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Episode One Hundred Four: Zig Heart Elex · The Death Of Journalism

• 0:00
  Welcome to episode number one hundred and four of the Death of Journalism podcast.
• 0:04
  My name is John Zigler. I'm your host on today's show, a fascinating
• 0:08
  and surprising interview with Fox Los Angeles News anchorman Alexmichaelson, Tim Scott drops out
• 0:16
  of the Republican presidential race, and some thoughts on the University of Michigan football
• 0:21
  scandal. I'm known as the Dutch Digital marketing Man. I'm a digital advertising
• 0:27
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• 0:32
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• 0:37
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• 0:56
  That's the Dutch Digital Marketingman dot com. And hey, thanks for sponsoring
• 1:02
  the show. Of the many predictions that I have made during this Republican presidential
• 1:07
  process during twenty and twenty three, I think that maybe the most important and
• 1:14
  the most the most prescient that I have made deals with Tucker Carlson. I
• 1:21
  was way way ahead of the curve when it came to predicting the negative impact,
• 1:27
  in my view, negative impact that Tucker Carlson would have on the Republican
• 1:34
  primary. And I first started to screen Bloody Murder about this back when he
• 1:38
  was still at Fox News Channel, and he did the whole thing about the
• 1:44
  January sixth revisionist history using the videotapes he was given by the then Speaker of
• 1:49
  the House, Kevin McCarthy. And then he did the very softball interview with
• 1:53
  Donald Trump after the first indictment, and he and Glenn Beck were creating this
• 2:00
  narrative that Republicans had to rally around Trump after that first indictment, otherwise we
• 2:05
  were going to lose the republic and we couldn't let the bastards get away with
• 2:07
  this. And then after he got fired, even that night, I went
• 2:13
  on News Nation television with Dan Abrams and said, this was a very good
• 2:16
  day for the Trump campaign because now I knew that Tucker Carlson had no choice
• 2:22
  but to latch on for dear life to Donald Trump, and that his street
• 2:27
  cred among Trump fans was going to increase, and that Fox News Channel was
• 2:32
  going to be in a far more vulnerable position than they were previously and they
• 2:38
  could never take on Donald Trump after firing Tucker Carlson. And so I saw
• 2:43
  all that coming from a mile away. And I have referred many times this
• 2:47
  year to Tucker Carlson as Donald Trump's MVP. And something happened this past weekend
• 2:53
  which further illustrated this. It shocked a lot of people. I don't know
• 2:58
  why they were stunned. I certainly wasn't. Donald Trump made an appearance at
• 3:02
  a UFC event Ultimate Fighting, where he came in with a gang of supporters,
• 3:12
  including Kid Rock, but among them was Tucker Carlson. Tucker Carlson was
• 3:19
  hanging out with Donald Trump at a UFC event over the weekend and chumming it
• 3:27
  up, buddy buddy. He was part of Trump's squad. This comes on
• 3:30
  the heels of Trump making statements that make it seem as if he is considering
• 3:37
  seriously Tucker Carlson as his vice presidential nominee, which would be completely and totally
• 3:43
  ridiculous even by Trump standards. And this is not the most significant thing that's
• 3:47
  happened in the presidential process. But I do think that it's worthy of mention,
• 3:53
  not just because of Tovetaales with my prediction and my doomsday arrative for how
• 4:00
  and why Trump was going to be the nominee in twenty twenty four for the
• 4:04
  Republican Party and what a total and complete sellout Tucker Carlson is. I mean,
• 4:11
  this is a guy who famously, in court documents, said that he
• 4:16
  loaths Donald Trump, hates him passionately, can't wait for him to go away.
• 4:21
  All this came out in the Dominion Voting System's lawsuit, which then,
• 4:27
  either directly or indirectly or depending on who you believe, resulted in Tucker Carlson's
• 4:31
  firing. But here we have Tucker Carlson really exposing himself as the ultimate sellout,
• 4:38
  supporting in every way, shape or form, a guy who he hates,
• 4:43
  and everyone who knows Tucker Carlson knows he hates him, and for good
• 4:46
  reason, but he doesn't care because now his self interest is aligned with Donald
• 4:53
  Trump's and vice versa. By the way, Trump never really liked Tucker either,
• 4:57
  because before all this happened, Tucker was someone who was not embracing Trump
• 5:01
  as much as the rest of the sycophants on Fox News Channel. But this
• 5:06
  is the world we live in. It's all about self interest. It's not
• 5:10
  about the cause, it's not about the country. And this was further proven
• 5:15
  over the weekend with Tucker Carlson hanging out with Donald Trump. Now that's the
• 5:19
  right wing media exposing themselves as a bunch of frauds. Where Tucker Carlson,
• 5:24
  a guy I used to have a lot of respect for, the smartest and
• 5:28
  funniest, the most compelling commentator of the right, has exposing himself as really
• 5:32
  nothing more than a Trump sellout when the rubber met the road. I mean,
• 5:36
  a guy who I thought theoretically could have been leading the charge to end
• 5:42
  Trump's script on the Republican Party is right there selling out because it's good for
• 5:46
  him personally. That's the right wing media and what a fraud they are.
• 5:53
  But the left wing media also this weekend further exposed what a fraud they are
• 5:58
  when it comes to Donald Trump. And I'm referring here specifically to Saturday Night
• 6:02
  Live. Now, Saturday Night Live is nowhere near as relevant politically as it
• 6:08
  used to be. It can still sometimes help create or promote certain narratives,
• 6:14
  but it doesn't have the audience because one fragmentation and two because it's not nearly
• 6:19
  as good a show as it used to be. But I would suggest that
• 6:24
  really, up until a couple election cycles ago, Saturday Night Live did play
• 6:28
  an important part in those narratives that got created and promoted during political campaigns.
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  There's zero down that in two thousand and eight, Saturday Night Live and Tina
• 6:38
  Fey played a massive role in the public perception of Sarah Palin and they're a
• 6:43
  huge part of my movie about that election cycle media map practice that Obama got
• 6:46
  elected and Palelin was targeted. Well. This past weekend, Saturday Night Live
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  started their show their cold open, which is by far the most highly rated
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  portion of the show, dated a cold open mockt the Republican debate from the
• 7:01
  previous week, and the essence of the skit was to diminish greatly all of
• 7:09
  the five Republican candidates who are running against Trump now four because as we'll get
• 7:13
  to momentarily, Tim Scott has dropped out. But they mocked all five of
• 7:17
  the candidates, diminished them greatly, and then they didn't even do a full
• 7:23
  skit on the debate itself, they paused it and allowed the guy playing Donald
• 7:30
  Trump to come in for the majority of the opening skit to further diminish those
• 7:38
  candidates and to elevate Trump. Now again, it's a comedy skit. By
• 7:44
  the way, it wasn't particularly funny, and it's only Saturday Night Live.
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  Not many Republican voters are watching. I do think that media members watched Saturday
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  Night Live, and it's still therefore has some relevance with regard to the creation
• 7:58
  of media narratives. But that's not even the major point. The major point
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  is this is symbolic of the larger left wing media and their massive hypocrisy when
• 8:09
  it comes to Donald Trump. Massive hypocrisy because Saturday Night Live has played every
• 8:16
  single angle of the Trump phenomenon, and in twenty sixteen, they played a
• 8:22
  role in helping Trump win the Republican nomination. He hosted Saturday Night Live during
• 8:30
  that campaign, and then they had the audacity acter he one to treat that
• 8:35
  victory literally literally, as if it was a funeral. The first Saturdayight Live
• 8:41
  episode after Trump's selection started off literally as a funeral, with the character who
• 8:48
  played Hillary Clinton, you know, singing at the piano Allelujah, like it
• 8:56
  was a funeral. I mean, why you you helped create this monster,
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  Seturdnight Live. And now you're saying that because you created that monster, helped
• 9:07
  create that monster, that it's horrible for the country because he won. Well,
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  okay, great, how about you take some blame and responsibility for that.
