On Tuesday, shortly after I broke the news that former CNN anchor and media correspondent Brian Stelter would be returning to the cable news network, Stelter himself confirmed that he would become its chief media analyst, formally assuming a job he had more or less been doing for free, albeit not exclusively, since April. Stelter will not reprise his previous role as anchor of a Sunday media show, but he will return to the helm of the Reliable Sources newsletter that he launched in 2015 and made into an essential nightly digest for media insiders—and, coincidentally, posing a considerable challenge to his erstwhile understudy, Oliver Darcy, who recently busted out of CNN to start a Reliable clone and competitor. Befitting the new economics of both media and television, Stelter will make a fraction of his previous salary.

Unsurprisingly, Stelter’s homecoming raised a lot of questions among the media insiders to whom he caters. Originally a mild-mannered TV news industry obsessive, Stelter had morphed during the late Zucker era into a chest-thumping proponent of press freedoms and a self-righteous critic of Trump and Fox News. (He’s written a pair of books on the topic.) This, along with his sui generis phenotype, made him a reliable punching bag for Tucker Carlson and Greg Gutfeld types, a poster child for CNN’s perceived liberal bias in the Trump era, and therefore a very obvious target in Warner Bros. Discovery’s effort to exorcize polarizing voices after it assumed control of the asset. Indeed, CNN’s own internal audience research revealed that Stelter was one of the network’s most polarizing on-air personalities.