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.
For eleven days, HPM gave no public explanation for the delay. Finally, on May 14, a cryptic statement appeared on its website: “Houston Public Media’s The Takeover Podcast will not be released. The podcast reporting team did its job in covering this important community story. The editorial leadership also did its job in reviewing and identifying concerns before this podcast was released to the public.” Later, HPM added a sentence stating that “all the new facts and information” revealed by the podcast had already been published on its website. More than four months later, HPM has offered no further details to the public.
Through a series of Public Information Act requests, Texas Monthly obtained all four episodes of the podcast, which appear to be finished and ready for release. We also obtained more than six hundred pages of internal HPM emails and text messages sent between April 1 and May 15. (As an affiliate of the University of Houston, a public institution, HPM is subject to Texas open-records law.) The communications reveal that on May 2, the day before the podcast’s planned debut, HPM executives learned that Walsh was in a long-term romantic relationship with an HISD teacher. Walsh had disclosed the relationship in 2023 to his supervisor and podcast editor, Christina Lee, and planned to disclose it to listeners in a bonus episode of the podcast, according to producer Ben Henry. In an email to HPM staff, executives said the show was canceled because of an unspecified “conflict of interest.”
According to sources within the organization, the relationship was common knowledge in the HPM newsroom. Walsh’s girlfriend had accompanied him to work happy hours, a holiday party, and an awards presentation. In an email to his bosses, Walsh wrote that he told many of his interview subjects about the relationship. That transparency with sources was “an important point of trust-building that got results,” he explained.
But HPM’s leaders appear to have been taken by surprise. As soon as they discovered the relationship, they put the podcast on hold. After consulting with outside experts, they decided to kill the podcast entirely. (HPM declined to provide the names of those experts to Texas Monthly.) Executives even discussed the possibility of firing Walsh and Lee but in the end retained them, moving Walsh off the education beat. Dozens of Walsh’s stories about HISD remain on the HPM website—without a disclosure of his relationship with the HISD teacher.
Texas Monthly found no evidence that HPM canceled the podcast because of external pressure, as some community members have speculated. No inaccuracies in Walsh’s reporting are identified in the internal communications we reviewed, and HPM executives did not respond to a question about whether they had identified any.
In response to a set of questions Texas Monthly sent after HPM station manager Josh Adams declined an interview, Adams wrote that “the financial and performance implications of HISD’s takeover directly impacts [sic] teachers in the district, including bonuses, school placement, promotions, curriculum, classroom control and performance reviews. A reporter in a domestic partnership with someone who stands to gain or lose from these outcomes has a conflict of interest when reporting on related matters.” If the conflict of interest was so serious, then why didn’t HPM add a disclosure to Walsh’s many other education stories? Adams answered that an HPM news staff committee had reviewed the articles and “recommended that none of these stories be removed, edited or retracted.”
What constitutes a conflict of interest is a disputed subject among journalists. At some media outlets, an education reporter dating a teacher might be unremarkable. At others, it might require providing a brief disclosure at the end of the story. At HPM, Walsh’s relationship was apparently seen as a five-alarm fire. In separate interviews with Texas Monthly, three experts in journalism ethics questioned HPM’s decision to bury the podcast.
“Dating somebody in the school system is not perfect, but per se, it doesn’t seem like it’s disqualifying, based on what I know,” said Neil Brown, president of the Poynter Institute, a Florida-based nonprofit dedicated to promoting high-quality reporting. “In a school district that has eleven thousand teachers, the fact that a reporter might be dating one of those teachers, who is not involved in the story as a character . . . It’s a bit of a head-scratcher as to why that relationship would keep this story from getting out to the public.”
Walsh declined an interview request for this story, citing University of Houston policy; Lee did not respond to an interview request. But emails make it clear that both disagreed with HPM’s decision to kill the podcast. Walsh and Lee repeatedly urged HPM executives to publicly disclose the real reason for burying the podcast, in part to protect Walsh’s credibility. HPM’s upper management was not persuaded. “We chose to protect the privacy of individuals involved and to maintain the focus on the broader issue of journalistic integrity rather than personal relationships,” Adams explained.
Internal communications show that HPM’s overriding concern throughout the crisis was its reputation and financial position. In one email, Adams worried that releasing the podcast “could impact our revenue.” Executives went to unusual lengths, including engaging an outside public relations firm, to conceal from the public the true reason for the podcast’s cancellation—defying the wishes of the very employees whose privacy they were supposedly trying to protect.
