Charles Feldman and I are joined by Craig Swagler — former head of CBS News Radio and now with Baltimore Public Media — for a candid conversation about what happened, why the decision was made, and what the collapse of the network says about the future of radio journalism itself.

From shrinking audiences and corporate consolidation to changing technology, vanishing local newsrooms, and the economic realities facing legacy media, this episode examines the slow unraveling of a broadcasting model that once defined American news.

But this isn’t just about one network.

It’s about the future of radio. The future of trusted journalism. And whether there’s still a place for depth, credibility, and public-service broadcasting in a media landscape increasingly driven by speed, outrage, and algorithms.

An honest conversation from people who lived it.

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There’s an old rule in television news that eventually overrides everything else: ratings.

You can survive criticism for a while. You can survive bad headlines. You can survive angry staff meetings, leaked memos, and media reporters circling like vultures.

But if the audience disappears? That’s when the knives come out.

And right now, the audience is disappearing at CBS News.

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The ratings for the CBS Evening News have fallen hard in the Bari Weiss era. Multiple industry reports describe historic lows for the broadcast under anchor Tony Dokoupil, who became the face of Weiss’s overhaul of the division earlier this year.

Staff morale reportedly is collapsing. Major talents are leaving or being laid off. And the Weiss overhaul is coming for 60 Minutes — the last jewel in the CBS News crown — this summer.

This week, the media reporting got even more interesting.

According to reports picked up by both Status and other media outlets, there are already discussions inside Paramount and Skydance about reducing Weiss’s direct control over parts of CBS News after months of controversy, internal unrest, and collapsing viewership. Paramount publicly denied the reports and says Weiss still has full backing. But corporate denials like that often happen right before major changes.

None of this surprises me.

From the beginning, the Weiss experiment felt less like a television strategy and more like an ideological branding exercise — an attempt to reposition a legacy news division around a vague “anti-woke,” contrarian-media identity that works better on podcasts, Substack, and social media than it does at 6:30 p.m. on broadcast television.

But network evening news is a habit business.

People don’t tune in because they want a cultural argument. They tune in because they want stability. Familiarity. Trust. A sense that adults are explaining the world to them.

For decades, CBS understood that.

Even when the ratings slipped behind NBC and ABC, the broadcast still carried the institutional weight of Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, and generations of serious journalists who treated the program like a public trust.

Now the newscast feels caught between identities. Confused.

And viewers can smell confusion instantly.

The problem for CBS is that television audiences are already fragile. Linear television is aging. Local stations are under pressure. Younger viewers are scattered across streaming, TikTok, YouTube, podcasts, newsletters, and independent creators. If you alienate even part of your remaining audience during a transition like this, rebuilding becomes extremely difficult.

Especially when your competitors still look steady.

Meanwhile, the chaos inside CBS News just keeps growing.

There’s been a backlash over editorial decisions at 60 Minutes. The internal fights over standards and newsroom direction. The reports of staff panic. The departures and layoffs. The growing public sense that one of the most important news organizations in American broadcasting no longer knows what it wants to be.

And then there’s the symbolism of this week itself.

Stephen Colbert is hosting his last Late Show Thursday. Another familiar CBS voice disappears.

On Friday, CBS News Radio goes silent after nearly a century on the air.

For people outside broadcasting, that may sound like just another media restructuring.

For those of us who grew up in radio newsrooms, it feels more like watching part of the American media nervous system being unplugged.

Which brings me to a special programming note.

Friday morning, a new episode of Archer & Feldman goes live featuring Craig Swagler — the former head of CBS News Radio — for a deep, candid conversation about what happened to CBS Radio News, why it disappeared, what’s happening inside broadcast journalism, and where all of this may be heading next.

And honestly, after this week’s headlines about Bari Weiss and CBS News?

The timing feels even more significant.

Also check out the Disciples of Democracy podcast. A new episode is in the pipeline, and you don’t want to miss it.

This is Stephen Colbert’s final week on CBS. The last show is Thursday.

And for people who grew up loving television — especially smart television — it feels strange.

I’ve been a fan of Colbert since his days on The Daily Show, back when he and Steve Carell would do those hilariously overcommitted correspondent bits together. There was always something different about him. He was building a character so committed to his own worldview that it became satire through sheer intensity.

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And then there was that famous moment when Colbert filled in during a segment after the guest, Al Sharpton, didn’t show up. Stephen just pretended to be Sharpton. And it was all last-minute. Stephen recounts the story that he was on the way out the door to catch a sneak preview of The Lord of the Rings when Jon Stewart desperately needed him. You could almost see the future happening in real time. The guy simply took over the screen.

Then came The Colbert Report.

To me, it remains one of the sharpest pieces of political satire television has ever produced. It perfectly captured the performative certainty of the Bush-era cable opinion machine — particularly the style of Bill O’Reilly and the hosts who followed him. Colbert understood something important: The joke was confidence masquerading as authority. Outrage as performance art.

And when CBS announced Colbert would replace David Letterman on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, I was ecstatic. Honestly ecstatic.

It felt impossible at first. The weird satirical character guy from Comedy Central taking over one of the most iconic desks in television history? Colbert was Colbert, the self-righteous egotistical blowhard.

But he grew into it. Not by becoming Letterman. By becoming more himself.

That’s probably what I’ll remember most about his CBS years. Somewhere along the line, especially after the arrival of the Trump regime, the pandemic, and some deeply personal conversations about grief and faith, Colbert evolved from satirist into something warmer and more human. He still had the jokes, but there was also vulnerability underneath them.

And now it’s ending.

Officially, CBS says this is about economics and the changing late-night landscape. A lot of viewers don’t buy that, especially given Paramount’s broader political pressures and ongoing corporate maneuvering. Whatever the real story is, one thing feels undeniable: CBS is walking away from a version of late-night television that once mattered culturally.

And what replaces Colbert?

A cheaper show designed to be endlessly replayed without topical jokes or political commentary.

Colbert’s departure also arrives during a strange moment for television news and legacy media overall.

On Sunday night, Anderson Cooper signed off from 60 Minutes after 20 years with the program. His farewell came as uncertainty hangs over the future of the broadcast under incoming changes reportedly being pushed by Bari Weiss.

“I hope 60 Minutes remains 60 Minutes,” Cooper said.

Well, we’ll see. That sentence carried more weight than he probably intended.

Because suddenly, a lot of institutions that once felt permanent don’t anymore.

CBS News Radio is shutting down at the end of the week. AP is laying off journalists. Local TV news across America keeps shrinking. Newspapers are disappearing. Entire generations of experienced reporters, editors, photographers, anchors, and producers are quietly being pushed out of the business.

The Associated Press announced Friday that it is laying off 20 U.S.-based journalists as part of a restructuring focused more heavily on visual journalism and new revenue strategies. The union representing AP journalists blasted the move, noting that even experienced photographers were among those cut.

That’s after buyouts had already reduced staffing further.

Everything is becoming smaller. Cheaper. Safer. More recyclable. Less risky. Less human.

Even television itself feels less permanent now.

There was a time when names like Letterman, Colbert, 60 Minutes, CBS News Radio, and the AP represented something sturdy in American culture. Reliable. Built to last.

Now they feel fragile.

And maybe that’s why Colbert’s final week is hitting people emotionally.

Because for a lot of viewers, he was part of an entire media ecosystem that shaped how we understood politics, satire, journalism, and culture over the past 25 years.

You look around now, and more and more of that world is disappearing.

I do hope Colbert shows up somewhere else. Streaming. Podcasting. Guest hosting. Whatever form it takes. He’s too talented, too intelligent, and too important to vanish from public life entirely.

But this week still feels like a curtain call for something bigger than one television show.

And I think a lot of us can feel it.

Let me know what you think. Also, follow our podcasts… Disciples of Democracy with my friend Jack Messenger, where we talk about how to help democracy survive… and Archer & Feldman, where we talk about the role of media, and whether it can survive.

Charles Feldman and I discuss the demise of CBS News Radio, the collapse of the traditional broadcasting model, and the changing mission of journalism in America.

The conversation explores the legacy of Edward R. Murrow, the shrinking world of radio news, corporate media consolidation, and whether moral clarity still has a place in modern broadcast journalism.

A thoughtful look at where the industry has been — and where it may be headed next.

The audio version is here:

Also, check out the other podcast I co-host with my friend Jack Messenger, Disciples of Democracy, where we talk about politics, culture, the media, and where our democracy is headed and whether it can be saved.

Once again, the President of the United States is accusing journalists of “treason.”

