So Another Anchor Just Vanished. Why Should You Even Care?
Let’s be honest. You probably saw the headline, maybe recognized the face of Bret Buganski from WCPO, and shrugged. Another one bites the dust. In a world of constant chaos, a weekend news anchor leaving a local station in Cincinnati barely registers as a blip. It’s just noise. But that’s exactly what THEY want you to think. They want you to see this as a non-story, a simple career move, a happy little farewell card signed with a polite, meaningless phrase like ‘It’s been an honor.’ An honor? An honor to do what, exactly? To be a temporary, interchangeable face reading scripts approved by a dozen corporate lawyers a thousand miles away from the city you’re supposed to be serving? The real story here isn’t about one man leaving one job. It’s a symptom of a deep, pervasive sickness rotting local news from the inside out, a cancer of corporate greed that is turning your trusted local news source into a hollowed-out puppet for massive, faceless conglomerates. You should care because this isn’t about Bret Buganski. It’s about you. It’s about the slow, methodical murder of the one institution that was supposed to be watching out for your community, your family, your interests. And it’s happening right under your nose while they distract you with a smile and a wave goodbye.
This is the playbook. This is how it works every single time. They never say, ‘We couldn’t afford to pay him a living wage’ or ‘The brutal hours and lack of upward mobility finally broke his spirit.’ No. It’s always a clean, sterile, corporate-approved departure. It’s amicable. It’s for ‘a new opportunity.’ It’s an ‘honor.’ This language is a tool, a tranquilizer designed to keep you, the viewer, calm and sedated, to prevent you from asking the real questions. Why are so many local journalists leaving the industry? Why do newsrooms feel like a revolving door? Why does the anchor you just started to trust suddenly disappear, only to be replaced by another fresh-faced kid who doesn’t know a thing about your town’s history or its people? It’s all part of the grand illusion.
What’s the Real Story Behind These ‘Honorable’ Departures?
The truth is a whole lot uglier than a press release. Think about this man’s career, they even mention it as if it’s a badge of honor: Quincy, Champaign, Milwaukee, Tucson, Oklahoma City, and finally Cincinnati. They joke it sounds like a Johnny Cash song. It does. But it’s not a romantic ballad of an American journeyman seeing the country; it’s the desperate, soul-crushing travelogue of a modern-day media mercenary, forced to constantly uproot his life and family, chasing a shrinking paycheck and a sliver of stability in an industry that offers none. This isn’t a career path. It’s a survival march. Each stop is another market, another set of call letters, another short-term contract with a non-compete clause that traps you. The corporate owners, behemoths like E.W. Scripps Company which owns WCPO, demand everything from these people. They demand you become a part of the community, that you invest yourself, that you become a trusted face. But they offer nothing in return. No loyalty. No security. No real future. You’re just a line item on a budget, a human asset to be squeezed for every last drop of value until you’re too expensive, too tired, or too jaded, at which point you are discarded and replaced by someone younger and cheaper. It’s a meat grinder. Simple as that.
And for what? So some executive in a New York boardroom who couldn’t find Cincinnati on a map can get a bigger bonus? The pay in local news, especially for reporters and weekend anchors, is abysmal. People outside the industry imagine some glamorous six-figure lifestyle. The reality for most is a salary that barely keeps up with inflation, crippling student loan debt from a journalism degree that promised a noble career, and the constant, gnawing anxiety of knowing you’re one budget cut away from being out on the street. They are asked to cover tragedies, to hold politicians accountable, to work holidays and weekends away from their families, all for pay that would get laughed out of the room in almost any other professional field requiring a similar level of skill and education. So when they say ‘it’s been an honor,’ what they really might mean is ‘I’m exhausted, I’m broke, and I can’t do this anymore.’ It’s a cry for help disguised as a thank you note.
How Does This Corporate Rot Affect the News You Actually Watch?
This is the part that hits home. This is where the ‘us vs. them’ narrative becomes crystal clear. When your local news station is owned by a distant corporation, its priorities shift from serving the public to serving the shareholder. That’s it. Full stop. The goal is no longer to produce the best possible journalism for Cincinnati; the goal is to extract the maximum possible profit from the Cincinnati market. How do they do that? By cutting. They cut experienced (and therefore more expensive) reporters and anchors. They slash investigative budgets. They shrink the newsroom staff, forcing the few remaining journalists to do the work of three or four people, running around with an iPhone trying to be a writer, photographer, editor, and social media manager all at once. Quality inevitably plummets. You get less investigative reporting that holds the powerful accountable and more cheap, easy-to-produce fluff pieces, sponsored content disguised as news, and crime stories that scare you into watching the next broadcast. The news becomes a product designed to keep your eyeballs glued to the screen long enough to sell you a car or a hamburger. It stops being a public service.
Think about the implications of having a transient news team. An anchor who has only lived in your city for three years, like Buganski, is just starting to understand its nuances, its politics, its people. Just as they’re hitting their stride, they’re gone. The new person who replaces them starts from zero. They have no historical context, no deep sources, no genuine connection to the community they’re reporting on. They’re just reading words off a teleprompter, words that could be read in any city in America. This creates a homogenized, sterile, one-size-fits-all version of ‘local’ news that is anything but local. It’s a McNews franchise, serving the same bland meal in every town. Is it any wonder trust in the media is at an all-time low? The corporations have systematically dismantled the very things that made local news trustworthy in the first place: experience, stability, and a genuine commitment to the community. They sold the soul of local journalism for a few extra percentage points on a stock report. And we, the people, are the ones who pay the price through ignorance and manipulation.
What’s the Endgame? Are We Doomed to a Future of Corporate Propaganda?
It looks grim. The trajectory is terrifyingly clear. More consolidation. Fewer owners. Less diversity of thought. The entire local media landscape is being bought up and swallowed by a handful of corporate sharks and parasitic hedge funds that see newsrooms not as a pillar of democracy, but as a distressed asset to be stripped for parts. They’ll continue to cut staff, automate processes, and centralize operations, beaming in national stories disguised as local reports until your ‘local’ news is just a weather map and a few token stories about a downtown festival. The smiling anchors will become even more interchangeable, their tenures even shorter. They will be gig workers with a nice suit. The facade of localism will remain, but behind it will be nothing but a hollow corporate shell. An echo chamber bouncing approved narratives from coast to coast, with no room for genuine local dissent or investigation. They are building a system where it is impossible for a real watchdog to exist. Because watchdogs are expensive. And they bite the hand that feeds them.
But it’s not hopeless. Not yet. The first step is to wake up. To see these departures not as routine personnel changes, but as the warning signs they are. It’s time to stop blindly trusting the polished presentation and start questioning the substance. Who owns your local station? Where are their headquarters? What are their priorities? We have to start demanding more. We have to support the few remaining independent news outlets that are trying to do real journalism. We have to call out the corporate garbage when we see it. This isn’t a fight we can afford to lose. Because when real local news dies, the powerful operate in darkness, corruption flourishes, and the voice of the people is silenced. The departure of one weekend anchor is a quiet bell tolling. The question is, are we listening?
