Michael Hardy and Forrest Wilder:

The anticipation was building. For four months, Houston Public Media had been working on a widely anticipated podcast about the state’s takeover of the Houston Independent School District and its controversial installation of Mike Miles as superintendent. Called The Takeover, the four-part series would be hosted by Dominic Walsh, an award-winning public-education reporter who had spent the past year covering Miles’s ambitious overhaul of the state’s largest school district. He’d broken stories and won awards for his coverage of the intervention. Now he would bring it all together for a national audience. “We’re super-excited,” wrote the podcast editor in an internal email obtained by Texas Monthly. “I don’t think a lot of people understand the significance of what’s happening” in Houston, wrote another employee. “Can’t wait for May 3!” 

In addition to heavily promoting the podcast on its radio station, News 88.7, HPM spent what management identified as a “not insignificant” portion of its annual marketing budget advertising the show to potential listeners. Every major streaming platform planned to offer the podcast; excerpts would run on public radio stations across Texas. But when the release date of May 3 rolled around, the podcast was nowhere to be found. 

Fans of the station were puzzled and frustrated. “Why is the podcast not available?” one longtime listener wrote to HPM in an email. “Where is Dominic Anthony Walsh? What has Houston Public Media done with him???” Several expressed concern that the station had bowed to political pressure. “The immediate suspicion without further explanation is external meddling from someone, somewhere with enough reason and power to stop the podcast,” wrote another listener.