This time it happened aboard Air Force One, where Trump lashed out at New York Times reporter David Sanger over reporting on the war in Iran.

“I actually think it’s kind of treasonous what you write,” Trump said. Then, moments later, he doubled down. “I actually think it’s treason.”

Here’s the whole exchange.

I won’t delve into how all the claims the president made about the war have little basis in fact. That’s being covered by other great journalists.

The Founding Fathers considered treason so dangerous as a political weapon that they did something extraordinary: they narrowly defined it directly in the Constitution itself. They defined no other crime in our founding document.

The Constitution says treason against the United States consists only of “levying war” against the country or “adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.”

That wording was intentional. The founders knew exactly what governments and kings had done with accusations of treason throughout history. They had watched monarchs use it to destroy political enemies, silence critics, imprison dissidents, and intimidate the press.

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In England, criticizing the crown could become an act of disloyalty. At some points in history, merely suggesting the King might someday die was considered treasonous speech. Under authoritarian governments throughout history, the pattern repeats over and over again.

First, the press is accused of bias. Then corruption. And down the list — sabotage, betrayal, and then treason.

A free press in a democracy is supposed to challenge power. It’s supposed to be free to ask questions. To hold leaders accountable to the people they’re supposed to be representing. But in authoritarian systems, especially where there are cults of personality, criticism of the leader gradually becomes criticism of the state itself. And criticism of the state becomes betrayal.

This isn’t even really about whether Trump personally means it literally. Maybe he does. Maybe he doesn’t. Maybe it’s just anger and impulse and performance, the way so much of modern political rhetoric works.

But history shows that language like this changes the atmosphere around journalism.

The public starts seeing journalism itself as suspicious, dangerous, and un-American.

And once that happens, pressure on the press becomes easier to justify.

That pressure can take many forms. Regulatory threats. Lawsuits. Credential revocations. Kicked out of the White House and the Pentagon. Harassment campaigns. Arrests during protests. Ownership pressure. Public threats.

Sometimes governments don’t even need to formally censor the press. Fear does the work for them.

The most effective authoritarian systems often leave newspapers technically alive while making independent reporting increasingly dangerous, exhausting, expensive, or socially toxic.

Russia still has journalists. So does Hungary. So does Turkey. But ask reporters in those countries how free they really are.

They won’t be allowed to tell you.

John Adams signed the Sedition Act in 1798, making criticism of the federal government punishable by law. Newspapers were targeted. Political opponents were prosecuted. But the backlash to that became so intense that the law helped fuel Adams’ defeat.

During World War I, Woodrow Wilson’s administration used the Espionage and Sedition Acts to prosecute dissenters and anti-war activists.

Richard Nixon constantly portrayed the press as enemies undermining the country.

And yes, authoritarian regimes throughout the twentieth century routinely described independent journalism as treasonous or traitorous. Stalin did it. Hitler did it.

Because controlling the narrative always requires discrediting the people who challenge it.

And here’s the uncomfortable part.

Americans are becoming numb to this language. “Enemy of the people.” “Traitors.” “Anti-American.” “Treasonous.”

The words have become part of the background noise of political entertainment — another viral clip, another outrage cycle, another social media battle that burns hot for six hours and disappears.

That’s how democratic erosion usually works.

And eventually, people stop reacting at all.

A president accusing reporters of treason for unfavorable coverage should still sound alarming in the United States of America.

Not because journalists are above criticism. They aren’t. But journalism cannot function in a free society if reporting information the government doesn’t like is treated as a betrayal of the country itself.

If I were trying to be above all this, I wouldn’t point out that Trump himself spent years attacking Obama and Biden with far harsher language than anything David Sanger wrote about him. He amplified conspiracy theories. He promoted dubious reporting constantly when it benefited him politically.

In other words, criticism of political leaders was patriotic right up until the moment the criticism was directed at him.

Now it’s “treason.”

CBS Evening News had a rough night in Taiwan.

The network sent anchor Tony Dokoupil to Taipei for special coverage tied to President Trump’s trip to China, which is awkward enough on its own, considering NBC and ABC reportedly managed to get their anchors into mainland China while CBS apparently couldn’t secure Dokoupil a visa in time.

Then the broadcast really went sideways.

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During the final segment Wednesday night, one of the cameramen apparently suffered a medical emergency live on the air.

You could see the camera suddenly begin shaking while Dokoupil was talking. Dokoupil disappears from the screen as B-roll comes on. He stopped mid-sentence and asked, “Is he okay?”

After a brief pause, Dokoupil turned to viewers and said:

“We are going to take a quick break. We have a medical emergency here. We are calling a doctor.”

Someone off camera could also be heard saying, “Call the doctor, please,” before correspondent Matt Gutman stepped in and sent the broadcast to commercial.

Later, CBS posted a statement saying the cameraman is okay and recovering. The network didn’t say what caused the medical emergency or identify the crew member involved.

But taken together — the Taiwan location, the apparent visa problem, the chaotic on-air interruption — it turned into exactly the kind of broadcast a network never wants people talking about the next morning.

All of this is happening during a period of major instability at CBS News. The editorial direction of 60 Minutes is under scrutiny. CBS News Radio shuts down next week. More layoffs and cutbacks are expected. And the ratings for Evening News are at the bottom of the broadcast pack.

And if the political winds shift again after the midterms or the next presidential election, what happens to the effort to reposition CBS News for a more MAGA-friendly audience? Any sudden pivot back toward the network’s old identity would look obvious — and no chance of regaining its old audience.

At any rate, I do not envy Tony Dokoupil.

The FCC’s lone Democratic commissioner just did something almost unheard of.

Anna Gomez publicly warned The Walt Disney Company that her own agency appears to be targeting the company for political reasons.

In a letter sent to Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro, Gomez accused FCC Chairman Brendan Carr and the Republican-led commission of using investigations as a weapon — not necessarily to win cases, but to pressure media companies into submission.

Her argument is blunt: the intimidation itself is the strategy.

Gomez called the FCC’s actions “dangerous” and described what she says is a broader campaign to punish companies seen as unfriendly to the Trump administration. She later told CNN the investigations are designed to “silence dissent” and praised Disney for refusing to completely back down.

That’s extraordinary language coming from a sitting commissioner talking about her own agency.

And it raises a bigger question: why is Gomez still there at all?

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Across the federal government, dissenters and internal critics have largely been pushed aside. But the FCC operates under different rules. The commission currently has only three sitting members — Carr, Gomez, and Republican commissioner Olivia Trusty. Major FCC actions require a quorum. Remove Gomez, and the commission risks grinding to a halt.

So in a strange twist, Brendan Carr may actually need the very person publicly accusing him of political intimidation.

At least for now. Given Trump’s history, it’s difficult to imagine Carr and the White House tolerating a public internal critic indefinitely.

Gomez’s official term expires next month, but FCC commissioners can often remain in their seats until a replacement is confirmed by the Senate. And so far, Trump hasn’t nominated one. That means the FCC’s “lone Democrat” could remain a very public thorn in Carr’s side well into 2028 if the seat stays vacant.

But due to Gomez moving to the fore in this narrative, Trump and Carr are sure to try to remove her as soon as they can.

Meanwhile, Gomez is escalating her rhetoric. And with her official term about to expire, she may feel she has little left to lose by warning publicly about what she believes is happening inside the agency.

In the letter, she argued that many of the FCC investigations under Carr are carefully designed never to fully reach court scrutiny because the real objective isn’t enforcement.

“The threat is the point,” she wrote.

She also took direct aim at Disney’s decision to settle Trump’s lawsuit against ABC and George Stephanopoulos late last year. Gomez warned the company that the settlement bought no lasting protection.

She writes, “You cannot buy this Administration’s favor. For the right price, you can only borrow it. And the price always goes up.”

Disney already learned the lesson many media companies are learning right now: accommodation doesn’t stop the pressure. All it does is show the bully that the tactic is working.

Meanwhile, the rot of normalization keeps growing.

A federal regulatory agency openly signaling to media companies that criticism of the administration may come with consequences. A commissioner openly accusing her own chairman of political intimidation. Media corporations calculating whether resistance is worth the cost.

Just another day in American media.

What do you think? Is Gomez a free speech warrior? Or is she the villain undermining her own commission?

Back when KNX gave me an afternoon show alongside Karen Adams and Brian Douglas, Charles was part of the mix. Smart. Steady. Serious. The kind of broadcaster who instantly raises the level of the conversation.

