Good evening, I'm Dylan Byers.

Welcome back to In the Room, my biweekly private email on the intrigue and inside story behind what’s going on in the media industry.

In today’s email: A readout on David Zaslav’s meeting with CNN’s top brass, what I'm hearing about Chris Cuomo's fading hopes for a financial settlement, and some new intel on the network’s linear and streaming plans.

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Zaz Comes to CNN

The atrocities in Ukraine have washed away much of CNN’s angst and sanctimony about the Zucker defenestration. Meanwhile, Zaz has encouraged a victory lap from “The Trio,” who have led the network in the interim. And as the European quagmire expands, many are still wondering what Chris Cuomo is fighting for.

At 9:30 a.m. on Thursday morning, the interim leadership at CNN—Michael Bass, Amy Entelis, and Ken Jautz, affectionately referred to by insiders as “The Trio”—put on their coats and left CNN headquarters at Hudson Yards for a meeting with David Zaslav, the soon-to-be president and C.E.O. of Warner Bros. Discovery, CNN's soon-to-be parent company. The meeting, which also included CNN's chief financial officer Brad Ferrer, and top lawyer David Vigilante, marked the formal beginning of what all parties hope will be a new chapter for the news network, sources familiar with the meeting told me—a chapter in which the drama surrounding Jeff Zucker, Allison Gollust, and Jason Kilar can be put in the rear-view mirror and the network can start telling a more favorable story about its industry-leading newsgathering capability and its coverage of the war in Ukraine.

After Zucker's surprise defenestration, CNN was wracked by anger and frustration. Everyone reading this story has also read the transcript of Jake Tapper berating Kilar for his mismanagement of the crisis, or Kaitlin Collins spinning the outgoing WarnerMedia C.E.O. around her finger with some rhetorical jujitsu. This open grieving spilled out into public view, and led to a steady drip of leaks about Zucker and Gollust's alleged misdeeds that never provided any real evidence of a smoking gun, and thus no real sense of closure. The grieving led to more grieving, and Kilar was a more than willing emotional pinata.

The Ukraine crisis changed that...

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