Channels with Peter Kafka
Media and tech aren’t just intersecting — they’re fully intertwined. And to understand how those worlds work, and what they mean for you, veteran journalist Peter Kafka talks to industry leaders, upstarts and observers - and gets them to spell it out in plain, BS-free English. Part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Episodes
February 27, 2026 • 33 mins
Netflix shocked the world last year by winning a deal to buy Warner Bros. Discovery. This week it shocked us by walking away.In this emergency bonus episode, CNBC’s Alex Sherman walks us through the whiplash: Why Netflix chose not to counter Paramount, what the market blowback signaled, and how much of this was about price versus the very real prospect of a long, ugly regulatory and political slog.Then we spin it forward: what a Pa...
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February 25, 2026 • 49 mins
Brian Stelter puts its clearly: "All M&A runs through the Oval Office right now.” So how much does Trump matter in the Netflix/Paramount battle for Warner Bros. Discovery — and what does he want out of it?
Stelter, CNN’s chief media analyst and author of the newsletter Reliable Sources, walks us through the information vacuum around the deal, Trump’s habit of inserting himself as a would-be kingmaker, and the harder-to-prove quest...
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February 18, 2026 • 67 mins
Janice Min and Reed Duchscher are both building new media companies in LA. But their perspectives are quite different: Min runs The Ankler, the trade pub that mostly focuses on the fate of Big Media companies like Paramount and Netflix; Duchscher runs Night, a talent agency focused on digital talent like Kai Cenat and Hassan Piker (he’s best known for his work with Mr. Beast).So it’s not totally shocking that my conversation with M...
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February 11, 2026 • 70 mins
If Joe Weisenthal didn’t exist, the internet would have to invent him. Because Joe Weisenthal is built for the internet — more specifically, an internet personality: Knows a lot, curious about even more, often right, happy to be wrong, always has something to say about anything.That persona/personality did wonders for Joe in the early days of Business Insider — which, not coincidentally, were also the early days of Twitter, where J...
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February 5, 2026 • 34 mins
Jeff Bezos used to be the savior of The Washington Post. He bought it for $250 million in 2013, and then invested money and energy into turning it around — and it worked.Now the Amazon founder is decimating the Post’s staff, and his managers are telling the ones who are left that things have to change.So what happened, and what happens next? Erik Wemple is the right person to ask: He spent years covering media at the Post, and now ...
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February 3, 2026 • 38 mins
In February 2020, Disney CEO Bob Iger finally announced his successor: Bob Chapek, who ran the company’s parks business. That didn’t work out.Now Iger is running it back: This time around he’s announced that Josh D’Amaro, who runs the company’s park business, is going to succeed him.So: Who is Josh D’Amaro, and what has he done to prove himself CEO-worthy? Why does Iger (and the Disney board) think this one will work? And what happ...
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January 28, 2026 • 38 mins
In an ideal world, I wouldn’t be bringing you an interview with the editor of the Minnesota Star Tribune about her paper’s coverage of the killing of Alex Pretti in the same episode where I interview the man behind HBO’s newest Game of Thrones show.
But we’re not in an ideal world right now.
So here’s a conversation with Star Tribune editor Kathleen Hennessey — who left the New York Times to take the gig less than a year ago — ab...
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January 21, 2026 • 56 mins
Football isn’t just the biggest show on TV — at this point, it’s basically the only reason some TV networks exist. So it’s a very worthy subject for Chuck Klosterman, the provocative and prolific writer, to tackle in his new book, which is called… Football.
The big Channels idea here is to talk about football’s dominance in American media and culture, and What That Means — and how that might end, one day. And we most definitely ge...
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January 14, 2026 • 39 mins
News is a tough business. So how did Semafor, the news startup founded by Ben Smith and Justin Smith, figure out how to turn a profit in their third year of business?
Excellent journalism certainly helps. But it’s really because the company made two key decisions: Focusing on events — and focusing on events in Washington, D.C., where companies will pay a lot of money to reach a relatively small crowd of influential people.
There’...
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January 7, 2026 • 40 mins
How, exactly, did Bari Weiss become the head of CBS News?
We know that David Ellison, who bought Paramount last year, hired her — and bought The Free Press, the publication she started a few years earlier. But how did she get on Ellison’s radar? And why are so many media moguls, like Ellison, huge fans?
