One late summer evening, the inner sanctum of the media-entertainment vortex descended upon the expansive garden of David Zaslav’s $25 million East Hampton estate, where the well-connected Discovery C.E.O. hosts an annual Labor Day party. This year’s guest list comprised the standard liberal in-crowd: Jerry Seinfeld, Jon Bon Jovi, Oprah, Alec Baldwin, Barry Diller, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and Katie Couric, to name a few. They were treated to a performance by Earth, Wind & Fire, who belted out “September” after the sun went down.

But there was another set of famous faces mingling in the crowd—the people whose job it is to cover the most compelling reality show in history, the Trump administration, for America’s original 24-hour news channel, CNN. Don Lemon, who anchors the network’s 10 P.M. hour, introduced his mom and boyfriend to guests. Brian Stelter, host of Sunday’s Reliable Sources, made the rounds. Carl Bernstein, who had beamed in for contributor segments over the summer from his place in Sag Harbor, was spotted on the dance floor. Most notable of all was Jeff Zucker, the 53-year-old network president under whose stewardship CNN has become a must-watch platform for nonstop coverage of the Trump White House and all of its attendant hysteria. It was Zucker’s first social outing since recovering from heart surgery in early August, and his last before returning to the hellish news cycle.

At the time, Zucker couldn’t have possibly predicted just how hellish things would soon get. Two months later, CNN would be dealing with a horrific bomb scare perpetrated by a MAGA-obsessed Florida man, which prompted a strong statement from Zucker to Trump, himself. “There is a total and complete lack of understanding at the White House about the seriousness of their continued attacks on the media. The president, and especially the White House press secretary, should understand their words matter.”

Photo by Christian Alminana/Getty Images.

Weeks before that exchange, Zucker was on the phone talking about why Trump sucks up so much of CNN’s oxygen. “People say all the time, ‘Oh, I don’t want to talk about Trump. I’ve had too much Trump,’ ” he told me. “And yet at the end of the day, all they want to do is talk about Trump. We’ve seen that, anytime you break away from the Trump story and cover other events in this era, the audience goes away. So we know that, right now, Donald Trump dominates.”

Zucker, the guy who first brought our president to the small screen when he green-lighted The Apprentice in 2004 while running NBC, had arguably schooled Trump in the art of reality television. Halfway through Trump’s first term, his instincts remain just as acute. If Fox News represents Trump’s base and MSNBC has become a friendly platform for the resistance, CNN is the arena where both sides show up for cantankerous battle. “On Fox, you rarely hear from people who don’t support Trump,” Zucker told me. “On MSNBC, you rarely hear from people who do support Trump. We want to be home to both those points of view.” He continued, as if rebuking a common critique of the network. “It is true some of these folks are not very good with the facts, but that’s O.K. in the sense that it’s our job then to call them out.”

In the current media environment, this is CNN’s hallmark. Of course, it’s still the network people turn to for coverage of massive news events—natural disasters and war zones; a papal visit or royal wedding or missing plane. CNN has also been in the game with regular scoops about the ongoing Trump saga and Robert Mueller probe. But a lot of the action these days unfolds in heated panel discussions between pro- and anti-Trump voices, as well as confrontational interviews with White House officials like Kellyanne Conway. “I have to check her everywhere, because what she’ll do otherwise is flood the zone,” said Chris Cuomo, who hosts the nine P.M. hour on the network. Cuomo and Conway met 25 years ago when they helped create an economic-policy think tank. “She’ll say three things in a row that need a correction. She’s really, really good.” (Conway didn’t return a request for comment.)