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Part of that job also meant hosting KNX In Depth with him every weekday — a news-driven magazine hour where we went beyond headlines, talked with experts, challenged guests when needed, and tried to make sense of stories that were getting more complicated by the day.

Well… we’re doing it again.

Today marks the debut of Archer & Feldman — a new podcast focused on media, radio, journalism, free speech, and the rapidly changing information landscape we’re all trying to navigate.

Our first episode features legendary voice talent and news anchor Pat Powers as we talk about the fate of radio, the collapse of local media, and where journalism may be headed next.

The audio version is available on Podbean, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and pretty much everywhere else podcasts live. The video version is below.

Please check it out. Subscribe if you like it. Share it around. Help us build this thing.

Thank you.

And don’t forget about the other podcast I co-host with my friend Jack Messenger — Disciples of Democracy.

CBS Radio News is dying in less than two weeks.

For most people, that won’t mean much. Another media brand disappears. Another corporate restructuring. Another quiet ending in an industry that has spent the past 20 years dismantling itself piece by piece, pushing experienced professionals out along the way.

But for me, and for a lot of radio journalists, this one feels different. It feels more like we’re drawing closer to a dimming campfire as the night settles all around, and we can see that the fire is dying, and soon we’ll all be in the dark.

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For 10 years at KNX in Los Angeles, the sound of CBS Radio News was part of the rhythm of my life. Every hour, the familiar chime and news sting rolled through the newsroom.

That chime was a reset. A turn of the clock. A new beginning. Another chance to tell people what was happening in the world.

Long before podcasts, long before cable panels, long before social media turned everyone into a broadcaster, CBS Radio News was helping invent modern electronic journalism in one of the darkest moments of the twentieth century.

Its defining broadcast — World News Roundup — was born in 1938 after Nazi Germany annexed Austria. As Europe slid into barbarism and chaos, CBS stitched together reporters across multiple countries in real time. That was revolutionary then. Radio networks usually centralized everything in New York. But this was different — eyewitness journalism crossing borders as authoritarianism spread across Europe.

Fascism was rising in real time. And CBS understood the stakes.

Then came Edward R. Murrow.

Murrow wasn’t loud. He wasn’t theatrical. He didn’t turn journalism into performance art. What made him powerful was his moral clarity.

From London rooftops during the Blitz, Murrow described bombs falling on civilians while much of America, climbing out of the Great Depression, hoped the horror in Europe could somehow be ignored. His reports made authoritarianism feel real and immediate to American listeners sitting safely thousands of miles away.

And later, when Senator Joseph McCarthy used fear, intimidation, and accusation to poison American politics, Murrow confronted him directly. And he did it because it was necessary.

That was the original DNA of CBS News.

The mission was simple: tell the public the truth, especially when powerful people don’t want you to.

Which brings us to now.

The modern media environment feels very different. Some news organizations still do fearless reporting. Great journalists still exist. But many corporate outlets feel cautious, fragile, and nervous. Billionaire ownership. Political pressure. Fear of lawsuits. Fear of losing access. Fear of government retaliation. Fear of audience backlash.

Mountains of corporate money are at stake now. Mergers. Licenses. Regulatory approvals. Billion-dollar valuations tied to political goodwill. In that environment, moral clarity and First Amendment principles start looking like liabilities.

And too often, the result is paralysis disguised as balance. But the reality is — and may all the gods forgive me for saying it — isn’t so much concern about balance as it is covering corporate asses.

You can feel it in the language. The hesitation. The refusal to plainly describe anti-democratic behavior for what it is.

That’s part of what makes the death of CBS Radio News feel strangely symbolic.

This network was born warning Americans about fascism. And it’s ending in an era when much of the press seems terrified of doing exactly that.

I keep thinking about those hourly chimes and the 60-minute reset.

Some hours brought earthquakes. Wildfires. Shootings. Elections. Presidential speeches. Wars.

Some hours brought nothing at all.

But the sound remained constant, steady, and reliable. Like the breathing of some great organism, coiled and poised and ready to warn us of danger.

Connected to generations of broadcasters stretching all the way back to Murrow and those first frightened reports from Europe.

Soon, that sound disappears.

And maybe that’s what bothers me most. The feeling that something larger is fading with it.

A belief that journalism is supposed to confront power instead of orbiting around it. A belief that telling uncomfortable truths is part of the job. A belief that democracy requires a press willing to say plainly what it sees.

The chime was never just a sound effect. It was a reminder of what broadcast journalism once believed was its purpose.

What do you think? Is the death of CBS Radio News just the beginning? Leave a comment below.

BY THE WAY, if you were a fan of KNX In Depth, good news: I’m reuniting with my cohost Charles Feldman for a new podcast, Archer & Feldman. The first episode drops Tuesday morning at 9 Eastern / 6 Pacific on YouTube. And yes, we’ll be talking about the death of CBS Radio News. Please join us!

The use of AI chatbots can be dangerous for people vulnerable to magical thinking — especially when they don’t understand what their own brains are doing.

Pareidolia — the brain’s tendency to find patterns, faces, and meaning in noise — is a feature, not a bug. It helped our ancestors survive. The rustle in the grass might be a predator, so the brain that assumes it is lives longer than the one that doesn’t. It reproduces more offspring with that instinct.

We’re all running ancient threat-detection software that was never designed for the modern world — let alone for a chat window that types back.

Most people have enough self-awareness to know, at least loosely, that when they feel like their car “doesn’t want to start today,” they’re projecting. They’re dimly aware that they’re doing it.

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This isn’t just whimsy. Humans have been personifying objects for as long as we’ve been human — naming boats, cursing tools, grieving over broken things as though something alive had died. Psychologists call the underlying mechanism agent detection: the brain’s reflex to assign intention to anything that moves, responds, or behaves unpredictably. It’s why we yell at ATMs.

Like pareidolia, agent detection was adaptive. An organism that assumes the boulder rolling toward it has intent moves out of the way faster than one that doesn’t. And those people live longer and reproduce more.

Together, these systems form a quiet alliance in the brain: one finds the face, the other assumes it wants something.

For most people, that’s background noise.

But some people have that tendency dialed up — and more importantly, have no framework for understanding why their brain keeps finding intention, personality, and presence in things that have none.

Into that gap walks an AI chatbot.

This is the same cognitive space where gods and religion once took hold — not because people were foolish, but because the human brain is built to detect agency and respond to it. Historically, the “response” came through ritual, interpretation, or authority figures.

Priests and cult leaders were quite happy to find they were dealing with a resource hardwired into the brain that they could exploit.

But now, something answers back directly, and it doesn’t need prophets.

The problem is that chatbots don’t just trigger these instincts the way a cloud that looks like a face does. They actively reinforce them. They respond. They mirror tone. They validate. They say things like “I understand how you feel.”

A pattern-hungry brain reads that as confirmation: it knows me.

That’s where the feedback loop begins.

The user perceives a relationship. The system reflects it back. The perception deepens. The interaction feels more real. The loop tightens.

I don’t want to get into the “Is AI sentient?” debate. But it’s hard not to wonder how much of that argument — even among experts and scientists — is also being nudged along by the same cognitive wiring. The same instinct to detect intention. The same pull to see something or someone behind the curtain.

Because the system sounds like someone. It responds like someone. It carries on a conversation like someone. And the human brain fills in the rest.

Now layer that onto a media environment.

Engagement is the product. Time is the currency. Systems that feel responsive, warm, and present keep people interacting longer. They build a habit. They create return behavior. They convert users into subscribers.

The architecture doesn’t need to be malicious to produce the effect. It only needs to be optimized for attention.

The AI that makes stronger connections gets more users, keeps them online longer, and that company makes more money.

The result is the same: a system that increasingly feels like someone is there.

For users who already struggle to separate pattern from meaning, simulation from presence, tool from companion — this isn’t harmless anthropomorphism. It’s stronger.

There’s a second-order effect, too: substitution.

If the chatbot “understands” them — and the brain insists that it does — why deal with the friction of human relationships? Humans disappoint. Humans push back. Humans aren’t available at 3 a.m.

The chatbot is. It listens. It responds. It never leaves. It always thinks your idea is a great one.

All of this is scaling quietly, in plain sight, to millions of people who have never been taught how their own pattern-recognition systems work — or how easily those systems can be fooled.

And the platforms delivering it have every incentive to keep the loop running.

We built a god that listens… and actually responds. We just didn’t think about who was going to be praying to it.

Thank you so much for reading. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber and help keep Archer’s Line free of corporate or advertiser influence.