• 9:16
  And now here they are all these years later, twenty three and they're
• 9:22
  doing exactly the same thing, and it's symbolic of all of the left wing
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  media diminish the candidates have a chance theoretically to take Trump out and further elevate
• 9:35
  him. And that's the most important thing. It's not even the substance of
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  these stupid skits, it's the essence of it, which is this isn't even
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  a race. You know, these other candidates are all terrible. I'm the
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  alpha male Donald Trump. I'm gonna win. Of course I'm gonna win.
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  And that's all Trump once there needs, right now, that's all the ones
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  are needs, is to diminish those going against them, especially round Santis and
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  or Nikki Haley, the only two people that even theoretically have a chance and
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  to elevate him as being in a position that can't be taken out, and
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  the left wing media has played right into that throughout all the indictments and throughout
• 10:16
  all the other news of this cycle, through Trump dodging not one, not
• 10:20
  two, but three debates, and here we have a skit which should have
• 10:24
  been I mean, in theory, the skit should have been Trump cowering afraid
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  to participate in a fairly substantive debate with a couple of really solid candidates,
• 10:39
  most specifically Ron de Santis. That should have been the essence of the skit's
• 10:43
  narrative. Instead, it's exactly the opposite, which of course plays right into
• 10:46
  Trump's hands and further facilitates this narrative that it's over. Now, I acknowledge
• 10:54
  I've said it's over, but not because I'm a Trump supporter, because I'm
• 10:58
  just telling you what's gonna happen. Also, I don't have nearly the influence.
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  I don't have any influence at all other than you know, these major
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  left wing media outlets. They do have an influence on the narrative and on
• 11:09
  people's perceptions. And when people, even Trump supporters, when they see this
• 11:15
  online, they go, huh, yeah, of course, my guy's the
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  guy. He's inevitable he's gonna win, and it demoralizes other candidates. Hell,
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  it maybe even had a small role in Tim Scott dropping out because they
• 11:28
  were mocking him for something I don't think he deserved to be mocked for.
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  And so here we have Tucker Carlson showing his ass Saturday Night Live, showing
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  massive hypocrisy and being symbolic of how the left wing media has handled this entire
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  election process from the beginning, playing right into Donald Trump's hands. And here
• 11:50
  we have for history repeating itself. We're going to get exactly the same thing
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  now. The only thing that's slightly different is that the number of candidates going
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  again Trump at this stage is slightly smaller than it was in twenty sixteen.
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  But other than that, it's basically deja vu all over again, and it's
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  really depressing and disgusting. And it's a big part of the reason is because
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  how broken the news media is, and I put Saturday Night Live in that
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  category. They're not technically news media, but they obviously, as I mentioned
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  with Palin, they've had significant influence in the past when it comes to creating
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  and furthering political narratives. Now they were mocking the debate that happened last week
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  within the Republican Party, the non Trump debate, which I always said was
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  silly because how can you have a debate without Trump? But the biggest problem
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  I have is that Trump doesn't get any blowback for this, the Saturday nve
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  skit being perfect example this. He doesn't even get attacked on Saturday Night Live
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  for not having the guts to participate in a debate, but he gets no
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  blowback. He dodges these three debates, and as I have predicted, each
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  debate has had a smaller audience than the previous one. I was wrong about
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  the third debate being a crap show. It was actually a pretty decent debate,
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  partially because the number of candidates was smaller than it had been previously.
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  But I was right that the ratings were less than the second debate, and
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  the second debate ratings were less than the first debate. So you're now in
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  a death spiral. People realize that this is irrelevant, that it doesn't matter
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  if Trump's not going to be there, what's the point of watching because nothing
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  I'm seeing is all that important. That's the reality of this. And now
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  perception becomes reality, and so you know, the death spiral continues, then
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  the next debate will have an even much smaller audience than this third one because
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  the third one was on old network television NBC Nationwide, as opposed to a
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  cable news outlet, which used to really be significant and now is only somewhat
• 14:05
  significant in certain situations. And so the third debate had smaller ratings than the
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  second debate. And reality is starting to set in with most people, and
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  it's set in with Tim Scott. Tim Scott dropped out of the race,
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  the senator from South Carolina. He was never going to be the nominee.
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  I like Tim Scott. He seems like a good guy politically. I mean,
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  he's very conservative, which I like. Being an African American and being
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  in the debates I think is a positive thing. But what I'm most upset
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  about with regarding Tim Scott is how he was treated by the left wing media,
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  including Saturday Night Live, including outlets like The Daily Show that were mocking
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  him mercilessly because he has a girlfriend. He's not married, but we're into
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  him. He has a girlfriend, a very attractive woman who's a mother of
• 15:03
  three children from South Carolina, happens to be white, he's black, and
• 15:09
  it's been shocking to me. And I don't get shocked by much how openly
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  racist. The left wing media and the comedy outlets especially have been in mocking
• 15:22
  Tim Scott for this relationship, essentially saying that it's totally fake and playing that
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  she's somehow like a hired prostitute or something for him to have on his arm
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  as he's going through a presidential campaign. Well then why did he drop out
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  right after he announced who his girlfriend was. I have no information, though,
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  knowledge, no inkling that this is a fake relationship. Now is it
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  possible? I mean, I guess so. A lot of relationships are fake
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  to some degree. But here's my problem. Can you imagine if a black
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  democrat was dating a white woman, there would be no talk, no mocking,
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  no nothing, no implication whatsoever of anything untoward, anything fake or phony.
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  It would be respected. In fact, it would probably be seen as
• 16:19
  a sign of them being able to reach across racial lines and being a modern
• 16:26
  couple. And isn't this awesome? But with Tim Scott, this poor guy
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  got mocked mercilessly all because he all of a sudden announced he had a girlfriend.
• 16:41
  Well, there's been evidence he's been saying he's had a girlfriend for quite
• 16:44
  a while. Maybe he just wasn't ready to announce who it was or to
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  have her be out in public with him. That's perfectly normal for a celebrity
• 16:52
  or a public person to make a decision like that. So that really bothered
• 16:57
  me how the left wing, especially the quote unquote entertainment media, handled Tim
• 17:03
  Scott's dating situation. Total and complete hypocrisy and double standards. But Tim scott
• 17:10
  dropping out is probably not that significant. Who knows where his two three four
• 17:15
  percent of support goes. It probably disperses into the ether and goes to all
• 17:22
  the other candidates. You would think Nikki Haley might pick up a bit of
• 17:26
  that support because they're from the same state. I can see some of those
• 17:30
  people going to Ron de Santis because he's very conservative politically. It's not going
• 17:37
  to be a very important or dramatic impact at all, because obviously Trump is
• 17:42
  leading by so much in the polls. The one thing that it does do,
• 17:45
  though, is that the next debate will likely only have four people in
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  it, and now you're starting to get into a situation where you can have
• 17:55
  a really substantive debate. Now again, as we get more substantive here,
• 18:00
  the audience is going to be smaller and smaller, and therefore the impact less
• 18:03
  and less significant. But at least, you know, there's some semblance of
• 18:08
  hope. At least we're a little bit better off than we were back at
• 18:12
  this stage of twenty sixteen. To me, you know, you got to
• 18:17
  get down to two or three people to have any shot at going after Trump.