“Ethics are about having a process to make judgments,” Brown said. “And those judgments should start from the premise of, ‘How can we publish?’ Not ‘How can we avoid publishing?’ And, you know, disclosure to the audience is a strong component of that process.”
When he was hired by Houston Public Media in 2022, Walsh was a 24-year-old rising star in the world of public radio. After graduating from Trinity University, in San Antonio, he worked at the city’s NPR affiliate for two years as part of reporting teams that won two national Edward R. Murrow Awards for covering the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2021 Texas electrical grid failure. He cohosted a four-part investigative podcast, Fire Triangle, about a series of deadly chemical-plant disasters across Texas.
Shortly after moving to Houston, Walsh struck up a conversation with his neighbor, an HISD teacher named Lorena Reyes, in their apartment complex’s laundry room. They began dating in December 2022. That month, the couple attended an HPM holiday party, where Reyes met much of the staff, including Walsh’s editor, Christina Lee. Although Reyes sometimes accompanied Walsh to work functions, they tried to keep their professional lives separate at home. “We had a very strict mutual understanding that we would leave work at work,” Reyes told Texas Monthly. “We have very strong boundaries around that.” (The couple got engaged in May 2024.)
Walsh’s job put him at the center of the biggest story in Houston, one with statewide and even national ramifications: the looming state takeover of Houston ISD. In the summer of 2023, Texas Education Agency Commissioner Mike Morath dissolved the democratically elected HISD board, installing handpicked trustees and hiring Mike Miles, a controversial former Dallas ISD superintendent, to lead the district. The move, Morath claimed, was necessary because of a single failing high school in the 274-school district. With little consultation, Miles began implementing a top-down curriculum at more than two dozen of HISD’s lowest-performing schools. His so-called New Education System immediately encountered massive resistance from teachers and parents.
Walsh quickly established a reputation as one of the hardest-working journalists covering the HISD takeover. He broke news about Miles’s plan to pay all HISD teachers according to their students’ test scores by 2025–26, and he interviewed a teen who said students were tricked into performing in a district-funded musical celebrating Miles. In December 2023, he reached out to Henry, his former colleague from Texas Public Radio, in San Antonio, about creating a podcast based on his reporting. “The idea was that I would come on to help with the extra research needed for a deeper dive,” Henry recently told Texas Monthly. “Instead of covering the takeover in fragments, with a bunch of news stories, the idea was to tell it all at once, with the care it deserves.”
Executives at HPM green-lit the podcast. Walsh would be the host. Lee, HPM’s executive producer of enterprise journalism, would be the editor. Henry, who was still living in San Antonio, would serve as freelance producer. For the next four months, the team worked at a feverish pace. Walsh interviewed students, teachers, administrators, community members, and education experts. He and Henry delved into the decades-long history of school reform in Texas, going back to former Governor George W. Bush’s implementation of standardized testing and accountability ratings in the nineties.
By mid-April, the team was putting the final touches on the four episodes of the podcast, now titled The Takeover. News 88.7 began running promos for the series during programming breaks. HPM hired Houston-based High Five Marketing Partners to make digital ad buys promoting the series. On April 15, Walsh appeared on HPM’s morning talk show, Houston Matters, to preview the podcast. In the days leading up to the launch, the show was distributed to Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other outlets.
It remains unclear how HPM executives learned about Walsh’s relationship with Reyes. But on May 2, an emergency meeting was held at the station’s headquarters, on the University of Houston campus. Lee and Walsh attended in person, while Henry joined by phone from San Antonio. Among the executives present were station manager Josh Adams and Laurie Johnson-Ramirez, the executive director of content operations. The executives announced that the podcast’s release would be paused for an “editorial review” of Walsh’s potential conflict of interest.
“The overall tone was surprisingly hostile,” Henry recalled. “Josh was definitely upset at Dominic.” According to Henry, Walsh pointed out that he had disclosed the relationship to Lee, his supervisor, well before starting work on the podcast. This did not mollify the executives. “The word I remember Laurie saying is ‘livid,’ ” Henry recalled. “Her position was basically that she should have been informed about the relationship sooner.”
At first, the idea of HPM canceling the podcast on the eve of its release seemed too absurd for the editorial team to contemplate. “We were kind of saying, ‘Hey, you would be crazy to pull the podcast right now,’ ” Henry said. That afternoon, though, Adams sent an all-staff email announcing that “a potential conflict of interest was identified” in The Takeover and that the podcast “will be paused pending an independent, 3rd party, editorial review.” In a subsequent email to a UH human relations manager, Adams was more explicit, writing that the relationship “creates a breach of trust between HPM’s listeners, podcast subscriber [sic] and violates HPM’s well established journalistic standards. That breach threatens our integrity, our brand and could impact our revenue.” Walsh and Lee should be placed on administrative leave, he added. “Their presence in the newsroom could be a distraction to our journalists and reporters.”