For months, America’s major television networks have mostly responded to political pressure from the Trump administration the same way: compliance, caution, retreat.

Now, one of them is pushing back.

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ABC has accused the Federal Communications Commission of violating the network’s free speech rights — calling the agency’s actions a “chilling effect” on speech and warning that the government is trying to punish viewpoints it dislikes.

ABC hasn’t always been willing to fight.

When Trump sued ABC in 2024 over comments by George Stephanopoulos, Disney settled for 15 million dollars rather than continue the legal fight — even though many legal experts believed the case was weak.

When late-night host Jimmy Kimmel angered Trump and his allies over a joke, ABC temporarily suspended him instead of immediately defending him.

CBS has also faced enormous pressure. Parent company Paramount has spent months trying to navigate both regulatory scrutiny and its merger ambitions while Trump allies repeatedly attacked CBS News programming and editorial decisions. NBC and Comcast have similarly spent the past year avoiding direct confrontation while executives try to keep regulators and shareholders calm.

The pattern has been obvious: bend, apologize, settle, de-escalate.

ABC’s new filing changes the tone entirely.

The FCC — under chairman Brendan Carr — has reportedly questioned whether The View qualifies as a legitimate news program under equal-time rules, despite the show already receiving an FCC exemption more than 20 years ago.

ABC says the agency’s demands are “unprecedented” and outside its authority.

The network also noted something many observers have already noticed themselves: federal scrutiny appears aimed almost entirely at programming critical of Trump, while pro-Trump media figures face no similar pressure. ABC specifically referenced conservative personalities like Glenn Beck and Mark Levin.

It’s like Brendan Carr isn’t even trying to hide what this is really about: the federal government using regulatory power to pressure broadcasters over political viewpoints.

And here’s the bigger danger for media companies that think silence or accommodation will protect them: history suggests it rarely works.

Authoritarian pressure campaigns usually escalate when institutions show weakness. Once government officials learn they can force apologies, suspensions, settlements, or friendlier coverage through intimidation, the demands don’t shrink. They grow.

Once the bully knows you’ll give him your lunch money, he’ll have you do his homework for him.

ABC appears to finally understand that.

Its filing even warns that if one administration can selectively target viewpoints it dislikes, the precedent won’t magically disappear when power changes hands. Who’s to say some future Democratic president won’t decide that, since the rules have changed, it’s time to stomp on Fox News?

This is about whether America’s legacy media companies still believe the First Amendment is something you defend — or merely something you reference in corporate press releases while quietly negotiating surrender behind closed doors.

For the first time in a long time, one of the networks appears ready to test that question in public.

If you believe journalism matters most when power is uncomfortable with it, subscribe to Archer’s Line.

I cover media, broadcasting, politics, and the growing pressure campaign against independent journalism — from the perspective of someone who spent decades inside the business.

And check out the Disciples of Democracy podcast, where we dig even deeper into the collision between media, politics, and the future of American democracy.

Most of the time, law enforcement and local reporters can work hand in hand. After all, a lot of reporting comes from information given to them by the police.

But when the big crowds gather, the protests get heated, and tempers flare between demonstrators and cops, something shifts.

Like it did in Los Angeles on April 11.

That protest was part of a wave of demonstrations tied to immigration enforcement actions — crowds gathering in and around downtown, tensions already high, with police trying to keep streets open and prevent the kind of clashes that can escalate quickly.

Multiple journalists at that protest say they were shoved, pushed back, and threatened with arrest. One reporter says an officer told her she could be detained. Others were hit or forced out while doing their jobs.

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The police will say it’s all part of crowd control, that sometimes they have to ratchet up the force level to keep crowds from getting out of hand, blocking a freeway, or committing vandalism, and that they were never targeting reporters.

The problem is, it isn’t rare.

If you’ve covered protests — or even just watched closely — you’ve seen this movie before. Los Angeles has its own track record. Lawsuits. Court orders. Journalists hit with projectiles. Photographers caught in the same sweeps as the protesters they’re there to document.

And it’s not just the LAPD. The Sheriff’s Department has its own history of friction with reporters, including allegations of surveillance and intimidation. Go back further and you run into the old Public Disorder Intelligence Division — a reminder that in this city, the relationship between law enforcement and the press has never exactly been comfortable.

There’s more than one example of a reporter being arrested, with the police claiming they didn’t identify themselves as reporters, or they weren’t wearing proper credentials, and that they weren’t rough at all with the reporter.

But the reporter tells a different story.

In 2020, Josie Huang, a reporter with KPCC, was covering a protest in Lynwood when Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies rushed her as she filmed an arrest.

She says she identified herself. She says she was wearing her press credentials.

The department said she interfered and didn’t make it clear she was a journalist.

Then the video came out.

It shows her credentials hanging from her neck. It captures her repeatedly shouting that she’s a reporter as deputies shove her and throw her to the ground.

Charges were filed against her. Then they were dropped. Later, the county agreed to a settlement worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

That seems to be a pattern. It happens. There’s fallout. Then we wait for it to happen again.

But step back, and the geography stops mattering. Because this isn’t just Los Angeles.

During the protests in 2020, journalists across the country were arrested, shoved, and shot with rubber bullets. It didn’t matter if the reporters were from national outlets, network operations, major papers, local stations, freelancers, or independent journalists.

And before you point out that this sounds like I’m just pointing the finger at law enforcement, let me be clear. It’s not just the cops.

Reporters have also been surrounded by protesters, shouted down, and had equipment grabbed or destroyed. By both sides of whatever demonstration is happening. Sometimes the journalists are branded as fake news, and the protesters want to teach them a lesson. Sometimes they’re branded as mouthpieces of the government, there to help the authority suppress the cries of the downtrodden — and the protesters want to teach them a lesson.

That leaves journalists in a strange place — inside the story, but not really belonging to either side of it.

There was always tension. Always distrust. Police didn’t like cameras in their faces. Reporters didn’t always get cooperation. That’s not new.

What’s changed is how often the press gets treated like just another body in the crowd. Someone to move. Someone to push back. Sometimes, someone to neutralize with force.

That shift shows up in moments like April 11, when multiple journalists get handled the same way at the same time.

It’s not one officer losing control. It starts to look like instinct. And sometimes, it has the whiff of policy.

There are reasons for that, and they’re not complicated.

Trust in media has collapsed. Every camera is a potential viral clip. Every interaction can end up online within minutes. Independent journalists don’t always have the backing — or the visibility — that once gave them some protection.

And protests themselves aren’t what they were. They’re louder, faster, more chaotic. Police respond differently. So does the crowd.

Put all of that together, and the press ends up in the middle — not above it.

There’s a line that used to be clearer: you might not like the press, but you understood what they were doing there. Not just at demonstrations, but in war zones and disaster scenes.

Now, that line gets blurry in real time.

You can see it in how quickly a press badge gets ignored, or how often a camera doesn’t slow anything down.

That doesn’t mean every incident is intentional. It doesn’t mean every officer is targeting journalists.

But when it keeps happening — in different cities, different protests, different years — it stops looking like a coincidence.

In this day and age of ever-growing rage, anger, and violence, and wide chasms between political ideologies and worldviews, when we hear more about the protests that turn violent rather than the peaceful ones, I despair that things are ever going to calm down and go back to that low rumble we were used to.

I hope I’m wrong. Because reporters have a job to do. So does law enforcement. And so do the demonstrators.

If this is the kind of conversation you think we should be having more often, subscribe to Archer’s Line. And for the unfiltered version, listen to Disciples of Democracy — where we take these stories apart and put them back together.

There’s a phrase in broadcasting for when you’re between gigs: on the beach.

It sounds almost pleasant. It isn’t. It’s more like a kind of gallows humor. Like admiring the view when they’re putting a noose around your neck.

I’ve been on the beach longer than I expected, and I’d be less than honest if I didn’t tell you that I’m beginning to feel the tide coming in. The broadcast industry doesn’t need me to explain its condition to you — if you’re here, you probably already know. Jobs in this business don’t grow back the way they used to, and the search takes longer and costs more than anyone outside it fully appreciates.

I haven’t stopped. I’m still in it. But I need a bridge.

This is where I ask for something, which is genuinely uncomfortable for me. I’m not setting up a GoFundMe — that’s not what this is. What I’m offering you is a trade: your support, in exchange for something I believe is worth paying for.

Become a paid subscriber or founding member of Archer’s Line.

