Welcome back to In The Room. I’m Dylan Byers.

Tonight, a look at MSNBC’s big win on indictment day, and what it signals about the cable news landscape heading into ’24. Plus, notes on the futility of CNN’s primetime shuffle, and the ouster of CBS’s Neeraj Khemlani.

Nevertheless, MSNBC’s big win on indictment day highlighted some broader trends in the cable news landscape heading into 2024. As I noted a few weeks back, MSNBC’s unwavering commitment to an avowedly progressive, anti-Trump audience has put the network in a uniquely strong position to assuage (and amplify) liberal anxieties during a Trump-heavy election cycle, especially since David Zaslav decided to forfeit the competition by repositioning CNN once it was under his aegis. (Though, to be fair, the network’s coverage has drifted leftward since Chris Licht’s exit.) Indeed, MSNBC was the most-watched cable network on Tuesday, as well, averaging nearly 2 million viewers in prime time.

It’s hard to tell how much of MSNBC’s success is owed to Rashida Jones’ consistent editorial strategy and how much is due to the lingering embers of Licht’s disastrous programming decisions at CNN, including but not limited to: leaving the 9 p.m. primetime slot vacant for nearly one year, throwing ill-suited co-anchors together in the mornings, and generally mandating that the talent demonstrate less personality and take a more reserved and dispassionate approach to our era’s myriad civil and political crises. In any event, CNN’s ability to compete with MSNBC this election cycle will depend on whether it can undo the damage of the Licht era by creating habit-forming programming for politically engaged audiences—a notable number of whom seem to have tuned out or changed the channel during the previous leader’s reign.

On Monday, CNN’s post-Licht leadership quadrumvirate took a notable step in that direction, announcing a primetime lineup that will see Abby Phillip and Laura Coates taking over the 10 p.m. and 11 p.m. hours, respectively, behind Anderson Cooper at 8 p.m. and Kaitlan Collins at 9 p.m. Other notable moves: Phil Mattingly will join Poppy Harlow as co-host on CNN This Morning, as previously reported here; Pamela Brown will host a new 3 p.m. show, possibly positioning her for greater responsibilities in a post-Wolf Blitzer landscape after 2024; and the indefatigable Capitol Hill hallway interrogator Manu Raju will take over as host of Inside Politics Sunday. Regrettably, two of the network’s most seasoned journalists—Chris Wallace and Christiane Amanpour—will now host shows on Saturday mornings, which is cable news Siberia.

In the grand scheme of things—the inexorable decline of the linear business, the dwindling relevance of cable news, etcetera—these moves are wholly unremarkable. CNN’s leadership carefully assessed the talent at their disposal and thoughtfully rearranged the deck chairs as best they could. And they deserve credit here on at least a couple fronts: first, for actually implementing a consistent lineup (which Licht never really did) and then for implementing one that is so diverse, especially in primetime. But there are no game changers here, particularly in the mornings, where CNN continues to seem wholly incapable of even getting on Joe Scarborough’s radar.

Seen another way, however, CNN is consciously betting so many key hours of the lineup on young talent who, capable as they may be in the field, are relatively inexperienced behind the anchor chair. I’ve noted before that Licht never put Collins through the various training stages that anchors usually endure before taking on primetime, and CNN is still paying the consequences for that in the ratings. Optimists argue that both Collins and Phillip have the skills you can’t teach—poise, presence, reporting skills, work ethic—and that they’ll get their reps in the anchor chair. But many seasoned television news executives argue that an ironclad law of television is that the talent is supposed to get their reps in before they get in the primetime anchor chair. Time, and the ratings, will tell.

The enduring problem here, of course, is that CNN still doesn’t have stars. On some level, MSNBC’s 3.9 million triumph was really a testament to the star power of Maddow, rather than Clinton, who isn’t really a guaranteed ratings draw. At the very least, it was a combination of the two. “Star x star = ratings,” one television news executive texted me after Monday’s MSNBC ratings came in. “The math of cable news,” he continued. “Star power matters... and CNN doesn’t have any real wattage. …. At least they are shuffling the deck, because the current hand sucks. But they’re playing the same deck.”

There was no actionable offense here, I’m told; ultimately, Cheeks seems to have simply concluded that “the Neeraj problem”—the general antipathy toward his brusque and rough leadership style—wasn’t worth the headache. And it was undoubtedly the right decision: five CBS News sources I spoke to this week described Khemlani’s ouster as a great relief to everyone in the news division.

With Khemlani out, Wendy McMahon will become chief executive and president of CBS News; her colleague Ingrid Ciprian-Matthews, the former CBS News Washington bureau chief, will become co-president, overseeing newsgathering. Notably, for the first time in history, every major cable and broadcast news network is being run by a woman or group of women—in effect, if not on paper. Unfortunately, they’re more operators than visionaries, and they have inherited these once august roles at a time when the ambitions of the industry have never felt smaller. But of course that is the case. Just as CNN’s unoriginal shakeup suggests, or Maddow’s Clinton triumph portrays, the days of innovation are long gone. The industry, after all, is more focused with managing down its past success than building anew.