Good evening, I'm Dylan Byers.

Welcome back to In The Room, my biweekly private email on the inner workings of American media. Tonight, fresh reporting on what industry insiders are saying about Alex Wagner’s anointment at MSNBC as she takes over superstar Rachel Maddow’s once-sacrosanct 9 p.m. anchor chair. Her promotion comes at a time when leaders like Rashida Jones and CNN’s Chris Licht are fiercely tempering ratings expectations as their networks tack toward a more “centrist” and civic-minded approach to coverage. But, as one veteran television executive said, “lowering expectations isn’t a strategy.”

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After all, the micro news event wasn’t enough to overtake the macro-economic forces: cord-cutting, the rise of mobile, disintermediated content, the profusion of affinity-driven brands, and, frankly, the fact that TV news was a hallmark of the Boomer life experience that just didn’t fundamentally translate to Millennials and Gen Zers. (Trump, himself, was living proof of this fact.) When Trump left office, Zucker intimated, the ratings would fall back down to earth and then continue their downward trend...