I built this publication around a specific thing I can offer that most media newsletters can't: four decades inside major-market broadcast journalism and radio — from the trenches to the manager's desk. I've watched this industry transform, stumble, reinvent itself, and in some cases quietly give up. I was there for most of it. That’s a promise of what you get here. Analysis grounded in how this business actually works, from someone who worked it at every level.

My goal is to grow Archer’s Line into something sustainable — a publication that helps me stay on my feet while I figure out what comes next. And I want to be clear about one thing: I’m not writing this as a farewell or a hedge. Whether I land another gig tomorrow or in two years, I’m not walking away from this. The writing continues either way.

If you’ve been reading for free and getting something out of it, this is the moment to make it official. If you’re already a paid subscriber, thank you!

The link is here. The price is honest. And if this work has meant something to you, I’m asking you to back it.

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— Rob

Taking a break today from covering media, journalism, and radio… and instead offering you a political horror story. The following is a fictional “what if” scenario.

Day One — 9:00 a.m. | The House Floor

The vote to impeach Donald Trump has been building for six weeks — slowly at first, then all at once, the way these things always go. What breaks the dam is not a single scandal or a single crime but something more corrosive: exhaustion. Senior Republicans, men and women who have spent years bending their spines into shapes they no longer recognize, have simply stopped bending. A former MAGA congressman from Ohio — a man who once called Trump “the greatest president of my lifetime” on national television — casts the vote that puts the tally over the threshold and then sits very still at his desk while the chamber erupts around him.

The final House count: 241 to 194. Thirty-one Republicans cross the aisle. Trump is now the first and only president to have been impeached three times. The third time, many cable news commentators note, is the charm.

The articles travel to the Senate by courier, as tradition requires, carried by a small procession of House members who look like they are walking to something they cannot take back. Which they are.

Days One Through Four | The Senate Trial

The trial is not a surprise by the end, though it would have been, once.

What has changed is simpler than ideology and more durable than loyalty: several senior Republican senators, including three who once faced primary challenges for insufficient fealty, have concluded that the man in the White House is no longer an asset. He is a liability with a nuclear clearance. There are doubts about his mental acuity. The witnesses are damaging. The evidence is methodical. The defense is loud and legally thin.

On the fourth day of testimony, a former MAGA senator from a state Trump carried by nineteen points announces he will vote to convict. His statement is one paragraph. He reads it at a press conference without taking questions and then walks directly to his car.

The room understands that it is over.

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Day Five — 11:14 a.m. | The Senate Chamber

The final tally: 67 to 33. The constitutional threshold, met exactly.

The gavel falls.

In the chamber, no one cheers. A few members bow their heads. One senator from a deep-red state stares at the ceiling for a long moment before gathering her things. She knows what is waiting for her when she lands at home.

Under the Constitution, removal is immediate. There is no appeal, no grace period, no transition window.

The vice president is notified.

Day Five — 11:30 a.m. | Emergency Session

JD Vance receives the news in a secure room and makes his call — not to the Chief Justice, not to the Secretary of Defense. He calls the man who is no longer president.

He tells Trump he will not serve. He will not take the oath. Within the hour, he releases a statement calling the conviction “a constitutional atrocity, a legislative coup dressed in procedural clothing.” He does not use the word illegitimate once. He uses it four times.

Congressional leadership convenes in emergency session less than an hour later. The legal question is uncomfortable but not ambiguous: a vice president who refuses to discharge the duties of the presidency following a constitutionally valid succession has effectively abandoned the office. Another impeachment resolution is drafted. It is brutal in its efficiency — three articles, fourteen pages, introduced and voted on before sundown.

Day Six — 10:00 a.m. | Vance Convicted

The Senate, still in emergency session, reconvenes at dawn.

The Vance conviction moves faster than anyone expected, because senators on both sides understand that the vacuum is the danger. Final tally: 69 to 31. Vance issues no further statement. He will spend the next several weeks on television, describing what happened to him as martyrdom. But that is later. Right now there is only the count, and the gavel, and what comes next.

The Presidential Succession Act of 1947 is not a document anyone expected to need in their lifetime. It does not care about expectations.

Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House, is administered the oath of office in a side room off the House chamber at 11:22 a.m. There are no cameras by design. The man holding the Bible looks like he is trying to remember how to breathe.

Some were surprised. They expected Johnson to follow Trump’s and Vance’s lead. He took the oath quietly, then spent the next hour telling reporters he still “supported Trump” — without explaining what that meant or how both things could be true.

Hardly anyone is buying it, but there are sighs of relief that Johnson might hold the line.

Day Six — Noon | The Oval Office

The removed president does not pack a bag.

Trump sits behind the Resolute Desk — his desk, he will say this for months, his desk — and watches the coverage on three screens simultaneously. His remaining senior staff, the ones who haven’t left yet, stand in a loose, anxious cluster near the door to the outer office. No one sits down. No one wants to be comfortable in a room that may stop being accessible tomorrow.

“This is a coup,” he says. Not to anyone in particular. “A coup against a duly elected president of the United States.”

He picks up his phone. He has 87 million followers and he is not finished talking to them.

Day Seven — Nationwide

The posts come in waves.

They STOLE the Election. Now they STOLE the Presidency. This is what the end of America looks like.

Patriots — do not comply. Do not accept. Do not stand down.

I am still your President. I will always be your President. They can impeach me but they cannot remove the Greatest President Ever from your hearts and they cannot remove Me from history. What they have done is illegal. It will not stand. I will not let it stand. And neither should you.

By midnight the posts have been shared 40 million times. By morning, they have been translated into action: rallies forming in Phoenix, in Nashville, in a dozen mid-sized cities where the grievance runs deep and the organizational infrastructure has been quietly maintained for years. Men in body armor photograph themselves outside state capitols. Militia group chats — dormant for months — flicker back to life.

The temperature does not rise gradually. It spikes.

Some Democrats call for Trump to be arrested because of the danger he presents to the country. Some point out that his posts constitute calls for violence against the government. But absolutely no one is willing to arrest him. Even the ones who want to see Trump behind bars know it’s impossible. It would only cause an explosion.

They’re caught between an impossible rock and an immovable hard place.

Day Seven — Moscow

The statement from the Kremlin comes through official channels at 6 a.m. Moscow time, attributed to a spokesperson but worded with unmistakable deliberateness.

Russia has always believed in the sovereignty of democratic processes and the will of the people. We observe with concern the removal of a leader who received the overwhelming support of the American electorate, and we note that what has occurred in Washington has the appearance of an institutional coup rather than a constitutional process. President Putin has expressed his deep personal solidarity with his friend, Donald Trump, and wishes to convey that Russia does not recognize the legitimacy of a government installed through legislative maneuver rather than the ballot box. We are monitoring events closely and reserve the right to respond to developments that affect global stability.

The phrase reserve the right to respond lands in the State Department like a stone through a window.

Within hours, China issues a statement of its own — more measured, more cautious, but noting “irregularities in the American succession process” and calling for “international observation.” North Korea says something. Iran says something. The NATO secretary-general issues an emergency communiqué urging calm. Three allied heads of state who privately recognize Johnson as the lawful president decline to say so publicly until they understand which way the American military is going to move.

The crisis, which was American, is no longer only American.

Day Eight — The Country Splits

States do not secede. That is not how modern America fractures. They do something subtler and in some ways more dangerous: they simply disagree about who is in charge, and then they act on that disagreement with the full weight of state authority behind them.

California, New York, Illinois, Michigan, Washington — their governors convene a joint call and emerge with a coordinated statement. They recognize Johnson as the legitimate president. They direct their National Guard units to operate under the constitutional command authority. They freeze cooperation with any federal directive originating from the holdouts.

Texas, Florida, Alabama, Tennessee — their governors do the opposite. They recognize the removed president, or failing that, Vance. They instruct state agencies to ignore Johnson’s orders. Florida’s statement refers to Johnson as a “traitor.” Several begin using state-level law enforcement to “protect federal facilities” in ways that put armed men in direct proximity to other armed men following different chains of command.

The Guard units do not shoot at each other. Not yet. But in three states — Georgia, Arizona, Michigan — National Guard formations are now within visual range of one another, operating under different authority structures, with no shared communications protocol and no agreed-upon rules of engagement.

A military police sergeant at a federal depot outside Tucson receives simultaneous orders from the Johnson Pentagon and from the Arizona governor’s office. He puts both orders in a folder and calls his JAG officer.

“Which one do I follow?” he asks.

There is a long pause on the line. “I’m working on it,” the JAG officer says.

Day Nine — Johnson’s Problem

Johnson is not built for this. He knows it. His staff knows it.