• 18:22
  Although it should be pointed out and this is one of those many things
• 18:25
  that the Santa supporters are relying on that are going to be mirages that even
• 18:32
  if they happen, aren't going to turn out the way that the Santa supporters
• 18:34
  are hoping for, and that is there's this thought that, well, if
• 18:37
  you just get Trump one on one, then everything can change, because then
• 18:41
  the non Trump vote can coal less behind one person. That was always the
• 18:48
  thought in twenty sixteen. In twenty sixteen, I think that could have worked
• 18:52
  it if it hadn't happened soon enough, because Trump hadn't been president yet.
• 18:56
  Trump hadn't beaten Hillary yet. He wasn't a full fledged god yet. He
• 19:02
  was just a phenomenon. Now he's been president, he's beaten Hillary, he
• 19:07
  killed the wicked witch of the West. He's got a cult, he's got
• 19:11
  a long history, and so those people aren't moving. And the polls continue
• 19:17
  to show that even if you eliminate all the other candidates, Trump still wins
• 19:22
  big well, even over Desanta's probably round two to one in a head to
• 19:26
  head matchup. Now, would that maybe change the dynamic? Could DeSantis bait
• 19:32
  Trump into a debate? I doubt it, not with that kind of a
• 19:36
  lead. I'd still like to see it happen. I'd rather be one on
• 19:41
  one than, you know, having four candidates go after Donald or not really
• 19:45
  go after Donald Trump, pretend to go after Donald Trump instead just go after
• 19:48
  each other for I guess the position in case Trump happens to die. That
• 19:55
  seems to be what the motive here is the only scenario where where Canada these
• 20:00
  these debates and this race actually takes on real meaning as if Donald Trump dies.
• 20:07
  I mean that's I mean called the last debate that just in case Donald
• 20:11
  Trump dies debate and or some people are calling it the kids table debate.
• 20:15
  I think that's what they refer to it on Saturday Night Live. The bottom
• 20:18
  line here is that Trump is completely in control. The media is reacting exactly
• 20:25
  like he wants. Tucker Carlson understands he's going to be the nominee and it's
• 20:30
  in his interest to latch onto that, whether he's the vice presidential nominee or
• 20:33
  not, as long as he possibly can. And unfortunately this is all going
• 20:38
  to end very, very badly, probably for the Republican Party and for the
• 20:42
  country. Now I mentioned the relationship between Tim Scott and his girlfriend being announced.
• 20:51
  This is kind of an odd transition, but I do think there's some
• 20:55
  connection. And there's been a major major development in the romance of the year
• 21:00
  when it comes to media stories, and that of course is Taylor Swift and
• 21:03
  Travis Kelcey. In case you are not on LIE. Over the past weekend,
• 21:10
  it has become very very clear that Travis Kelcey and Taylor Swift really are
• 21:15
  dating. Their relationship is not just a PR stunt, maybe partially a PR
• 21:19
  stunt, but he went to Argentina for her concert. She changed the lyrics
• 21:25
  of her song Karma to include him in it. By the way, I
• 21:27
  can't believe I know this stuff, partially because of my eleven year old daughter,
• 21:33
  Grace. I hate myself that I even know this, but after the
• 21:37
  concert, Taylor Swift ran into Travis Kelcey's arms and they gave each other a
• 21:45
  big smooch. So it certainly seems to me, as I've been saying all
• 21:48
  along, that the relationship is at least mostly real and it's not going to
• 21:52
  end anytime soon, and the Swift fans are just over the moon about this.
• 21:57
  And the reaction to this, I think does have some political importance because
• 22:03
  I've been saying all along the Taylor Swift has the power to influence the twenty
• 22:08
  twenty four presidential election against Donald Trump, and boy boy, the reaction to
• 22:14
  this most recent relationship news further established as that because my god, there are
• 22:21
  millions of women who are not just a little bit interested in this, they
• 22:25
  are deeply, deeply, deeply invested in this outcome, this relationship, in
• 22:33
  what happens with Taylor Swift's life, and they will do anything anything that she
• 22:38
  even implies she once done, and if that includes voting against Donald Trump,
• 22:44
  They're absolutely positively going to do it. And there are some conservatives even that
• 22:48
  are catching on to this being the reality. Charlie Kirk, who's a Trump
• 22:53
  sick event and a bit of a nut job, a conservative quote unquote conservative
• 22:57
  commentator, Maga Guy. He has been saying, as I have been,
• 23:03
  that this is going to be a major problem because there are millions of young
• 23:07
  women who would not be voters that could be counted on by the Democratic Party,
• 23:11
  who are going to show up in droves if Taylor just snaps her fingers,
• 23:17
  and she certainly seems in a position and be willing and able to do
• 23:22
  exactly that going forward. Now, there's another element, of course, that
• 23:27
  has social significance to the whole Taylor Swift Travis Kelsey relationship, and that is
• 23:33
  its impact on coverage of NFL football games. And there's been a fascinating poll
• 23:40
  or study done, a massive study done of NFL fans. Sixteen thousand NFL
• 23:47
  fans were I guess you would say, polled surveyed about their view of the
• 23:55
  coverage on NFL games of the relationship between Taylor Swift and Trapp Kelsey, and
• 24:00
  about ninety percent, including women. By the way, about ninety percent of
• 24:06
  NFL fans want less Taylor Swift coverage during Kansas City Chief games ninety percent.
• 24:15
  And yet why I find this really interesting and actually important is that it shows
• 24:25
  the changing nature of our media landscape, because you know, in the old
• 24:30
  world, in the old world, back before we had massive fragmentation, if
• 24:37
  you had a survey like that, immediately the networks covering the games would stop
• 24:45
  giving so much coverage of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelcey's relationship during the game,
• 24:49
  because you don't want to offend ninety percent of your core audience. But I
• 24:56
  don't believe that's what's going to happen. You might see a little diminishment of
• 24:59
  it because it's no longer new and there's been some backlash to it, but
• 25:03
  you're still going to see some coverage. Why because the other ten percent or
• 25:10
  maybe they're not even in this survey of people love it so much. The
• 25:15
  Swift cult members love it so much that they're tuning in just for that.
• 25:22
  So it doesn't matter that you've irritated ninety percent of your audience if you're gaining
• 25:30
  a significant number of people who are so fanatical that that's all they care about.
• 25:36
  And this is emblematic of the way, for instance, cable news television
• 25:41
  works all the time as long as your base isn't irritated enough to go away.
• 25:48
  And I have been saying this for years that one of the problems with
• 25:51
  the core NFL fan base is that they endure way too many ignominies, including
• 25:56
  during COVID or whether it's Colin Kaepernick or whatever it is. They're the rule
• 26:00
  changes turning into flag football whatever. The core audience isn't going anywhere. So
• 26:07
  they know they can crap all over you. They know they can crap all
• 26:11
  over you with Taylor Swift and Travis Kelcey coverage. But they're going to gain
• 26:17
  a significant number of people in a key demo, which is younger women who
• 26:22
  are tuning in to Chiefs games just to see Taylor Swift cheering in the suite.
