By Cassidy Lee · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, February 2013
In late February 2013, FishbowlLA picked up a Rich Lieberman report concerning the retirement of former KABC television news anchor Anna Chavez. Lieberman’s San Francisco-Bay-Area media blog had shared what the original FishbowlLA framing called a chastening bit of history about the circumstances around Chavez’s departure from on-air work.
Then
Anna Chavez had been a television news anchor whose career included substantial work in both the Los Angeles (KABC) and San Francisco Bay Area (KGO) markets. Rich Lieberman — whose Bay Area media blog tracked the Northern California broadcast-news community — had reported on the circumstances of Chavez’s retirement.
The chastening framing in the original FishbowlLA piece pointed to a sobering element of the story: that the safety pressures on a public-facing broadcast journalist had been a factor in the career decision. The broader subject — the personal-security risks that on-air television-news figures face, and the way those risks can shape career choices — was the substantive thread the piece was tracking.
Richard Horgan’s FishbowlLA framing pulled the Lieberman report forward to a broader audience, treating it as a documented and sobering piece of LA-and-Bay-Area broadcast-news history.
Now
The broader issue the 2013 piece touched — the personal-security pressures faced by public-facing broadcast journalists — has continued to be a substantive concern across the television-news industry. The visibility of on-air news figures, combined with the rise of social-media-based harassment, has continued to make journalist safety a recurring industry issue across the years since 2013.
Rich Lieberman has continued his Bay Area media-blog work. The broader category of regional media-news blogs — the kind of close-up, market-specific broadcast-news coverage Lieberman provided — has continued in modified form, though the broader contraction of independent media-news blogging has thinned the field.
KABC and KGO have both continued as anchor stations in their respective markets across the years.
The 2013 piece reads now as a small documented moment touching a serious and continuing industry concern — the personal-safety pressures on television-news figures, and the way those pressures can shape the careers of the people who do public-facing broadcast work.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.