Good evening, and welcome back to In The Room. Tonight, more news and notes on the ongoing fallout from CNN’s Trump Town Hall.

Amanpour said she had met with Licht this week to convey her belief that CNN should not have allowed Trump “to appear in that particular format,” and criticized his decision to broadcast Trump’s remarks live before an unruly audience. Licht acknowledged that “the execution was lacking a little,” Amanpour said, but he maintained that the network “did the right thing,” and that the town hall was “a service to the American people.” Amanpour respectfully disagreed: “We know Trump and his tendencies, everyone does,” she told the students. “He just seizes the stage and dominates, no matter how much flack the moderator tries to aim at the incoming. It doesn’t often work.”

As is obvious by this point, Chris Licht has a difficult job. He was thrown into a seismic mess in which he had to simultaneously replace a legend, oversee a global news organization during a time of foreign war and a looming presidential election, manage through the exigencies of a fresh corporate merger… oh, and oversee a unit of thousands of journalists, many of whom are world famous, some of whom are prima donnas, and some more of whom are indifferent to managing up, his vision, etcetera. And as the contretemps over Oliver Darcy’s recent newsletter lede criticism of the town hall clearly manifested, these are journalists: it’s their job to speak truth to power, even when it’s their boss. Amanpour’s public criticism channeled the widely held frustrations of so many CNN anchors, correspondents, producers and reporters in the wake of the Trump town hall, which I noted last week. But it was especially notable that it came from Amanpour, herself, a highly decorated journalist who has been with the network almost since its inception, and who, coincidentally, is the paragon of Lichtian-Zaslavian vision for New CNN.

Indeed, WBD executives frequently invoke Amanpour’s name in private conversations when seeking to distinguish their vision for the network from that of Licht’s predecessor, Jeff Zucker. They argue that Zucker sidelined Amanpour’s inimitable, globally-minded journalism by relentlessly focusing on the theater of Trump-tinged U.S. politics. And yet, here was that very same journalist speaking out against the new administration for how it decided to platform the former president.

“I have always opted to speak out when staying silent might have been easier,” Amanpour told the graduating class. “I want to do what’s right and empathize with and acknowledge all of those who need to trust us at CNN. I understand that for many of us the town hall was an earthquake,” she continued. “I hope that your trust in us might have been shaken but not shattered. That you believe we can survive and rebuild that trust.”

Licht, after all, is still beating back against old institutional habits. Last week, I reported that he summoned CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy to an hour-long meeting after Darcy published his own critical take of the town hall, and told the reporter that he should be less emotional. I subsequently learned that Licht’s deputy, Ryan Kadro, summoned Don Lemon to a meeting after his contentious on-air exchange with G.O.P. presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy regarding the 2nd Amendment’s role in civil rights—Lemon told Ramaswamy that his remarks were “insulting”—and told the anchor that he had been too emotional. Lemon was fired from CNN a few days later.

More broadly, Licht’s “dispassion” mandate has neutered the career trajectory of journalists who thrived in the Zucker era. Brianna Keilar, who was once a minor celebrity for her impassioned critiques of Trump and his enablers, now reads milquetoast headlines from the dayside teleprompter.

The fact that CNN’s primetime ratings are bottoming out—last night, Newsmax’s Rob Schmitt and Eric Bolling drew larger audiences than Erin Burnett and Anderson Cooper, respectively—doesn’t seem to phase them, either. Perhaps that’s an understandable mindset for executives who endured similar slings and arrows when the WBD stock cratered during last year’s restructuring, and have since seen it rebound 31 percent year-to-date. They’re playing the long game, and believe that a consistent primetime lineup and a presidential campaign season could reverse the network’s fortunes.

Still, nothing will test Zaslav’s ability to execute on this mission as much as the depleted morale of the journalists and producers who work for his company, and who see Chris Licht as Captain Queeg, the antagonist from Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny. If I can break the fourth wall for a minute: In all my reporting on CNN over the last 18 months—and yes, I recognize that I write about the organization not infrequently—I have never felt such an overwhelming sense of frustration and resentment toward Licht as in the week since the town hall, and never from such a broad range of sources, more than 40 of whom I’ve spoken with in recent days. The Amanpour speech and the Darcy newsletter are merely the most diplomatic and nuanced articulations of those sentiments. In private, they are far more passionate and explicit—emotional, you might say.

In that regard, the most consequential effect of the town hall and its fallout is the way in which it has exacerbated CNN employees’ more general and longstanding frustrations with Licht’s leadership. After the broadcast, Licht privately identified a number of production decisions he wished had been made differently that night, from better contextualizing the makeup of the audience to having his post-game anchors focus on the news Trump made, rather than having them respond to his lies. When Jake Tapper’s postgame panel of CNN journalists descended into a somber grief session over the spectacle, Licht texted executive producer Charlie Moore and told him to switch the broadcast to Anderson’s panel, which featured partisan pundits—thereby taking the pressure off his own journalists to come to terms on live television with what they had just witnessed.

Licht’s postgame analysis leaked to CNBC this week, leaving several journalists and producers who were involved with the night’s coverage with the suspicion that their boss had just thrown them under the bus. (It didn’t help that an initial version of the story claimed Licht was disappointed with Tapper and Anderson’s panels). The true backstory behind the leak is a bit more nuanced, and there are indeed ways in which Licht has tried to absorb the criticism directed at his network since the town hall. Nevertheless, these are indeed the CNN and WBD leadership’s takeaways from what many staffers viewed as a disaster: the audience should have been introduced; the post-game analysis shouldn’t have been so morose; producers should have tweaked the camera angles.

In her commencement address, Amanpour offered different prescriptions for CNN’s town hall: “Maybe less is more, maybe ‘live’ is not always right,” she said. “Some of the very best and even most fiery, compelling interviews are, in fact, taped … to edit for filibuster and a stream of disinformation.” Amanpour also stressed the distinction between neutrality and objectivity: “Both-siderism—on the one hand, on the other hand—is not always objectivity. It does not get you to the truth.”

Finally, she suggested that she, a Emmy and Murrow and Polk and Peabody award-winning veteran journalist who has covered myriad conflicts and interviewed her fair share of leaders and despots, might have done a better job moderating the town hall than Collins, the 31-year-old golden child of Licht’s New CNN whose measured and respectful fact-checking of Trump hardly served as a counterbalance to his onslaught of lies and misinformation. “I would have dropped the mic at ‘nasty person,’” Amanpour said, referring to Trump’s memorable insult toward Collins. “But then that’s me,” she said. “I’ve been in the ring for a long time with these people.”