• 26:30
  And so it's going to continue because it's in the best interest of the
• 26:34
  networks to keep doing that, even if they're irritating to some degree ninety percent
• 26:41
  of NFL fans. And this is how we this is why we can't have
• 26:45
  nice stuff anymore, folks, because all the incentives are distorted. The incentive
• 26:51
  structure is completely broken in the media, and this is a great example of
• 26:55
  that. Now, as far as football is concerned, especially specifically college football,
• 27:02
  what was formerly known as college football I now referred to it as as
• 27:07
  college affiliated professional minor league football. That's really what it is, because we
• 27:11
  now pay everybody, or at least the stars, with nil money. There
• 27:17
  are two stories, or two or three stories I want to quickly go through
• 27:19
  before we get to our interview with Alex Michaelson, which is really outstanding regarding
• 27:26
  news that have happened recently within the realm of college football. The first is
• 27:30
  that President Joe Biden held a very odd, almost surreal summit at the White
• 27:37
  House about college football, and he invited several not that many. He was
• 27:45
  an odd group of people that were there, former players, none of them
• 27:48
  were particularly recent. But the strangest part of the whole thing was that the
• 27:55
  essence of the reason why Biden was holding this event was because he's concerned about
• 28:02
  fairness and safety in college football now, putting aside that there's a hundred and
• 28:10
  one other problems going on right now that are way bigger. And I'm a
• 28:15
  big college football fan, at least I used to be till it went to
• 28:18
  minor league status professionally, but there are way bigger issues than college football,
• 28:23
  way way bigger issues, obviously, So how this is even on the President's
• 28:29
  radar right now, is mind boggling. But if you're gonna do some sort
• 28:34
  of presidential oversight, which I don't even understand what that would be, over
• 28:38
  college football, how the hell in twenty twenty three are we talking about fairness
• 28:45
  and safety for the players. I mean, twenty ten called President Biden.
• 28:52
  They want their narrative back. I mean, this is at least a decade
• 28:56
  old narrative that somehow we're not being fair to college football players and college football
• 29:03
  isn't safe enough. I mean, college football players now run the show.
• 29:10
  College football players can be paid virtually anything for doing nothing if they're in the
• 29:15
  right situation via the massive loophole that is name, image, and likeness.
• 29:22
  Just as I predicted, that would be a massive loophole. That would not
• 29:25
  just be a situation where players would be paid for doing endorsements. No,
• 29:30
  they would get basically paid directly by boosters and schools and what have you,
• 29:34
  because there's no way to restrict it. It's literally name, image and likeness
• 29:38
  could be anything. And so now you've got players making millions of dollars.
• 29:45
  Certain players be being paid millions of dollars for playing what used to be known
• 29:49
  as college football, and they can transfer whenever they want, So it's like
• 29:56
  the worst of professional sports, free a agency. They can get paid whatever
• 30:02
  they want. There's not even a salary cap in reality, and they can
• 30:06
  leave effectively whenever they want. They have all the power. So I don't
• 30:11
  even understand what could possibly be theoretically unfair. And because most of the players
• 30:17
  were black, there was this I think implication, at least to me as
• 30:22
  I perceived the way the White House promoted this event, that somehow, because
• 30:27
  they're black, they're not being treated fairly. I mean, it's just preposterous.
• 30:32
  Forget about twenty ten wanting their narrative back. You know, nineteen sixty
• 30:37
  wants their narrative back. I mean, it's just it's ridiculous. And this
• 30:41
  idea that somehow college football wasn't safe enough. Has Joe Biden watched a college
• 30:48
  football game recently? The players have stopped wearing pads. That's not hyperbole.
• 30:57
  The certain game, on certain teams, the players are now wearing shorts.
• 31:03
  That's basically what they're wearing. They're wearing shorts because they realize they don't need
• 31:07
  all the padding on their legs. The shoulder pads are now non existent.
• 31:14
  Notre Dame's quarterback doesn't even really wear shoulder pads. I mean, it's unbelievable
• 31:21
  how much the game has changed. And so what's the safety issue If the
• 31:26
  players aren't even wearing pads. It's almost like they wear helmets out of some
• 31:30
  tradition or because they look cool. They're not even really needed anymore given the
• 31:34
  essence of the game. So I found that to be frankly bizarre that Joe
• 31:38
  Biden was doing this, especially with everything else that's going in the world and
• 31:44
  in the country as a whole. Now, let me get more specifically to
• 31:47
  what's going on in the world of what was formerly known as college football and
• 31:52
  the University of Michigan scandal with so called sign stealing. I've talked about this
• 31:57
  on the Piotcast previously, and look, I think what Michigan did was wrong.
• 32:02
  It's very clear that Michigan did this. How much knowledge did the head
• 32:07
  coach, Jim Harball know is still uncertain. As someone who has covered a
• 32:12
  lot of college and pro football and coach high school football and been around the
• 32:15
  game, it would be very difficult for me to believe that Jim Harball had
• 32:19
  no knowledge of this. And so I think Michigan did something wrong. I
• 32:22
  think the evidence is strong they did something wrong. I think it's logical that
• 32:27
  herball would have known about this, and that there probably ought to be some
• 32:30
  punishment. However, I do think that it's being overblown by people who have
• 32:36
  an agenda against the University of Michigan. I think if Michigan wasn't one of
• 32:39
  the top teams in the country, this would barely be a story. And
• 32:45
  I like Deon Sanders. Take Deon Sanders, who played obviously professional football and
• 32:51
  professional baseball, where sign stealing has become a major issue in light of what
• 32:55
  happened with the Houston Astros several years ago. Deon's take was, look,
• 33:00
  you know, bad, but not that big of a deal, especially in
• 33:04
  comparison to baseball. That baseball sign stealing is way more impactful, way more
• 33:12
  significant because of the nature of you know, as I think he put it,
• 33:15
  If I know a curveball's coming, I got you. If you know
• 33:20
  my play in football, I still got to execute. I may still not
• 33:23
  be able to stop it. And so I do think that the issue,
• 33:30
  while clearly evidence of wrongdoing, has been overblown. I also think that there's
• 33:37
  a media conflict of interest here because ESPN has been leading the charge against Michigan
• 33:43
  to a certain degree. In fact, Paul Finbaumb this really got my INTENTNA.
• 33:46
  Paul Fleinbaum's a very well known Southeastern Conference radio host and television host kind
• 33:54
  of become a legendary figure within college football media. He did a media call
• 34:00
  on ESPN saying the biggest mistake of his entire career was being too soft on
• 34:06
  Michigan at the start of this scandal. And I saw that. I'm like,
• 34:09
  uh oh, somebody got a message. Somebody got the message from on
• 34:14
  high at ESPN that we're going to be all in on Michigan and attacking Michigan
• 34:21
  for what they did here. I don't know that. I'm just putting the
• 34:22
  pieces together because I know the way that the media works, especially the sports
• 34:27
  media works. But ESPN, particularly because of the fact that they have lost
• 34:32
  effectively the rights to the Big Ten conference where Michigan plays, ESPN has no
• 34:38
  self interest in protecting Michigan, and they may have an interest in actually destroying
• 34:44
  Michigan. And then you have the other schools in the Big Ten that are
• 34:47
  all jealous of Michigan, envious of Michigan, and have a self interest in
• 34:52
  bringing Michigan down. They're all screaming bloody murder, at least in private.
• 34:58
  And you have this very strange situation that happened this past weekend where all of
• 35:01
  a sudden, the head football coach in Michigan, Jim Harbaugh, gets suspended
• 35:07
  less than twenty four hours before there to this date, biggest game of the
• 35:12
  year against Penn State, and happens to be on a holiday, Veterans Day,
• 35:16
  so that the courts weren't even open so that they could get a preliminary
• 35:21
  injunction, which they weren't able to get on the Saturday morning before the game.