New York magazine’s Charlotte Klein knows. She recently published an excellent profile of Weiss that tracks her ascent over the ...
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December 31, 2025 • 48 mins
Craig Finn makes music — as the head of the Hold Steady, and on his solo records — about grown-up lives and bad decisions. Back in 2017, we talked about his life as a working rock musician — and how touring actually works, how the band found a second life, and why fans and friendship matter more than old ideas of rock stardom.
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December 24, 2025 • 54 mins
PJ Vogt helped invent modern narrative podcasting with “Reply All.” Now he’s running “Search Engine” with a much smaller team and a lot more control. We talk through what he gave up this time around, what he gained, and how he actually makes the show each week.
I loved this conversation when we recorded it earlier this year. And I think it’s just as relevant now, as media talent — and lots of people in other industries, too — are ...
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The backstory here is that weeks ago, Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw agreed to join me for my 2025/2026 look back/look ahead episode. And then things got way more compelling, because Paramount and Netflix got into a truly unprecedented fight over the future of Warner Bros Discovery.
So that’s what we’re talking about here, including:
*Why this truly is a turning point for Hollywood, and streaming, and the great media/tech collision we’ve...
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December 10, 2025 • 46 mins
I chat with lots of media reporters. Lachlan Cartwright is a different beast: An Aussie who started out working for Rupert Murdoch’s tabloids in London and New York, and then on to the National Enquirer — yes, that National Enquirer — back when it was catching and killing stories on behalf on Donald Trump. Now Cartwright runs Breaker, a must-read New York media gossip newsletter and podcast, and spends his time staking out Sulzberg...
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December 5, 2025 • 18 mins
In 2013, Netflix wanted to become HBO. Now Netflix is going to buy HBO along with the Warner Bros. Studio, in a blockbuster $83 billion deal.
Wowza. Here to talk me through this is Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw, who has been deep in the deal talks for weeks. Discussed in this one:
*How did Netflix maneuver its way into a deal everyone thought Paramount would win?
*Will this deal actually get past Donald Trump and U.S. regulators?
*Wha...
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December 3, 2025 • 40 mins
The last time I interviewed PBS CEO Paula Kerger was 2019: Donald Trump was President, and Republicans were trying to defund public media — as they had been trying to do for decades.
That didn’t happen then, but this year it did, and now Kerger is trying to fill a $1 billion funding hole.
So far, she says, PBS and its member stations have held up ok — no one has had to shut down, yet.
But while Kerger holds out hope she can conv...
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November 26, 2025 • 39 mins
We built the modern media business for the web — for people who visited websites, read articles, and saw ads. What happens when no one does that anymore?
That’s been one of the big themes of conversations we’ve been having on Channels with this year — with people who run big and small media properties, and with people who are trying to build media businesses. And that’s why I wanted to talk to Tony Haile.
Tony got into digital me...
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November 19, 2025 • 40 mins
If you watched something on TV that you liked in the past few decades, there’s a good chance Kevin Reilly was involved: at various times he’s held top jobs at FX, Fox, NBC, Turner and HBO Max.
But that run ended in 2020, and now Reilly is running Kartel, an AI company that… well, I’m still not entirely sure what it does. (To be fair, as Reilly notes in our chat, it’s a young company that’s still figuring it out itself.)
But I rea...
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November 12, 2025 • 52 mins
It’s not unusual for a big TV network and a big TV distributor to fight about money. But the Disney-YouTube fight is unusual -- at the bare minimum, because it has stretched out for so long. CNBC’s Alex Sherman lives and breathes this stuff, so I asked him to walk me through it, and make some prognostications about when it might get settled (spoiler alert: he thinks some football fans who pay for YouTube TV may be unhappy for a whi...
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November 5, 2025 • 45 mins
In some ways, the Bulwark feels like other small publishers in 2025: it’s found growth and profit by pushing itself out on any platform it can find.
But that wasn’t the plan when the company started in 2018. Back then, it was a non-profit cofounded by Republicans who couldn’t stand their party’s embrace of Donald Trump, and wanted a place to organize, debate and push back.
Over the years the site turned itself into a for-profit, ...
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