Photo Illustration by Darrow; Photographs, from Getty Images (Trump’s Head), by Shannon Finney (Brzezinski’s Head), Paras Griffin (Ryan’s Head), from NBC Newswire (Reid’s Head), by Ray Tamarra (Maddow’s Head), all from Getty Images. The me-Tarzan heyday of political broadcast journalism’s “big swinging dicks” (to borrow Michael Lewis’s hallowed term) has entered its twilight phase, a long-overdue development obvious to everyone except those little swinging dicks who keep injuring themselves trying to perpetuate the old swagger. Lift the lid on the lusty telenovela at Fox News, if you dare, where once testosterone, cigar smoke, and rampant innuendo were the seething norm under the long reign of former chairman and C.E.O. Roger Ailes, whose emperorship ended in shabby disgrace after a cluster bomb of sexual-harassment accusations. Ailes—who did not live to enjoy the golden parachute from his former employer, dying from a subdural hematoma in May—was soon followed on the exit runway by the network’s biggest star and gnarliest samurai, Bill O’Reilly, who also allegedly let his grabby hands and mouthy comments roam where they oughtn’t. (Gangplanked by Fox, O’Reilly is trying out a subscription-based, Internet-only show, which I look forward to missing.) The Furies weren’t done flushing out reputed misbehavers at Fox News—if not firing them outright, at least sending them to the penalty box, pending investigation. Earlier this year, Fox Business Network host Charles Payne was suspended for alleged sexual harassment of a former guest, but the bigger story was the abrupt splashdown of Fox News host Eric Bolling, suspended after accusations from multiple sources in a story by Yashar Ali in HuffPost that he had sent female colleagues lewd texts with a picture of male genitalia, the irony being that this brash bucko was so righteously damning of Anthony Weiner for his penis selfies. Now Bolling too had been pulled over for possible weinering. It is a wicked world in which we live, but Karma sometimes gets the last cackle. What is significant about the Bolling imbroglio is that he was and is one of President Donald Trump’s most manly, two-fisted, top-sirloin defenders at Fox News, bested only by cube-headed Sean Hannity, who is determined to claim dibs on the last deck chair on the Titanic. And it is to the law firm of Trump’s personal lawyer Marc E. Kasowitz that Bolling has turned to launch a defamation suit against the author of the Huffington Post article. Throughout his entire Fox News career Bolling typified the “gorilla mind-set” espoused by macho paleo blogger Mike Cernovich in his book of the same name, an ode to alpha dominance that found its golden fulfillment in the candidacy and presidency of Donald Trump, the gorilla mind-set being the Wagnerian prelude to achieving what Cernovich heralds in his follow-up book as the “MAGA mind-set”—the inner power of Trumpian transformation that elevates the alphas from the also-rans. Thanks to the flubbering failure of Trump himself, the MAGA mind-set now resembles melted cheese, a glop of congealed ego and spilt religion.

While the belligerents of cable news writhe in fury and frustration, or stew in exile, a sexual evolution is afoot and gaining traction, a long-overdue changing of the guard. Even before Fox News looped its jungle vines, political journalism and commentary, in print and on air, were primarily a convocation of wise white men in dark suits and measured tones. Watch old b&w footage from Meet the Press or Face the Nation and note what a monochromatic custodianship of Washington consensus it was. In many ways it was better for an informed citizenry than the food fights that would follow in the Watergate era and beyond. These were serious, knowledgeable, procedure-minded men, but it was nearly all men in the studios and newsrooms, apart from a few notable exceptions, such as The New Yorker’s Elizabeth Drew (who, as I recall, would often have to ask Time’s Hugh Sidey to stop interrupting her on Agronsky & Company), Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift (who had to fend off everyone’s interrupting on The McLaughlin Group—see a pattern here?), Mary McGrory of The Washington Post (subject of John Norris’s fine biography Mary McGrory: The First Queen of Journalism), and, occupying an honored place in the front row of Washington press conferences for decades like a skeptical Buddha, Helen Thomas. We saw an explosion of female faces and voices on cable news during the Clinton scandals, in the 90s, but many of these belonged to pundit hit women and partisan operatives who plague us still (Laura Ingraham, Ann Coulter, Kellyanne Conway), not actual fact gatherers and illuminators. The fake-news pollutants and beefcake posturing of Trumpdom are being met with more visibility and audibility from female journalists with a Wonder Woman ability to fend off hostile tweets. Margaret Brennan, of CBS News. Susan Page, Washington-bureau chief of USA Today. Hallie Jackson, White House correspondent for NBC News. The intrepid reporter Katy Tur of NBC News/MSNBC. Janet Rodriguez, White House correspondent for Univision. Tara Palmeri, White House correspondent for Politico. Elisabeth Bumiller, Washington editor of The New York Times. Ashley Parker, White House reporter for The Washington Post. Jenna Johnson, political reporter for The Washington Post. Cecilia Vega, White House correspondent for ABC News. And so many more. The 2017 championship belt for prime-time cable-news queen has been claimed by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, the ebullient policy-wonk dissector of breaking events, whose No. 1 status in the ratings pains the Reverend Pat Robertson, who seems ready to be loaded into the wagon after seeing such heathen auguries come to pass. Since 2014, Maddow’s weeknight forensics report has tripled the size of its viewership, elevating MSNBC from mighty-mite status to monster-truck rally. On weekends, Joy-Ann Reid is racking up the numbers for MSNBC, her AM Joy show beating CNN in its time slot and boosting the vital 25–54 demographic while CNN’s and Fox News’s audiences go gray. Like Maddow, Reid doesn’t provide fireworks and rhetorical arias; she’s methodical, laying out each new Trumpian outrage like an Agatha Christie scene. Equally cool and unmussed, under much more trying conditions, is Mika Brzezinski, co-host with Joe Scarborough of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, a show that was hospitable to Trump in his campaign days but finally saw the light, beheld the monster of its own partial making, and turned its phasers to stun. For the sin of betraying America’s Godzilla in a golf cart, Trump unleashed an acid-rain tweetstorm on Joe and Mika, doling out the Megyn Kelly treatment to Mika with a misogynist slur that he seemed to be carrying around in his back pocket until the opportunity to let fly presented itself. Brzezinski handled the incident classily, with the aplomb befitting the daughter of the distinguished diplomat, adviser, and geopolitical theorist Zbigniew Brzezinski.