• 35:24
  I mean, to me, that smelled the high hell. And it
• 35:29
  was particularly ironic for me, given my history with the Penn State Joe Paterno,
• 35:35
  Jerry Sandusky scandal and our podcast with the benefit of hindsight, that all
• 35:38
  this happened not just at Penn State, but on the anniversary of Joe Paterno's
• 35:45
  firing, which happened in November eleventh of twenty eleven. And that was to
• 35:50
  me, the worst rush to judgment that's ever happened in the history of sports,
• 35:53
  where in just a couple of days, Joe Paterno went from being the
• 35:57
  winningest coach in the history of college football and having a team that was still
• 36:00
  in contention to do some great things that year to being fired over a cell
• 36:05
  phone at home with absolutely no new information in a situation where it turns out,
• 36:14
  in my view very strong view, did absolutely nothing wrong except maybe being
• 36:17
  too tough on Jerry Sandusky. But you can listen to with the benefit of
• 36:22
  hindsight, to learn more of the details on that. But here you have
• 36:25
  that massive rush to judgment happening at Penn State. Here we are in the
• 36:30
  anniversary of that, and what seems to be a similar rush to judgment against
• 36:36
  Jim Harbaugh. Now, obviously the stories are very different. One you got
• 36:40
  alleged child abuse and the other you got alleged signs stealing. And you know
• 36:45
  this, The way these two stories evolved differently and yet in a similar fashion
• 36:52
  is fascinating to me because there's a real political lesson to be learned here because
• 36:58
  the way Michigan has handled this is one hundred and eighty degrees different from the
• 37:01
  way Penn State has handled this. Michigan rallied around Jim Harball, even their
• 37:08
  president of their university offered public support for Jim Harball in the middle of this
• 37:14
  firestorm. The players supported Jim Harball, the assistant coaches, and most interestingly
• 37:20
  to me, the members of the media who are affiliated with Michigan have also
• 37:25
  rallied around Michigan and Jim Harball, which is something that did not happen with
• 37:30
  Joe Paterno and Penn State. You must, this is the political element in
• 37:36
  a crisis. You must hold your base. That's the most important thing,
• 37:40
  most important lesson in any kind of pr crisis, hold your base. And
• 37:46
  Michigan did that in an absolutely tremendous fashion. And their media members, people
• 37:53
  like Desmond Howard or Charles Woodson and Rich Eisen from the NFL Network. These
• 38:04
  are all Michigan men who have been very very strong in their support of Jim
• 38:09
  Harbaugh and Michigan. By the way, they might not even be right.
• 38:13
  They may end up being wrong depending on what we eventually learn regarding the evidence
• 38:17
  in this case. But it didn't matter politically because they all said, fuck
• 38:22
  you, no, we're not backing down here. We've got our guys back.
• 38:30
  And because of that one, I think it helped Michigan win the game
• 38:34
  against Penn State. They kicked Penn State's ass, which thrilled me to no
• 38:37
  end because I hate Penn State, which of course confuses all sorts of people
• 38:40
  because everyone always presumes I must be a Penn State fan to get myself involved
• 38:45
  in the whole Joe Paternal Jerry Zedusky scandal. In fact, it's exactly the
• 38:50
  opposite. I have no connection to Penn State, and because of my crusade
• 38:54
  and what I've learned about Penn State over the last decade plus, i hate
• 38:58
  them more passionately than I hate any institution of a similar fashion. I mean,
• 39:05
  I despise. My greatest sports rooting interest is rooting against Penn State.
• 39:08
  That's a fact. I don't have many sports rooting interests anymore, but my
• 39:13
  number one sporting rooting interest is rooting against Penn State. So I was very
• 39:16
  happy that Michigan won, and not because I'm in favor of cheating, but
• 39:22
  because I think the story is a bit overblown. I love the fact that
• 39:25
  Michigan rallied around the team and the coach. I loved the interview that the
• 39:31
  interim head coach gave after the game, crying, very emotional, praising Harball,
• 39:38
  praising the team, praising the school. I thought that was maybe the
• 39:43
  greatest moment in quote unquote college sports this year so far. But it all
• 39:47
  happened because Michigan held its base. When the Penn State story broke, Penn
• 39:54
  State didn't hold its base. Todd Blackledge was sped out, Matt Millan wassed
• 40:00
  out, LeVar Arrington was out, and everyone was terrified of being seen on
• 40:06
  the side of child sex abuse. And that's the key. It's tenable to
• 40:10
  be on the side of cheating to try to win games. It's not tenable,
• 40:15
  even if it's not based in reality. It's not politically tenable. At
• 40:20
  least it wasn't in twenty eleven when it mattered. It's not tenable to be
• 40:24
  seen not that it's reality, but perception is reality. It's not tenable to
• 40:30
  be seen as somehow defending the enabling of child sex abuse, even though that's
• 40:35
  not what happened in any way, shape or form. But that's what occurred
• 40:38
  in the media narrative, and the Penn State people failed. Now their challenge
• 40:43
  was greater because of what I just stated. But the Penn State people failed,
• 40:47
  and Joe Paterno was destroyed, and then you had years of injustice after
• 40:52
  that, which caused four innocent people to go to jail. These circumstances are
• 40:57
  obviously different, but there is some similarities with regard to the rush to judgment
• 41:02
  and the media handling of this, and the conflicts of interest. But the
• 41:07
  key. The key is holding your base, and Michigan did that. I'll
• 41:12
  be curious if they're able to do that going forward, especially since they are
• 41:15
  a national title contender still undefeated. They have a big game with Ohio State
• 41:21
  coming up, and then the winner of that game will very much likely make
• 41:24
  the college football playoff. But I'm on team Michigan right now, even though
• 41:30
  I don't like cheating, and I do think there's a very very good chance
• 41:32
  that they were indeed cheating. But that's how low my standards have gotten these
• 41:37
  days. If you show me any kind of balls, if you show me
• 41:40
  any kind of holding on to tradition, which Michigan does better than just about
• 41:46
  any other major school, you know, if you show me loyalty, that's
• 41:52
  enough. That's all I'll take it, because it's so rare in any sort
• 41:55
  of academic setting to see that. And I was particularly happy when I saw
• 42:00
  that the Michigan president was among those that was offering support for Jim Harball,
• 42:05
  probably because they thought it was in their best interest to do so. But
• 42:07
  we've seen other situations where academics do not react in that way. One other
• 42:13
  thing I got to mention, since I'm talking about college football, it is
• 42:16
  absolutely astonishing to me the Texas A and M. And I've referenced this situation
• 42:21
  previously because there's rumors that Dion Sanders could be the next head coach at Texas
• 42:25
  A and M. I don't think that's gonna happen because of the timing.
• 42:29
  But the Texas A and M University just fired their head coach, jimbo Fisher,
• 42:35
  and they're going to be on the hook to pay him seventy six million
• 42:40
  dollars seventy six million dollars to not coach their team. This is after a
• 42:50
  game they beat a conference opponent in Mississippi State fifty one to ten, fifty
• 42:57
  one to ten, they have a winning season, they're gonna go to a
• 43:00
  bowl game, and they fire their coach who had previously won a national championship
• 43:04
  at Florida State, and they're gonna pay him seventy six million dollars. Barring
• 43:08
  major renegotiation to not coach their team. This is by far the largest number.
• 43:15
  These are called buyouts. This is standard procedure when it comes to college
• 43:20
  contracts, but there's never been won anything close to this seventy six million dollars.
• 43:27
  It's just insane what has happened. And as far as the Deon Sanders
• 43:31
  rumors, I just don't think that it's possible because Dion has two kids at
• 43:37
  Colorado and transferring I think to Texas and M would probably be difficult. They've
• 43:42
  already transferred once they need a waiver. It's too complicated. I think there'd
• 43:46
  be too much blowback for Dion leaving Colorado after just one year. And Colorado
• 43:52
  is actually a losing streak, which everyone knew they would be in a losing
• 43:57
  streak, but they've still done much better than they did rather the year previous.
• 44:00
  So I don't think it's going to be Deon Sanders at Texas A and
• 44:02
  M, as much as I'd like to see that, because I view Texas
• 44:06
  A and M as one of the last semi conservative major schools in the country,
• 44:12
  and seeing Deon Sanders there would be would be fascinating and I think potentially
• 44:15
  very very successful, but I just don't think the timing is right for that
• 44:20
  to happen. And by the way, Mississippi State also fired their coach before
• 44:24
  his first year was over, So I mean, we talked the last episode
• 44:28
  about Bobby Knight and how the era of you know, the godlike coach is
• 44:32
  completely over. I don't know how in the world anybody coaches anything anymore,
• 44:37
  but specifically college football. With all the pressure, all the money, instant
• 44:43
  transfers, you have no power, and you get fired in less than a
• 44:47
  year, less than a year when you still got your rival game against Mississippi
• 44:52
  on Thanksgiving night to play, you get fired before your first year is up.
