The Collapsing Broadcast System

Archer's Line Podcast · Mar 18, 2026 · 4m

Eleven years ago, when I started my job at KNX in Los Angeles, it was a CBS station. There was a huge CBS News logo when you got off the elevators. I was proud to walk by it every day, because that was the network of a man I built a religious temple to in my head: Edward R. Murrow.

He was long gone by then, of course. Not just him, but his like — the whole tradition of hard-edged, power-speaking-to-truth broadcast journalism that he embodied had been slowly dissolved by the economics of cable and then finished off by social media. I was sad about that. But at least the legacy was still there…