions with the network; but he had no inkling that he was going to be fired and didn’t enlist outside help until today.

Lemon’s fall from cable news stardom is undeniably somewhat of his own making: his all-too-obvious frustrations with his removal from prime time; his palpable impatience with his morning show co-host, Kaitlan Collins; his spontaneous self-immolation when he foolishly said that Nikki Haley was not “in her prime,” and a series of subsequent mini-scandals that created a running tabloid narrative about a beleaguered and controversial host. In many ways, Lemon simply seemed visibly unhappy in a post-Cuomo, post-Zucker, Malone-esque CNN. And, given the existential challenges of cable news, he simply had nowhere else to flee.

At the same time, Lemon’s decline also seems to have been somewhat preordained by moves above his purview. As I reported in February, both Licht and his boss David Zaslav, the Warner Bros. Discovery C.E.O., never wanted Lemon in their primetime lineup, and entertained early on the idea of getting rid of him entirely. Licht had conceived a compromise: he could move Lemon out of primetime and give him a new start as the face of his flagship morning show. It was a solution Lemon agreed to, perhaps in part because he recognized there was no better choice.

Of course, the move was ill-fated from the get-go. Lemon, a serious (and occasionally self-serious) primetime solo act in the Zucker-Trump era, was now expected to show a softer side alongside two less experienced co-hosts. He was visibly miffed by the circumstances in which he found himself. Though, in venting his frustrations, he gave Licht precisely the ammunition he needed to oust him.

There is one oddity of Lemon’s ouster. Some close to Lemon have wondered why Licht announced King Charles, a new show starring Charles Barkley and Gayle King, this past Saturday, a day when no one announces news. Even though I had previewed the concept for months, it seemed strange that P.R.-obsessed CNN would roll out the news on the weekend, even if it did concur with the NBA Playoffs (which, of course, occur all week). Was this a coincidence, or was Licht’s comms team trying to announce a show starring two historically famous Black hosts in order to get in front of his decision to fire CNN’s most prominent Black talent? It’s a bad look either way, especially since that is what the decision looks like to some.

Meanwhile, as Licht approaches the one-year anniversary of his tenure, next week, he still has remarkably little to show on the programming side—the eventual once-a-week Gayle and Barkley show notwithstanding. His signature morning show has imploded, or at least lost its star host, and his program-on-the-fly primetime strategy has so far failed to rate. Indeed, for the first time in at least a decade, CNN now finds itself squarely in third place not just in total viewers but also in the business-relevant 25-to-54 demo, where it used to best MSNBC. Zaz has so far been willing to tolerate the dismal ratings and has publicly declared that ratings don’t matter. Let’s see how long that lasts.