• 44:58
  I mean, it's just it's the whole college football world is spinning completely
• 45:01
  out of control, and you know, it's entertaining, but it's also kind
• 45:06
  of sad to watch because I don't think it's going to end well. Two
• 45:10
  other stories before we get to the interview with Elix Michaelson, which I would
• 45:15
  love to be able to ask Elix about, but unfortunately we tape the interview
• 45:19
  with Elix just before these two stories occurred. And I do think that they
• 45:23
  are related, and they're both from here in California. Right now in Los
• 45:29
  Angeles, there is a state of emergency, a state of emergency because the
• 45:36
  ten Freeway, which goes right through the heart of Los Angeles, is partially
• 45:39
  closed and will be closed indefinitely. No one knows how long it's going to
• 45:46
  be closed for. And the reason why it's closed is due to a fire
• 45:52
  that happened underneath a bridge. And it's pretty clear, at least seemingly clear
• 45:59
  that the fire was it do at least in part to a homelessness, a
• 46:05
  homelessness encampment which existed underneath the bridge. Now it's still a little bit vague
• 46:12
  about Okay, how did it happen? Why did it happen? But you
• 46:15
  got a homelessness encampment underneath this bridge and a massive fire breaks out, and
• 46:22
  now the structure is no longer deemed to be safe enough to drive over this
• 46:28
  bridge. And we have no idea, the authorities have no idea how long
• 46:34
  it's going to take to fix this. And of course it's been hilarious to
• 46:38
  watch the local television news media dance around the very obvious issue of what caused
• 46:45
  this. I mean, here, we have a situation where millions of people
• 46:50
  Los Angeles are going to be massively inconvenienced by this. So this is one
• 46:55
  of those situations where homelessness is not just an irritation, not just an eye
• 47:00
  This is a situation where theoretically it's causing people's lives to be dramatically impacted in
• 47:07
  a negative direction. And this morning, watching the local media dance around the
• 47:12
  issue of homelessness and the unwillingness of the authorities to take care of these homelessness
• 47:19
  encampenents has been rather hilarious because they're employing it, they're referencing it, but
• 47:27
  they're not directly stating that that was the cause. Now, an official cause
• 47:31
  hasn't been determined yet. I'm sure that'll be swept under the rug when and
• 47:36
  if that actually happens. But there's no question that, at least indirectly,
• 47:42
  this happened because of the issue of homelessness being allowed to get out of control
• 47:49
  by the authorities here in California and specifically in Los Angeles. And I doubt
• 47:54
  that the local media or even the national news media are gonna tell that story
• 48:00
  in as clear cut a way as it ought to be told, especially if
• 48:04
  we end up finding out what has already suspected that that was at least indirectly,
• 48:09
  if not directly, the cause of the fire. I do believe,
• 48:14
  though, I think there's a potential depending on how this all turns out.
• 48:19
  I think this story, if it is as bad as some are currently predicting,
• 48:24
  now they need to figure out is the bridge structurally sound or not?
• 48:29
  And when I have no expertise in this area at all, but it seems
• 48:34
  to me as if this might be a situation that gets solved in a week
• 48:37
  or two, if maybe things aren't as bad as they think, and that
• 48:42
  this is mostly a safety precaution circumstance. But if this really is as bad
• 48:50
  as some think and this goes on for months, I think this ends Gavin
• 48:54
  Newsom's presidential bid because this is going to be going to become a massive story,
• 49:00
  and it's one of those things that will create a very negative narrative about
• 49:07
  Newsom. And you know, the national media hasn't told you this. It's
• 49:09
  just one poll, but it's by a reputable polster. For the first time,
• 49:15
  Gavin Newsom's polling here in California is underwater. When it comes to his
• 49:21
  approval rating. He has a negative approval rating by I think four points in
• 49:27
  the entire state of California. His approval rating is well below fifty percent.
• 49:31
  His disapproval rating is almost at fifty percent. And so how do you sell
• 49:37
  Gavin Newsom. Let's pretend you know that Biden drops out in the next month
• 49:42
  or two. How do you sell, you know, Gavin, greasy haired
• 49:46
  Newsom from crazy California with a negative approval rating in his home state where this
• 49:54
  is the type of story. If the ten Freeway is as bad as some
• 49:59
  think, is go to start gaining traction nationally and it's going to be very,
• 50:04
  very embarrassing to California. Maybe I'm overestimating how much impact that's gonna have,
• 50:12
  but I am and I'm not prone to optimism. But it just seems
• 50:15
  to me like, if this is as bad as people are some are claiming,
• 50:20
  it's going to be really difficult for Gavin Newsom and all of a sudden
• 50:23
  transform himself into a presidential candidate superman, especially when you've got Kamala Harris sitting
• 50:30
  right there next in line, and I've never understood how it is that he
• 50:34
  jumps her in line. Should Biden be convinced to drop out? Now there's
• 50:39
  a similar story, which is also getting national attention in the media, especially
• 50:45
  online, where San Francisco, which has become a shithole suddenly got cleaned up
• 50:52
  instantaneously out of nowhere. Why because they're hosting the Asian Pacific Economic Conference and
• 50:59
  this is one of those things. This is why the Bridge story I think
• 51:00
  is so dangerous to Newsome, because it's easily understood, Oh, this is
• 51:07
  the cost of allowing homelessness to get out of control. Well, the San
• 51:12
  Francisco story is also easily understood. You got a shithole that all of a
• 51:15
  sudden, instantaneously gets cleaned up, all the homeless people are gone. Why
• 51:21
  because you have this conference of Asian leaders coming in and you don't want to
• 51:24
  show them a shithoul. Well, remarkably, Newsome addressed this at a press
• 51:31
  conference, and he did so basically doing his Kamala Harris impression. When I
• 51:37
  heard this, I'm like, what is going on? He sounds like Kamala
• 51:40
  Harris here, And I think he inadvertently, I think he got himself into
• 51:45
  a pickle because he inadvertently told the truth about what was really happening and didn't
• 51:52
  know how to get out of it. But so here's what that sounded like
• 51:54
  when Cavin Newsom suddenly and inexplicably tells the truth about how it is that San
• 52:00
  Francisco all of a sudden got cleaned up. I know, folks say,
• 52:04
  oh, they're just cleaning up this place because all those fancy leaders are coming
• 52:07
  into town. That's true, because it's true, but it's also true for
• 52:15
  months and months and months prior to APEC we've been having different conversations. I'm
• 52:21
  sorry, this is not a guy who ought to be all that feared on
• 52:25
  the presidential level. He's just not. And as far as the substance of
• 52:29
  the issue is concerned, I think this is something people average people can understand.
• 52:35
  Oh, so you're telling me that our cities can be cleaned up,
• 52:39
  homelessness can be taken care of if we have the proper incentive to do so.
• 52:46
  So you could do it all along. You just don't want to do
• 52:49
  it for a political and other reasons. And Newsom really stepped in it there,
• 52:55
  And yeah, does he have good political instincts? Is greasy as hell?
