“Our integrity is on the line!” one MSNBC host told me the other day, employing genuine if well-rehearsed urgency. This was a week ago, during the first wave of the Great Democratic Panic, when the intraparty battle lines over Joe Biden’s fitness for office were still calcifying. Yes, many of the most notable members of the liberal punditocracy—Tom Friedman, Nick Kristof, David Remnick, the Pod Save America crew, the Times editorial board, etcetera—had already staked out positions and called on the president to step aside. George Stephanopoulos, who had sat face-to-face with Biden, had also inadvertently admitted to the world that he didn’t believe the president could serve another four years. Meanwhile, the Democrats’ anxiety was metastasizing with each of Biden’s wince-inducing public appearances, the White House was tripping over itself to evade a newly animated press corps, and almost all the polls were starting to trend in the wrong direction.

For the MSNBC host, however, “integrity” meant being honest with the network’s very liberal and highly activated viewers about this situation—that Biden was fucked, the party was fucked, that the various options were neither easy nor good—and not pretending to live in some alternate reality where none of this was happening, “like Fox News,” as this person put it. Unfortunately, this was proving to be a challenge for some colleagues. Most hosts at the network instinctually wanted to cover the facts, this person said—the anxiety, the polls, the growing chorus of Democratic lawmakers calling for a new candidate—but they also knew that doing so would draw the ire of their most loyal viewers. “If I even cover a single poll that’s bad for Biden, I am going to get raked over the coals on Twitter,” the host said. “Viewers hate this.”