Hey everybody, Jeff Bennett here and welcome to another episode of Settle In from PBS News.

There's been a lot of turmoil in the media and entertainment business lately,

from the takeover of CBS and Warner Brothers by the Ellison family,

to mass layoffs at news organizations like the Washington Post,

to allegations of censorship by late-night talk show hosts,

and yes, to the federal funding cuts in public media.

Our guests today will help us understand all of this tumult and what it all means for the future of media.

He's Evan Shapiro, an Emmy and Peabody-winning producer, who now writes about the industry on his substack called Media War and Peace.

He's also become known as media's unofficial cartographer for his graphic

charting the size and ownership of media companies. So, settle in and enjoy our conversation

with Evan Shapiro. Evan Shapiro, thanks for joining us. Thank you so much for having me.

Yeah, of course. You've had this really fascinating career that runs from creative work to executive leadership

to now essentially mapping and critiquing the entire media ecosystem.

How did that evolution happen?

I got fired by Comcast, and at that point, you know, I had been speaking inside companies for a while

about the changes that were coming and really getting a bit agitated that the change was not

coming from within these companies who have all of this power and all these resources,

but rather was being made around them and they weren't reacting in real

time quick enough. I really, you know, had an existential crisis of why I got into the business

in the first place. And what I realized, it was to make stuff. And so I started writing my own

column first on LinkedIn, then on substack, which really wasn't a thing prior to when this was all

occurring. And as I was putting my thoughts out there, all based on data first, by the way, not just

...