• 53:01
  Is he tough to pin down? Do I fear him? In the
• 53:05
  debate against rond De Santis. At the end of the month, largely because
• 53:07
  the moron Sean Hannity is going to be moderating that yes, yes, yes,
• 53:10
  yes, yes, Well, I just do not think that right now
• 53:15
  he is somebody to be greatly feared now because he's younger, he takes the
• 53:20
  age issue off the table should he ever be the nominee instead of Biden,
• 53:24
  But I think he comes with an awful lot of baggage and maybe people shouldn't
• 53:29
  be quite as fearful of him as a lot of people are. Again,
• 53:32
  I still don't understand how he gets the nomination when Kamala Harris is standing there
• 53:37
  next in line. But anyway, Gavin stepped in it on that one,
• 53:42
  and I'll be very curious to see what happens with the ten Freeway situation as
• 53:45
  well. I don't have the ability to ask Elix Michaelson, our guest in
• 53:50
  this podcast episode, about either of these subjects, because I would love to,
• 53:54
  But we taped an interview a couple of days before those stories became and
• 54:01
  I really want you to listen to this interview because I've been one to speak
• 54:05
  on the record with Alex Michelson for a very long time. As you may
• 54:10
  know from previous podcasts. He and I have had a lot of conversations off
• 54:15
  the air where I've been trying to chide him into fairer coverage, specifically of
• 54:21
  Gavin Newsom, with whom he is associated and seen by some as being very
• 54:27
  close because he gets a lot of access to Gavin Newsom. By the way,
• 54:30
  the reason why this interview is happening, or I guess I should say
• 54:35
  I had previously stated I thought this interview would not happen was because I was
• 54:39
  under a misunderstanding. I kept saying, there's no way that Alex is going
• 54:45
  to get permission from his bosses to do this interview because the general manager at
• 54:50
  the Fox affiliate in Los Angeles is a guy who hates my guts because back
• 54:54
  when we were both in Louisville and he was the general manager of the Fox
• 54:58
  affiliate there infamously dated his morning show host, and that there was no way
• 55:04
  he was going to approve anything that had to do with me. Well,
• 55:06
  I didn't realize until I spoke with Liz Abebe, and I hadn't spoken with
• 55:08
  Liz, our former co host on this podcast and my co host with the
• 55:14
  Benefit of Hindsight podcast. I hadn't spoken to Liz in a while, and
• 55:17
  I happen to mention that I was going to talk to her former colleague Alex
• 55:22
  Michaelson. She said that that general manager is no longer there, so I
• 55:28
  didn't know that, So I was making a prediction based upon bad information.
• 55:31
  But I was very, very glad that Alex one wanted to do this podcast.
• 55:37
  Two got the approval from Fox in Los Angeles, and three did this
• 55:42
  interview with me that is remarkably transparent and frankly, I think one of the
• 55:49
  best things you're ever going to hear when it comes to the issues related to
• 55:52
  local television news. A lot of this will deal with Gavin Newsom for obvious
• 55:58
  reasons, but it goes much deeper to that than that, and I urge
• 56:01
  you to take a listen to this if you care at all about the issue
• 56:05
  of journalism and local television news. And I really was very impressed with the
• 56:10
  way that Alex Michaelson handled this interview. So this was the interview that I
• 56:15
  did with Alex just a few days ago. Alex Michaelson, Welcome to the
• 56:20
  Death of Journalism podcast. Thanks so much, John. I don't know whether
• 56:23
  to be looking forward to this or not, but I'm here. Wow,
• 56:30
  there's an interesting way to start. I think you should be looking forward to
• 56:32
  this. I know I have been. This has been a long time in
• 56:36
  coming. You and I have had a lot of communication off the air,
• 56:38
  but we've never actually done a formal interview in either direction, and I want
• 56:42
  to kind of start off in an unusual way, which hopefully will put you
• 56:45
  at ease, because part of why I wanted to do this is I consider
• 56:51
  you to be in a different category of news media member, and that is
• 56:55
  that you at least try to be fair, that you feel an obligation to
• 57:02
  fairness, which you would think would be fundamental to everyone in the news media
• 57:07
  business, everyone who tries to be a journalist. It is my opinion that
• 57:13
  that attribute is exceedingly rare. Now, you don't have to address yourself,
• 57:19
  or if you can, if you've wanted, you're more than welcome to.
• 57:22
  But do you agree with me, as someone in the business and has been
• 57:25
  in the business a long time, that that is a problem, that there
• 57:30
  is a rarity among members of the news media who still really do care about
• 57:35
  being fair and being introspective about their own potential biases. Yeah, of course
• 57:42
  that's a problem. I think that one thing that you understand so well and
• 57:46
  have talked about smartly is the incentive structure now is different than maybe when you
• 57:54
  started in the media business, and it's not one that necessarily rewards fairness.
• 58:01
  There's not a lot of extra points for nuance on Twitter. In fact,
• 58:07
  you end up getting beat up a lot of times for nuance. There's not
• 58:10
  a lot of extra points in terms of ratings or in terms of financial incentive
• 58:16
  for being in the middle, picking a side, having an opinion is rewarded,
• 58:23
  and oftentimes if you go against the grain, which is your area of
• 58:30
  specialty, you leave yourself open to a mob to come after you and potentially
• 58:37
  be canceled. And there isn't necessarily a lot of huge, you know,
• 58:45
  corporate support for you in doing that, because they don't necessarily want to get
• 58:50
  involved in those fights either, and you leave yourself more vulnerable to that.
• 58:54
  So I think, like everything, incentives drive behavior, and if you look
• 59:01
  at politicians right now, the incentives are to go to the extremes because that's
• 59:07
  where the money is, that's where the attention is. Being in the middle,
• 59:13
  bipartisanship, deal making, nuanced, not rewarded, and in a lot
• 59:17
  of ways journalism similar Doing this sort of in depth, thoughtful, nuanced fair
• 59:27
  reporting is expensive, it's hard, and it's not rewarded given the current media
• 59:32
  ecosystem, as much as it should be. Boy, that was a great
• 59:37
  answer. We're off to fantastic start here because that dovetails really with my whole
• 59:44
  philosophy that it really comes down to the incentive structures, and so let's talk
• 59:47
  a little bit more about that before we get into the specifics of why it
• 59:52
  is that I asked you to come on the podcast after all these years of
• 59:55
  us having conversations off the air. Tell me more about how you perceive the
• 1:00:01
  incentive structure problem. Well, the way I see it is that we're now
• 1:00:07
  living in a world where the coin of the realm, as I call it
• 1:00:10
  in the news media, is not truth, it's popularity, and that there
• 1:00:16
  is an inherent contradiction between what might be popular and what might be truthful.
• 1:00:22
  What do you make of that and can you give us more of your assessment
• 1:00:28
  of the incentive structure problem. Well, that's totally true. I think that's
• 1:00:32
  a very smart way to put it, because the more that the audience is
• 1:00:39
  fragmented, the more of the need to go towards popularity, right. I
• 1:00:45
  mean, if you've only got three networks and everybody's watching one of the three,
• 1:00:50
  and in reality, everybody's kind of watching one of them, and people
• 1:00:52
  are there and they don't have any other choices, you can say stuff that's
• 1:00:59
  unpopular and not risk people fleeing. Now there's eight thousand choices. People don't
• 1:01:07
  have to watch or listen to anything, and so the easiest thing for an
• 1:01:13
  audience member to do if they see or hear something they disagree with is to
• 1:01:17
  just move on and potentially never go back to that person again. I mean,
• 1:01:22
  it is remarkable just to watch, even on Twitter, this thing which
• 1:01:28
  I'm sure you're going to criticize me on our Newso interview and happy to get
• 1:01:34
  into that. And then after we did this interview with Newsom on COVID,
• 1:01:37
  interviewed doctor Kelly Victory on COVID as well, in an effort to be fair
• 1:01:42
  and to put different signs out there, and it was amazing to see the
• 1:01:45
  response from so many people who called me a terrible quote unquote journalist for the
• 1:01:51
  Newsom interview, who then see my interview with Kelly Victory making a point that
• 1:01:55
  is the opposite of what Newsom is making, and all of a sudden,
• 1:01:59
  that's greatjournalism because I'm now highlighting, in what I think is a fair way
• 1:02:06
  to her a perspective that they agree with. So there, that's great journalism.
