Happy Wednesday, I’m Dylan Byers.

Welcome back to In The Room, my biweekly private email on the inner workings of the media industry. In tonight’s issue, how Fox News is leveraging Brett Baier’s unexpectedly Swan-like Trump interview to bolster the network’s credibility in the post-Dominion, post-Tucker era.

It was a pleasant reversal of fortune for Baier. Months earlier, after all, he had absorbed a reputational hit after the Glasser-Baker power couple revealed that he’d lobbied his network to rescind its pivotal Arizona-for-Biden call in 2020. Now, with a single interview, he seemed to be thrust back into Fourth Estate stardom, a veritable It Boy of journalism. At the very least, he was off the hook. “Hot for Bret Baier,” tweeted Brooke Hammerling, the veteran member of the tech-and-media P.R. in-crowd. “Never thought I’d say those words but wow. A masterclass in how to do an interview.”

Baier’s ability to stick it out through those years is a testament, in part, to the strength of his well-rated 6 p.m. product, which commands the respect of his D.C. friends and establishment conservative golfing buddies, while only rarely upsetting the MAGA base. It may also be a testament to his deft management of Fox’s internal politics and his own career growth. (Baier was courted at least once by CNN during the Zucker years, and John Malone openly declared him the ideal candidate for his vision of that network.)

In any event, Baier focused solely on his Special Report, where he wields full editorial control, and almost never made too big a stink about whatever batshit crazy conspiracy theory Tucker was peddling in primetime (there were some exceptions). For his troubles, he was rewarded with an annual salary of around $12 million a year, which will come up for renegotiation at some point next year. And in an era when Fox is more insecure than ever about its reach, and when the aforementioned batshit antics are costlier than ever, Baier looks like he’s in for a tidy little raise.

Heading into 2024, Fox News is likely to try and toe a more familiar tightrope, one in which Baier and other conservative-approved journalistic personalities—MacCallum, John Roberts, Dana Perino, etcetera—keep Fox News in the good graces of the center-right while Hannity and the other hippy-punching opinionators—Laura Ingrahm, Jesse Watters, Greg Gutfeld—try to massage the MAGA erogenous zones without inviting unwanted litigation. (Though, to be sure, they can stake their claim on the 2024 news cycle, too, as Hannity’s interview with Gavin Newsom showed.)

The furies and anxieties of late-stage cable news are complex and difficult to behold, but the contours of the changes are becoming clearer. We’ve entered an era when the industry expects cord-cutting to continue, cable adoption to fade, and stars to migrate to new platforms, as many already have. But the decline of the industry doesn’t change the business model that preserved it for so many decades. For generations, fortunes were built on a system that monetized not what people did watch, but what they could. In fact, as cable providers scrape for market share in this brave new world, Fox News will become an increasingly valuable and essential element of their bundle as they ensure they are carrying a platform kinda-sorta representing the internal monologue of 46 percent of the nation. This was the great Ailes insight, after all.

So while cable news may be getting smaller, it won’t go away, and the upper-mid-tier stars, like Baier, may be the ones who will best age into this new reality. And, when it comes to democracy, that might not be such a bad thing.