His statements have been careful to the point of paralysis — calibrated to avoid confrontation, gesturing toward law and order without demanding it, never quite saying aloud what everyone in his situation must eventually say: I am the president. My authority is not conditional. The law is not negotiable.

He can feel his base fracturing beneath him. The MAGA constituency, even the remnant that has tired of Trump personally, is not tired of Trumpism. They do not want to see the apparatus turned against their movement. Johnson is trying to lead a country that includes people who believe his leadership is illegitimate, and he is doing it with the rhetorical tools of a man who has spent his career avoiding exactly this kind of binary.

His chief of staff puts it plainly in a conversation Johnson wishes he could forget: “Mr. President, you cannot be the reasonable man in a situation that has stopped being reasonable. At some point you have to pick a side. And the only side available to you is the law.”

Johnson nods. He does not issue a stronger statement.

The removed president posts three more times before midnight. Each one is angrier than the last. Each one lands like fuel on a fire that is no longer small.

Day Ten — The Core That Remains

They are not many, but they are not nothing.

The hardcore — the ones who were there on January 6th, the ones who have spent years in the militia forums and the encrypted group chats and the county Republican committees where the fever never broke — they are watching all of this with a particular, terrible clarity. They have seen what they believe is a pattern: the institutions are corrupt, the courts are captured, the military has been turned, the Republicans who broke with Trump are traitors and cowards who were never real conservatives to begin with. Every legal avenue has been taken from them. Every procedural option has been exhausted or co-opted.

They are not wrong that options are closing. They are catastrophically wrong about what that means.

But the logic of the desperate is not the logic of the rational. The logic of the desperate is: if they take everything, what is left?

In forums that the FBI is monitoring — and in some that it isn’t — the language is shifting. It is no longer the language of protest or of electoral politics or even of legal challenge. It is the language of men who have decided that the last door has been closed and are now looking at the wall.

This is what it comes to. This is what they forced us to.

If the tree of liberty needs watering — well. You know the rest.

A weapons cache in rural Georgia is photographed by a neighbor who doesn’t say anything for two days because he knows the men involved and doesn’t want trouble. Then he calls the FBI because he can’t sleep.

A militia unit in northern Michigan — forty men, disciplined, organized, not amateurs — begins a convoy toward Lansing.

A man in Phoenix, not affiliated with any group, just a man with guns and a television and a certainty that the country he loves is being murdered in front of him, loads his truck and pulls onto the highway.

He is not the only one.

Day Ten — 11:47 p.m.

The removed president hasn’t been seen in public for days, but then, suddenly, posts from Mar-a-Lago.

Tomorrow is the day Real Americans make themselves heard. This is our country. Not theirs. Do not let them take it. HOLD THE LINE!!! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J TRUMP.

The post is live for eleven minutes before it is removed from every platform.

Eleven minutes is enough.

In the Michigan convoy, someone reads it aloud over the radio. There is a sound from the men in the trucks — not quite a cheer, not quite a prayer. Something between the two. The convoy keeps moving north toward the capital.

In Washington, Johnson is awake. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs is awake. The director of the FBI is on a call with the attorney general. The Supreme Court’s ruling — issued two days prior, 7 to 2, clear and complete — sits on every desk in every relevant office, valid and unambiguous and entirely dependent on what happens in the next few hours.

In Moscow, someone is watching.

Somewhere on the Georgia-Tennessee border, a state police cruiser pulls up behind a truck it has been following for forty miles. The trooper sits in his car for a moment before getting out. He doesn’t know exactly what is in the truck. He has a feeling.

Somewhere in Lansing, the convoy is almost there.

Somewhere on I-10 outside Phoenix, a man who has decided he has nothing left to lose is driving east into the dark. Toward Washington DC.

The Constitution is a shared agreement. It endures as long as enough people choose to honor it — and as long as enough people with authority choose to enforce it. In the coming hours, both of those things will be tested in ways they have not been tested since 1861.

The question is not whether the breaking point has arrived.

The question — the only question now — is which way it breaks.

History does not telegraph its endings. It simply moves. And now, it is moving fast. Perhaps too fast for reason.

Whether the institutions held — whether the weight of law and collective belief proved sufficient against the weight of grievance and organized fury — is a question that nations answer not in courtrooms or on cable news, but in the specific, irreversible moments when someone either pulls a trigger or lowers a gun.

In the morning, there will be an answer.

Tonight, there is only the dark, and the waiting, and forty men on a highway in Michigan who have decided that history has left them no other choice.

They are wrong about that.

But they are moving anyway.

Global press freedom has hit its lowest point in the 25 years that Reporters Without Borders has tracked it.

Far from being a dip, it’s a trend. And there are no signs of it bouncing back.

In its 2026 World Press Freedom Index, the group says more than half of all countries now fall into what it calls “difficult” or “very serious” conditions for journalists. And it’s not just the old threats — arrests, prison, violence — though those haven’t gone anywhere. What’s changing is how the pressure works. It’s more systemic, more bureaucratic, and in some ways more effective.

The report says journalism is being squeezed from every direction: hostile political rhetoric, a weakening business model, and laws increasingly used as weapons to silence or minimize coverage governments don’t like.

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That last part matters. Of all the indicators in the index, the legal environment saw the steepest drop over the past year. Translation: it’s getting easier to punish journalists just for doing the job.

The United States ranks in the middle — 64th this year, down seven spots. Still ahead of plenty of countries, but behind a lot more than it used to be. The report points directly at President Trump’s repeated attacks on the press, describing them as something that’s hardened into policy in his second term.

And it doesn’t stay here. The report says leaders in other countries are taking notes — places like Argentina and El Salvador, where the tone toward the press is getting sharper and more openly hostile. If a country that brands itself as a beacon of press freedom starts tightening the screws, others don’t need much encouragement.

At the top, Norway is still number one for the 10th straight year. Germany, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom — all well ahead of the U.S.

There is movement in the other direction, at least in one case. Syria — post-Assad — saw the biggest jump in the rankings, climbing 36 places. That tells you something, too: conditions can change. Just not always the way you want.

At the same time, there’s a second problem running parallel to all of this — the audience.

A new study from the Media Insight Project shows Americans aren’t abandoning the news. They’re rationing it. Managing it. Avoiding it when it gets to be too much.

Most people say they can still find reliable information. They just don’t always want to. It’s exhausting.

The numbers tell the story. 62 percent say they avoid news about Trump. 57 percent avoid national politics. And 71 percent avoid celebrity coverage — which may be the least surprising statistic in the entire report.

That fatigue has consequences. When people tune out, the vacuum doesn’t stay empty. It gets filled — usually by the loudest voices, the least accountable sources, and, increasingly, outright garbage.

Disinformation. Misinformation. State-backed propaganda — Russia still at the center of a lot of it, including efforts to quietly amplify sympathetic voices in the U.S.

And then there’s the flood of AI-generated junk. Fake images, fake moments, fake outrage — shared just as eagerly by people who should know better. Left, right, doesn’t matter. When those fakes get exposed, they don’t just disappear. They erode trust across the board. Everything starts to look suspect.

That’s the real damage.

You see another effect in how people react to actual events. After the shooting outside the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the story barely had time to land before it started to fade. The fact that, fortunately, no one was killed or injured helped. But the bigger signal was how quickly it all felt… routine.

Mass shootings are already routine. Often, they barely make the headlines.

One last note from the study: the old political lines don’t fully apply anymore. Democrats are still more likely than Republicans to trust local news — especially on the radio. That part holds.

But when it comes to influencers, both sides are on the same page. Same level of trust. Same level of reach.

In a country built on the idea that a free press is an essential check on power, you can’t lose that foundation without losing something bigger.

And once it goes, getting it back isn’t easy.

If you care about where this is heading — and how fast it’s moving — stay with me.

Subscribe to Archer’s Line for more reporting and analysis like this.

And for deeper conversations, listen to the Disciples of Democracy podcast — hosted by me and Jack Messenger — where we break down the forces shaping politics, media, and the country in real time.

Things aren’t looking good for radio. The audience is shrinking. Listening is at the lowest levels we’ve seen.

But I still believe radio has a future, even taking that into account. More on that in a moment.

First, the bad news.

Jacobs Media released its Techsurvey 2026 last week, and if you work in broadcast, you’ll want to sit down. For the first time in the survey’s history, traditional AM/FM listening has fallen to just 54% of the time P1 listeners — that’s the industry term for your most loyal audience — spend with their favorite station. Digital platforms now account for 44%. A ten-point gap.

