Good evening, I’m Dylan Byers.

Welcome back to In The Room, my biweekly private email on the inner workings of American media. Tonight, we go back inside CNN, where some on-air talent are on pins and needles as Chris Licht evaluates whether or not they align with his vision for a non-partisan, non-polarizing news network.

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Those anxieties, which have been simmering for months, ever since influential Discovery board member and cable founding father John Malone called on CNN to “evolve back to the kind of journalism that it started with,” were set ablaze after Axios’ Sara Fischer reported that Licht was “evaluating partisan talent” to see if they could re-align themselves with his new mandate. “Have you heard anything about the reality of that report?” one decidedly non-partisan talent asked me this week. “It kind of screwed with my head.”

Licht is indeed evaluating talent, but there’s some nuance to his thinking that goes well beyond concerns about partisanship. His greater ambition, sources familiar with his thinking tell me, is to discourage spectacle and alarmism, as well as the chest-thumping fulminations that defined Jeff Zucker’s CNN during the Trump era. The direction that Licht wants to impress upon his staff—and which he intends to bring up at tomorrow’s town hall—is that CNN should cover the story, not be the story, and that anchors and correspondents need to uphold those principles in order to maintain and build trust with audiences, especially the cohorts who were turned off by the self-aggrandizing this-is-an-apple, always-at-11 grandstanding of the recent past...