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On Monday, the CBS affiliate in Sacramento posted a thirty-minute video to its YouTube page that, on its face, seemed likely to be a slog to watch. Investigative reporter Julie Watts had spent much of September sitting down with each of the state’s many candidates for governor, to ask them the same four questions about the upcoming election and the current governor’s redistricting proposals.

But a three-minute clip of Watts pressing former US representative Katie Porter, thought to be one of the race’s front-runners, broke through. “What do you say to the forty percent of California voters, who you’ll need in order to win, who voted for Trump?” Watts asked, reciting a question she’d put to several other candidates. California’s election structure means that the top two vote recipients in the primary advance to the general election, regardless of party, meaning it could end up a race between two Democrats. Porter nevertheless rejected the premise. “How would I need them in order to win, ma’am?” 

Watts coolly pressed on, until Porter finally held both her hands up in frustration: “I feel like this is unnecessarily argumentative. What is your question?” Finally, Porter started to fumble with the mic clipped to her shirt. “I don’t want to keep doing this, I’m going to call it,” she said. “Thank you.”

The clip went viral, and social media was soon awash with unnamed reports that Porter was known in DC to have a short fuse. On Thursday, another video emerged—raw footage of a recorded statement during which Porter snaps at an aide to “get out of my fucking shot.” As Politico (which unearthed the second video) reported, Porter’s campaign was spiraling.

The firestorm ignited by Porter’s reaction to Watts’s calm, sensible questioning was just one example of what has been a banner couple of weeks for the often overlooked foot soldiers of local television news. At a time when the national conversation about TV news has been dominated by anxiety about mergers and corporate politics and hostile takeovers, it’s reassuring to see the reporters on the ground continuing to do the kind of work that makes them indispensable to the communities they serve.

In Indianapolis, news broke over the weekend that former NFL quarterback and current television analyst Mark Sanchez had been stabbed in a brutal attack downtown. For a few hours, it appeared that the incident would be more fodder for Republican politicians seeking to cast aspersions on the safety of Democrat-run big cities—including Governor Mike Braun, who posted on X condemning city leaders for not doing enough to “hold criminals accountable.”

Until, that is, Fox59 uncovered the real story behind the assault: Sanchez had allegedly instigated a fight with a truck driver, who deployed pepper spray in self-defense before pulling out a knife. Sanchez was facing criminal charges, which were later upgraded to include a felony. (Braun deleted his posts.)

The next day, veteran Fox59 reporter Russ McQuaid and weekend anchor Max Lewis added more. McQuaid, who had initially acquired the police report that revealed the more accurate version of events, visited the scene and found the bartender who’d treated Sanchez immediately after the incident. Lewis, meanwhile, connected with the family of the victim, Perry Tole, who provided the network with photographs of Tole in his hospital bed, with a large, bloody gash on his face.

It turned out that Tole was already known to the network. In 2021, Fox59 profiled him after he’d devoted his life to caring for his sister-in-law, who’d been shot and permanently injured a decade earlier. “We actually leave the building, go out in the streets, talk to people, and figure things out, without jumping to conclusions,” McQuaid said in a postmortem aired by the network. “And we’re very cautious about it.” Right on.

In late September, Ryan Walters, the controversial Oklahoma schools chief who sought to bring the Bible into classroom curriculums and appointed internet provocateur Chaya Raichik (@libsoftiktok) to a library advisory committee, pulled up to the studio of KOKH Fox 25 to tape an appearance on Fox News.

Walters’s plan was to announce his retirement—he planned to take a job with an organization trying to “destroy the teachers unions”—and depart, but KOKH reporter Wendy Suares had other ideas. As Walters removed his microphone and strode off the set, Suares approached him with her own mic and camera, to ask the follow-ups that the national Fox host had not. “What do you want to say to Oklahomans who might feel you’re bailing out on them?” she asked. “Can you tell us when you’re stepping down?” (In a later post on X, Suares said that KOKH had agreed to let Walters use its studio on the condition that he sit down for a local interview afterward.)

As Walters walked out of the building in silence, Suares followed behind, continuing to press. “We have to ask when this relationship started, because it seems like you’ve been pushing this job for a while now. Did it interfere with your job for Oklahoma?” 

The final forty seconds of the video play out in tense silence, as the camera follows Walters through the halls and out the door—a refusal to engage with unscripted questions that says far more than any answers would have.

CBS News Chicago investigator Dave Savini uncovered evidence of a dispute between local police and federal agents from ICE in the village of Broadview, just outside of Chicago. Broadview is home to the ICE processing facility at the center of protests and clashes over the past few weeks; several journalists have been wounded covering events there, including CBS News Chicago reporter Asal Rezaei, who said a federal agent shot pepper balls directly into her vehicle, engulfing it in chemical smoke and causing her to throw up. On Monday a group of local reporters filed a lawsuit accusing ICE and the Department of Homeland Security of using excessive force in a way that made it impossible to safely conduct journalism.

That didn’t stop Savini, who acquired bodycam footage showing the Broadview Police  responding to calls from the ICE facility that appeared to be bogus. Broadview Police Chief Thomas Mills, who has previously described ICE’s use of tear gas and other incendiaries as “creating a dangerous situation for the community,” told Savini he considered the calls a waste of resources: “It’s ridiculous,” he said.

It seems too soon to say what Bari Weiss, the newly installed editor in chief of CBS News, will do with the network’s local coverage. But Byron Allen, a multi-hyphenate media figure who started out in stand-up comedy and went on to build a production and distribution company called Allen Media Group, made a few of his intentions known this week. At an event on Wednesday, he said that he wants to take over the CBS time slot occupied (for now) by The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. (Allen is currently on an hour later, time he buys from CBS for Comics Unleashed with Byron Allen, during which he sells advertising slots.) And on Thursday, Allen Media Group’s Local Now, a free streaming service for local news, announced that it was adding five channels from Fox to its lineup: Fox Sports, Fox Weather, LiveNOW from Fox, Fox Soul, and TMZ. “Local Now is committed to bringing the audience what they want,” Allen said. Apparently, that means less community coverage, more national fare.

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