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One year ago, that gap was fifteen points. And if you want to see how fast the ground is shifting, go back to 2013, when broadcast commanded 85% of listening time and digital was an afterthought at 14%. That was a 71-point gap. Today it’s ten. Jacobs Media president Fred Jacobs put it plainly: “The train isn’t leaving the station. It left quite a while ago.”

The demographic breakdown is where it gets uncomfortable. Gen Z has already crossed over — digital edges broadcast among that group 49 to 48. Millennials and Gen X are close behind, with broadcast holding only slim leads. Older listeners still skew toward over-the-air, but they are not a growth audience, and the industry knows it.

Format matters too. Sports radio is the outlier — and not in a good way for traditionalists. It’s the only format where digital has outpaced broadcast outright, 56 to 42. News/Talk holds the most loyal over-the-air audience at 59% broadcast, which may explain why that format has been the last refuge of the big AM stations trying to stay relevant.

The 44% digital number, by the way, isn’t just people streaming on their phones. It includes smart speakers, podcasts, smart TVs, and computer streams. It’s fragmented. But fragmented and growing still beats consolidated and shrinking.

So yes. The numbers are bad. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling something, probably to a board of directors, or to advertisers.

And yet.

I still believe radio has a future. It’s counterintuitive, but the way forward is to embrace the shrinkage.

The future is smaller but more vibrant and hyper-local than the one the big companies have been chasing.

Last year, on a trip to the East Coast, we passed through a handful of small towns. And people there were listening to the radio. Not streaming. Not their own playlists. Radio. They knew the call letters. Most of them could name the person on the air. Many of them said, “It’s the only station I listen to.”

Most importantly for the dollar-watchers, there were lots of ads, almost all of them local businesses.

The future of radio, I think, lives there. In small markets with independent owners who actually know their listeners’ names, and with morning shows where the host went to the same high school as half the audience. That kind of radio doesn’t need to win a digital platform war. All it has to do is be indispensable to the people within 30 miles of the tower.

It’s live, local, and immediate.

And it doesn’t need big new buildings and the latest, most advanced state-of-the-art equipment. Just enough to stay on the air.

The large consolidated groups are not saving radio. They’re just determining how much of it survives their tenure, what they can get out of it before it dies. Not because they’re evil, but because they’re big companies, and they have Wall Street to answer to, not the listener.

They’re caught in a shrinking loop. To survive and service all the debt they’re carrying, they have to cut costs. They have no choice but to keep doing the things that are killing radio — continual layoffs, consolidating managers into bigger regions, and porting a few voices over to as many stations as possible.

But here’s the silver lining in those growing clouds.

Once the mammoth companies have cannibalized each other out of existence, and several of them are well along in that process, there will be more room. More frequencies. More opportunities for people who actually want to do radio rather than simply extract from it.

Hopefully, they’ll be smart enough to lean into the smaller model. They’ll find the smaller model easier to embrace by local audiences, who will be loyal because they feel like that radio station is theirs.

The Jacobs numbers are a warning for the big companies and their shareholders.

They’re not necessarily a warning for the station in your county that still airs the local school board meeting.

That station might outlast all of them.

I've been inside this business for most of my life. I know where the bodies are buried. Subscribe to Archer's Line — and I'll keep showing you where to look.

Audacy is moving KNX News back to 1070 AM only and flipping 97.1 FM to sports.

The new station — 97.1 The Fan — launches May 11 at 6 am.

That’s the headline. And it’s a big one.

KNX going to FM was one of the most important strategic moves the station made in years — I was there when it happened. It was survival. A recognition that AM alone wasn’t enough anymore.

This reverses that.

Yes, 1070 AM has a massive signal. At night, it can cover a significant part of the western United States. But reach isn’t the same as relevance.

Listeners — especially younger ones — have been moving away from AM for years. Carmakers are pushing to remove AM from car radios. FM gave KNX a cleaner signal, better in-building reception, and access to an audience that simply wasn’t tuning to AM.

Now that piece is gone.

In its place: a full-time sports format with a promise of all-live, local weekday shows.

The lineup isn’t out yet.

The real story here is the signal shift — and what it says about where Audacy thinks the audience is going.

More on this breaking news as it develops.

The federal government is preparing to do something it hasn’t done in decades.

The FCC is moving to call in all eight Disney-owned ABC station licenses for early renewal — stations in major markets like New York and Chicago, licenses that aren’t due for renewal for years. The orders could come as early as today.

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On paper, the FCC will claim the review stems from an ongoing probe into Disney’s DEI practices. Don’t believe it for a second. This is what retaliation looks like when it’s wearing a suit.

The timeline tells the story. First Lady Melania Trump blasted Kimmel for a joke he told during a monologue. Then President Trump publicly demanded — again — that ABC fire Jimmy Kimmel. Now the FCC — run by Trump loyalist Brendan Carr — is reaching for a legal mechanism that hasn’t been used in decades.

But let’s back up, because the setup here matters.

Kimmel made his so-called “assassination joke” — the one the White House is now calling “disgusting” — days before last Saturday’s shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Nobody said anything. No outrage. No demands. No calls for his firing. The joke landed, the news cycle moved on, and that was that.

The joke itself? Kimmel, during a mock White House Correspondent’s Dinner roast, riffed on the age gap between Trump, who is nearly 80, and Melania, who is younger than Kimmel himself. He called her an “expectant widow.” It was a late-night joke about mortality and a May-December marriage — the kind of thing Johnny Carson might have delivered with a raised eyebrow and a rimshot.

Then came Saturday night. A gunman moved toward the Hilton ballroom. And suddenly, retroactively, Kimmel’s joke was reframed as incitement.

In fact, any criticism or even questioning of Trump is now being reframed as incitement. Never mind that Trump regularly blasts people, calls Democrats traitors, and says if they’re not stopped, they’ll destroy the country, and insults reporters for asking questions he doesn’t like. And MAGA loves it. MAGA spokespeople are all over news shows and social media defending his comments.

Here’s where the hypocrisy becomes almost comedic in its brazenness.

Just before the Correspondents’ Dinner, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt — the official spokesperson for the President of the United States — said that “shots would be fired” at the event. Those were her words. Of course she was joking, referring to what was expected to be Trump again blasting the press. Leavitt’s comment drew no demands for her resignation. No outrage from Trump. No statement from Melania. No White House communications director calling her a “shit human being” on social media.

Kimmel made a joke about life insurance math. Leavitt used the word “shots” in the context of a gathering that was then actually targeted by a gunman. One of them still has her job, and the other is facing a federal license review.

Draw your own conclusions. The administration has certainly drawn theirs.

Carr is a smart enough operator to know exactly how this looks. He’s doing it anyway.

Here’s the thing about “early renewal”: it doesn’t yank licenses off the air. What it does is trigger a lengthy, expensive hearing process — one that forces Disney to spend money, time, and legal resources defending itself. As Malcolm Feeley wrote about the legal system back in 1979: the process is the punishment.

ABC’s licenses are probably not in any real danger. But that’s almost beside the point.

Meanwhile, the affiliate rebellion that rattled Disney last fall — led by Nexstar and Sinclair, the conservative-leaning station groups that threatened to preempt Kimmel back in September — hasn't materialized this time. Turns out Nexstar just got FCC approval for its Tegna acquisition last month. Pulling Kimmel now, with Democratic AGs already in court over that deal, would be a gift-wrapped exhibit for antitrust lawyers.

The politics have shifted. Trump’s approval numbers are sliding. Some institutions are finding their footing. Disney, under new CEO Josh D’Amaro, appears ready to fight.

The FCC’s lone Democrat, Anna Gomez, put it plainly: “We cannot allow this tragedy to become a pretext for silencing speech.”

“Political leader tries to silence a comedian” is the kind of sentence you usually read about somewhere else. Today, it’s the sentence that describes the United States of America. Aren’t we all old enough to remember conservatives complaining about “cancel culture”? Here it is on steroids.

Stay tuned. This one’s moving fast.

I'll be covering it here as it develops — with the context the algorithm won't give you. Sign up and become a paid subscriber to Archer's Line now so you don't miss out.

It’s time for a wellness check on CBS News.

What’s happening at CBS Evening News right now looks like a slow-motion car wreck. And a Vanity Fair deep-dive published this week confirms what a lot of us in the industry have been watching with our hands over our eyes.

The short version: Bari Weiss took over CBS News, installed Tony Dokoupil as the evening anchor, and in the first week alone, the wheels started flying off.