It took less than a week for HPM to conclude both the internal review and the third-party review. Adams told Texas Monthly that the internal review “involved listening sessions and discussion of the content, concluding that Walsh’s personal relationship could have influenced the reporting on the project.” During the outside review, HPM staff met by phone and in person with “external journalism consultants and media ethics experts who unanimously agreed that some level of conflict of interest either did exist or could reasonably be assumed to potentially influence the reporting.” By May 10, internal emails show, a decision had been made to scrap the podcast.
The move roiled the HPM newsroom. Several executives expressed concern about the cancellation’s impact on morale. “I keep thinking about our newsroom,” HPM general manager Lisa Trapani Shumate texted Adams on May 7. “We don’t want them to get the message that we’re not behind them when they make a mistake. And I believe Christine and Dominic when they say they don’t understand what they did.” In a text message to Johnson-Ramirez, HPM executive producer Jack Williams predicted that “you’re going to get a lot of shrugged shoulders on Dominic’s relationship. I don’t think they get it. They’re basically saying, ‘so’? The new generation…sigh.”
Kathleen Bartzen Culver, director of the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s journalism school, said that independence in journalism doesn’t mean you can never have a relationship in your personal life. “It seems like [HPM] is taking a very important tenet to an unreachable degree.”
Dan Axelrod, who teaches communications at St. Thomas University, in Florida, and serves on the Society of Professional Journalists’ media ethics committee, noted that HPM had other options beyond killing the podcast: “They could have published the podcast with a well-positioned disclaimer. Or the editors could’ve turned the investigation into a team report or handed it to the education reporter’s colleagues to do the project. Instead, they chose the most drastic option—spiking a deep-dive investigation aimed at helping the public.” In an email to Texas Monthly, Adams wrote that HPM did not consider publishing the podcast with a disclosure because “the conflict was apparent and did not meet our editorial standards.”
After failing to release The Takeover on its scheduled date, HPM fielded dozens of emails, voice messages, and social media posts asking about the podcast’s status. Many of the correspondents identified themselves as longtime HPM listeners; several were dues-paying members, including one woman who canceled her $1,200 annual membership. Reached recently, the woman, a mother of two HISD students who requested anonymity to preserve her privacy, said she was disappointed in HPM. “I think the real mistake here is cancellation without a disclosure of why,” she said. “If your mission is to disclose the truth, as I would think a public media organization would be, then that starts in-house.”
HPM has emphasized in its public statements that all the “new facts” from The Takeover have already been published. That’s not exactly true. The podcast contains at least one never-before-heard anecdote from a prominent researcher and teases a follow-up about an HISD spokesperson who abruptly quit, among other minor storylines. But, more important, listeners have been deprived of the immersive, narrative experience of a serial podcast.
The Takeover is a nuanced, spirited look at the upheaval in HISD. Walsh plunges into the myriad controversies as they unfold: the sacking of librarians, the exodus of experienced teachers, the tying of teachers’ pay to their commitment to Miles’s militantly test-focused instructional model, and the superintendent’s awkward effort to introduce himself to his employees through a student-staged musical. (“We just low-key accidentally performed in a propaganda show,” one student tells Walsh.) The podcast resists easy answers.
It finds that while many teachers and parents view Miles’s reforms as degrading and ineffective, Miles has his defenders. We hear from a teacher who embraces the turnaround model, and from Miles, answering criticisms that students are turned off by the intense focus on scripted learning. “If it’s not engaging, I blame the teacher,” he says. The HISD experiment, Walsh ultimately suggests, is a redux of an old story. The podcast finds that Miles is running a familiar playbook, one that has arguably failed over and over again for decades: top-down, test-based school reform, often implemented at the local level by a charismatic leader under pressure to show proof of concept.
Walsh’s concern with fairness and accuracy comes through clearly in the podcast. In a bonus episode called “Mike Miles and the Media,” which Adams says was never “fully vetted,” the reporter relates his considerable efforts to secure an interview with Miles. Eventually, after Miles’s spokesperson formally declines the request, Walsh runs into the superintendent in a parking lot. We hear Walsh explaining to a skeptical Miles why he has gone to such lengths to get the interview: “Ultimately, this is about fairness.”
