Welcome back to In the Room.

I’m heading back to Los Angeles after a fruitful trip to Cambridge for the Harvard Shorenstein Center’s fall gathering, where we waxed prosaic on all of the media’s most pressing editorial and business challenges. (I’ll be back in New York early next week.)

Needless to say, the rapidly developing situation in Israel and Gaza is top of mind here at Harvard, and everywhere. So, tonight, a meditation on the media coverage of the atrocity and its aftermath—and the inevitably fraught debates about that coverage, which are taking place, most notably, on MSNBC.

The billboard, paid for by the conservative group Accuracy in Media, declares these students, in Old English font, to be “Harvard’s Leading Antisemites,” and its presence in Cambridge has created a stir. Tensions have flared across campus as Harvard professors and administrators struggle, in tense email threads, to address the acute and contrasting sensitivities of its cosmopolitan student body and distinguished alumni (including Bill Ackman, who is seeking to blacklist the students who signed the letter, and Larry Summers, who condemned university leadership for not denouncing it immediately). Outside the café, a lone security guard fitfully tried to disperse gathering crowds, with limited success—a fitting metaphor, perhaps, for the school’s limited response.

While there should be no moral ambiguity about the massacre that took place on Saturday at the hands of Hamas, it was all too predictable that these events would trigger the third-rail of American political discourse. As Jon Stewart memorably put it nearly a decade ago, there is no way to talk about Israel without being shouted at (it is far easier, he noted in 2014, to talk about Ukraine). From a media perspective, too, every editorial decision—phrasing, framing, etcetera—leaves one vulnerable to scrutiny. And indeed, the shouting and the scrutiny has begun. On Thursday, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough took his “friends at Axios” to task over a headline that characterized the students’ letter as “pro-Palestinian,” rather than “pro-Hamas.” “The media needs to do a better job of clarifying!” he shouted at the camera (and into Andrew Ross Sorkin’s earpiece). “Let’s be exact in our language! Let’s be exact in our headlines!”

Of course, no media institution seems to struggle with its coverage of global historical conflicts so much as MSNBC, itself. In recent years, the network has thrived—by cable news standards, anyway—as a highbrow scream pillow for America’s anti-Trump coalition, a broad tent that covers the entirety of the Democratic party and then some. But non-domestic events have a way of sowing discord inside the tent, especially as MSNBC tries to walk a tightrope between the Democratic establishment and its more progressive wing.

In the earliest days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, while CNN was broadcasting round-the-clock footage from Kyiv and Kharkiv, MSNBC’s Joy Reid memorably dismissed the existential threat to the nation as something that the media only cared about because the victims were “white and largely Christian.” As I noted at the time, Reid’s comments were absurd, but they also read like an excuse for MSNBC’s inability to match CNN in telling the story of Europe’s biggest war in 75 years.

Such contortions come across as particularly unpalatable against the backdrop of images of burned bodies, bleeding women and mutilated children, and predictably expose the network to criticism. On Tuesday, the Anti-Defamation League C.E.O. Jonathan Greenblatt grew so frustrated with MSNBC’s characterization of Hamas’s attack as “an escalation” by “militants”—rather than a massacre by terrorists—that he felt compelled to ask host Jonathan Lemire, “who is writing the scripts?” On Wednesday, an Israeli mother whose kids had been taken hostage by Hamas took Andrea Mitchell to task for asking her, while she was grieving for her children, about Israel’s attacks on Gaza: “You’re looking first for a symmetrical situation,” she said. “There is no symmetry!”

Despite having the resources of NBC News and Sky News at its disposal—and god bless Richard Engel for trying to carry all that weight on his shoulders—MSNBC, which occasionally leans on Democratic activists to serve as news anchors, is not seen as the destination for that kind of news. And, depending on how this conflict proceeds, and how leaders on the progressive left respond, it also risks becoming a minor vulnerability for Brian Roberts and his larger Comcast conglomerate—the asset that accounts for a mere single-digit percentage of his business, and 90 percent of his headaches.

Meanwhile, the last few days have also highlighted some new challenges for CNN, which usually seizes on international conflicts and crises to showcase its unparalleled newsgathering resources and its value as a de facto public utility. It has struggled in some of its various iterations to justify its value on the off-days, of course, and thus usually draws about half of MSNBC’s audience and a quarter of that of Fox News. But, since Wolf Blitzer’s earliest days, it has historically been the place to go during a global crisis. And, indeed, when Russia invaded Ukraine, CNN beat both Fox News and MSNBC in the earliest days of the invasion, providing the network with a much needed lifeline amid the uncertain corporate takeover of Warner Bros. Discover and the sudden defenestration of its beloved leader, Jeff Zucker.

Unfortunately for CNN, the relatively minor ratings uptick this time around—again, just 17 percent—has mostly served to highlight how much the CNN brand has suffered under WBD’s ownership, and particularly under former C.E.O. Chris Licht. The fact that CNN can’t break a million viewers in daytime or primetime and still trails Fox by a vast margin would have devastated previous regimes, and negates its reputation as the place to turn to for breaking news. (Presumably, the war could also serve as the death knell for Licht’s last programming idea: the Charles Barkley and Gayle King weekly show, which quite obviously has no place in this news climate.)

The damage at CNN is especially notable in primetime, where ratings over the five-day period have improved just 7 percent—yet another sign that viewers are rejecting a lineup of mostly young primetime hosts who are still out of their depth in the anchor chair. That newly installed C.E.O. Mark Thompson has not moved to temporarily preempt the full primetime lineup with special coverage, helmed by the likes of Anderson Cooper and Jake Tapper and Erin Burnett, either suggests that he’s still getting a feel for the place, or that he meant what he said when he promised to stop prioritizing conventional TV.

In any event, the conflict is laying bare the challenges and opportunities for both networks outside of the familiar territory of American politics. In the meantime, it’s also highlighting Fox News’ dominance not just as a source of pro-Republican, anti-liberal punditry, but as the leading source of news for the TV-viewing public. And that is certainly an uncomfortable reality for anyone seeking a more nuanced national debate about the conflict between Israel and Hamas, and the invasion of Gaza.

On the other hand, sitting at that café, surrounded by students on their phones and laptops, I was reminded of just how small television’s claim on these world historical events has become. Presumably, this is exactly the sort of crisis where the television medium can and should be most valuable, a departure from the endless, obvious commentary for which it is most often known. And yet, to state what has long been obvious, most of the breaking news these days, and the most compelling moral arguments, arrive, via push notification or email, on far smaller screens.