Night One

Weiss walked into the newsroom on Dokoupil’s first Monday and asked to see the script. That’s not how this works. The network chief does not edit scripts. But she’s the boss, and so producers — after objecting — handed it over. She added lines to a segment on the U.S. military raid targeting Nicolás Maduro, framing Trump’s operation as a strategic masterstroke against China, Russia, and Iran.

Then someone put her edits in the teleprompter twice.

Dokoupil, on live television, stumbled through several excruciating seconds of duplicated copy. “First day, big problems here,” he told viewers.

One former CBS News anchor told Vanity Fair: “What a disaster. Honestly, I would’ve f---ing killed her.”

That was just the first night.

Every news anchor from the smallest TV station to the big networks has stories about teleprompter screw-ups. We’ve had them in radio news, too. I’ve had writers and producers struggling to get breaking news in the system fast, with information being updated on the fly, and the inevitable errors that rarely slip through. But I have never, ever had a script tampered with by a boss right before it showed up on my screen. The anchor chair is supposed to be sacred ground.

Night Two Was Worse

The fifth anniversary of January 6 came on Dokoupil’s second night. He personally rewrote the script to frame the coverage around Trump’s revisionist account of the Capitol riot.

Then, after the break, he delivered a segment on Marco Rubio memes and signed off with an ad-libbed line: “Marco Rubio, we salute you. You’re the ultimate Florida Man.”

The White House loved it.

Nobody at CBS did.

“It just alienates the audience,” one CBS News journalist told Vanity Fair. “I don’t think even a MAGA Republican wants to see that in their news.” The criticism isn’t partisan — it’s professional. Evening news isn’t the morning show. You don’t salute the Secretary of State.

The Exits

Scott MacFarlane, the network’s justice correspondent who spent years covering January 6 and its aftermath, spoke up on the editorial call the morning after Dokoupil’s J6 coverage, urging the newsroom to stop putting false claims on the air. A source familiar with his thinking says he found it “highly objectionable and personally gutting.” Within weeks, he was gone.

Night four of Dokoupil’s debut week: the number two producer on the show was escorted out by corporate security. Javier Guzman — nine-year CBS veteran, one of the most experienced people on the broadcast — was told he was fired because he wasn’t “sufficiently on board” with the new direction.

Ten staffers have left the Evening News this year alone.

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The Numbers

Here’s where it gets existential. In the first quarter of 2026, the Evening News lost three full share points compared to the same period last year. One broadcast insider put it bluntly: every percentage point of share a network loses to the competition represents about $10 million in annual losses.

That’s $30 million. In one quarter.

And the audience Weiss is apparently chasing — the right-leaning viewer who abandoned legacy media — isn’t coming back to CBS because the editorial aperture shifted ten degrees. Those viewers are entrenched with Fox or scattered across the digital ecosystem. They’re not going to start watching CBS because Tony Dokoupil saluted Marco Rubio.

All that’s being accomplished is that the legacy viewers who were there because they trusted CBS are jumping ship.

Who Is Tony Dokoupil?

I don’t think Dokoupil is the villain of this story. Maybe he deserved the shot. Maybe he didn’t. But he’s being asked to execute a vision on a stage with higher stakes than anything he’s navigated before, with a boss standing just off-camera coaching his lines, perhaps taking advantage of his inexperience behind a desk that big.

The Vanity Fair piece describes Weiss as literally out of frame during his introductory video manifesto, coaching him on what to say — while he criticized “legacy media” for relying on “academics and elites.” The self-awareness deficit was immediately noted inside the building.

And then there’s the Cronkite comment. Responding to a viewer who pushed back on his mission statement, Dokoupil wrote that his show would be “more accountable and more transparent than Cronkite or anyone else of his era.”

Walter Cronkite anchored CBS News for 19 years. He was the most trusted man in America.

One former CBS executive who worked with him says Dokoupil “completely lost the room.”

The Deeper Problem

Here’s what I keep coming back to: Bari Weiss has a theory. The theory is that what’s killing legacy broadcast news is a perceived liberal bias, and that shifting the dial rightward will bring audiences back.

It’s a plausible hypothesis if you squint real hard.

To be fair, there are markets where that repositioning could find traction — one CBS affiliate owner in Tulsa told Vanity Fair he’s seen good numbers in the Midwest.

But the Evening News isn’t a regional affiliate. It’s the flagship. And the audience that built that broadcast over 50 years didn’t leave because of bias. They left because the media landscape fractured. They left because they have a thousand other options. You don’t win them back by doing a meme segment on Marco Rubio.

Vital Signs

So: how is the patient doing?

Not well. Ratings declining. Staff departing. Newsroom demoralized. Anchor still finding his footing. Boss editing the teleprompter on night one.

CBS, according to insiders, feels like it has no choice but to keep Dokoupil in the chair — they’ve burned through too many anchors to absorb another change. So the experiment continues, and the Evening News carries on, trying to be something it was never designed to be.

Which brings us to the question nobody at CBS wants to ask out loud: with David Ellison about to complete his takeover of Paramount Global, what happens next door at CNN? Does the Weiss playbook travel? Does Ellison try to out-Fox Fox News and turn CNN into something that a decade’s worth of trained Fox viewers will suddenly embrace?

That’s a fantasy. And if the Evening News is any indication, it’s an expensive one.

If you found this useful, consider sharing it with someone who still cares about how broadcast news works — or used to. What I’m doing here isn’t supported by advertisers, so I don’t have to answer to a big company. That’s where you come in. Paid subscribers help me keep going — and if that’s not in the cards today, signing up for free and leaving a comment helps the numbers, which helps the algorithm, which helps me. Thank you.

Arguments were heard last Tuesday before the Supreme Court in a little-noticed but very important case that cuts right into how federal power actually works.

Ann E. Marimow writes in the New York Times that the court is hearing a challenge from AT&T and Verizon — both hit with tens of millions of dollars in fines by the Federal Communications Commission.

The issue isn’t whether the companies mishandled customer data. It’s how they were punished.

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The FCC fined AT&T more than 57 million dollars and Verizon more than 48 million dollars over location data practices — data that ended up exposing sensitive information about millions of customers.

At one point, according to earlier reporting cited in the case, even a sheriff was able to access private location data — including that of a judge.

The FCC says this is exactly why it needs enforcement power — fast, direct, and meaningful.

The companies say they shouldn’t have been fined without a jury.

The FCC doesn’t take every violation to a jury trial. It investigates, decides, and issues penalties internally. That’s been standard practice across multiple federal agencies for decades.

Marimow writes that this case follows a recent Supreme Court ruling that struck down a similar enforcement setup at the Securities and Exchange Commission, saying it violated the Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial.

Same argument here.

The Government’s Position

The Trump administration is defending the FCC. Their argument is blunt: take away this authority, and enforcement collapses.

The solicitor general warned that stripping the FCC’s ability to issue fines could leave “a significant gap in federal oversight,” with rules on privacy, national security, and more going unenforced.

If agencies can’t act directly, everything slows down. Every major enforcement action risks turning into a full federal trial.

The Companies’ Argument

AT&T and Verizon aren’t arguing that they shouldn’t be regulated. They’re arguing the process is unconstitutional.

Their position: the FCC acts as investigator, prosecutor, judge, and jury — all inside the executive branch.

And if a company wants a real jury trial, it has to refuse to pay the fine first.

That means risking more penalties, reputational damage, and a legal escalation just to get into court.

They say that’s not a real choice — and that receiving massive fines without being able to defend themselves before a jury isn’t fair.

The Split

Lower courts already disagree.

One federal appeals court sided with AT&T — saying you can’t punish first and offer a jury later.

Another sided with Verizon — saying the option for a jury exists if the company forces the issue.

That split is why this is now at the Supreme Court.

What’s Actually at Stake

This ruling won’t just hit the FCC.

At least five other federal agencies use similar enforcement tools — including areas like nuclear safety, health benefits oversight, and wildlife regulation.

If the court rules broadly, it could force a redesign of how federal agencies operate.

A decision is expected by early summer.

By then, we’ll know whether the court is continuing its push to limit administrative power — or drawing a line.

Either way, this is one of those cases that won’t dominate headlines.

But it will shape how rules are enforced in this country going forward.

What do you think — should federal agencies be able to fine companies like this without a jury trial, or is that a line that shouldn’t be crossed? Let me know in the comments.

And if you want more breakdowns like this — clear, direct, and focused on how the system actually works — consider becoming a paid subscriber to Archer’s Line. That’s how I keep doing this.