• 1:02:10
  But when I have a similar approach of being respectful dialogue with somebody they
• 1:02:15
  disagree with, that's not great journalism. And that's not good and and and
• 1:02:22
  and so much also of the way that people view politics these days through the
• 1:02:25
  lens of cable news outlets who at night are not attempting to be fair.
• 1:02:30
  I mean they flat out say their just opinion hosts. I think they they
• 1:02:36
  are looking for advocates for a particular side, which is not the role of
• 1:02:42
  a journalist. Journalis should be an advocate for truth, like that's the role
• 1:02:46
  of a journalist, but not advocating for a particular side. All right,
• 1:02:52
  So you said a lot there since you mentioned Newsome and then your subsequent interview
• 1:02:57
  with doctor Victory, which I thought was fantastic, And that's really why I
• 1:03:02
  respect you, because you did that that counter interview as a direct result of
• 1:03:08
  some of the reactions you got from the original Newsome interview, which is something
• 1:03:13
  you didn't have to do, and you did it out of a feeling that
• 1:03:17
  you wanted to be fair and tell both sides. Correct. Is that a
• 1:03:21
  fair assessment? Well? Not because I feel like I should be fair.
• 1:03:24
  That's the job. The job is to be fair and to look at things
• 1:03:30
  from a variety of perspectives. And I think that's our obligation. And I
• 1:03:36
  think that also is a more interesting conversation. If you're just hearing one side
• 1:03:40
  all the time, that's not interesting. All right, So let's talk because
• 1:03:45
  I think the Newsome situation, which kind of facilitated me asking to come on
• 1:03:51
  the podcast, tell us a lot about a lot of different topics. So
• 1:03:54
  let's kind of go through it and get to the bottom of how this all
• 1:04:00
  happened, and because I think it tells a lot about the state of the
• 1:04:02
  media and journalism. So let's start at the beginning here. You make the
• 1:04:06
  trip for about a week to China to report on Governor Gavin Newsom. Obviously,
• 1:04:14
  see you're the main anchor the Foxvilly in Los Angeles. He's the governor
• 1:04:17
  California. He's going to China. This is a big story. But you
• 1:04:20
  go alone, and you know what, I was stunned by that. I
• 1:04:27
  also happened to know that that was not the original plan for you to go
• 1:04:31
  alone. So tell us how it is that this trip for you materialized and
• 1:04:38
  why were you there alone without a photographer or a tech person or anything else
• 1:04:43
  like that. Yeah, I mean, that wasn't my preference, and I
• 1:04:46
  hope that that's the one and only time that we do it. So here's
• 1:04:51
  the story behind the trip. I went up to Sacramento for an event that
• 1:04:57
  Politico was putting on launching an expansion of their California coverage. We're doing some
• 1:05:02
  work with Politico on future debates, and I thought it would be sort of
• 1:05:06
  a good way to reconnect with a bunch of people in the California political space
• 1:05:11
  at once that I don't often get to see in Sacramento because I'm based in
• 1:05:13
  La Governor Newsen was speaking that night on stage and he announced for the first
• 1:05:17
  time publicly, which I didn't know, that he was going to China.
• 1:05:21
  So I reached out to his team and said, you know, what's the
• 1:05:25
  deal in terms of press coverage. A bunch of other news organizations reached out
• 1:05:30
  as well. They held a call for everybody that reached out and wanted to
• 1:05:35
  potentially go on the trip, where they laid out what they thought the costs
• 1:05:40
  associated with it would be and said that because of their negotiations with the Chinese
• 1:05:48
  government, who was very very particular on only having a certain number of reporters
• 1:05:56
  in these meetings, allowed that it would be like two to two because in
• 1:06:00
  China free speech and media is not necessarily their emphasis that they were severely limited
• 1:06:08
  in how many people they could bring, and because of also the security concerns
• 1:06:14
  of the way that this whole thing would go. We would be traveling with
• 1:06:19
  the Newsome motorcade basically everywhere we went, so we were part of this security
• 1:06:25
  bubble because of all of China's regulations and everything. It was more complicated than
• 1:06:30
  a regular thing. So they were very limited. They were looking at like
• 1:06:35
  four five journalists for the whole state that they would even be allowed to bring
• 1:06:41
  on this trip by China to get into these meetings and have access and be
• 1:06:46
  able to keep moving on terms of their schedule. So they said, if
• 1:06:50
  you're interested, this is what it costs, this is what is involved,
• 1:06:56
  and they said we would prefer the Newsome team said prefer if TV outlets could
• 1:07:02
  one man band because of all of these things, and also because of the
• 1:07:10
  way that China is very particular with camera gear and getting stuff in and out
• 1:07:15
  and serial numbers and freak out about shooting stuff on the street. It would
• 1:07:19
  be easier for us and allow for better movement if we did not have big
• 1:07:27
  camera gear that we're lugging through the five different flights that we're doing and all
• 1:07:30
  the rest of it, we would prefer it to be a one man band.
• 1:07:34
  I said, I don't really do that, I've never done that.
• 1:07:38
  I really would prefer to bring a photographer. And they said, if we
• 1:07:40
  only have four media slots for the entire state, to give one outlet two
• 1:07:45
  of them could be problematic. And I still was pushing back and pushed internally
• 1:07:53
  to try to get a photographer, and my boss pushed to try to find
• 1:07:57
  some money to get a photographer and couldn't. It was too expensive and they
• 1:08:03
  didn't really want us to bring one anyways, and so we made the decision
• 1:08:09
  to send me. And I said, if I go, I'm not a
• 1:08:13
  photographer, I'm not an editor. I'm not going to be able to produce
• 1:08:15
  as much material as I would if we had a photographer an editor there that
• 1:08:19
  are trained to do that. And they said, you know, we still
• 1:08:25
  think there's value in going. Well, take what you can give us.
• 1:08:28
  We understand you're not going to be able to produce as much, but we
• 1:08:30
  still think that you should go. And so we made the call to go,
• 1:08:35
  knowing that it wasn't going to be ideal, but the thinking that having
• 1:08:41
  at least one set of eyes on that trip was more beneficial than none.
• 1:08:45
  Wow, Okay, that's a lot of interesting information, and so let me
• 1:08:49
  kind of break that down and make sure I get I have this right.
• 1:08:53
  So my initial reaction from Afar was that this must have been a budget issue
• 1:09:00
  on Fox's part, but that's not really the primary issue. There's obviously always
• 1:09:04
  expense decisions being made in a trip like this, because I'm thinking in the
• 1:09:10
  olden days, you know, you would have been taking three or four people
• 1:09:13
  on this trip, right, I mean, it's this big a deal to
• 1:09:15
  go to China to follow the governor. But what you're saying is that this
• 1:09:19
  was really the Chinese government, and that the Newsome camp was effectively doing the
• 1:09:25
  work of the Chinese government to enforce their rules. That's the way I hear
• 1:09:30
  it. Is that accurate. I mean, I don't want to. I
• 1:09:35
  think that they were trying to make it as smooth as possible for the everybody
• 1:09:43
  to move around and get in and out of this stuff, and frankly probably
• 1:09:47
  not cause a bunch of extra issues for them. And to be fair,
• 1:09:55
  I will say being there and seeing the way this worked, and I mean
• 1:09:58
  we were doing eighteen hour days, is we were at like six locations a
• 1:10:01
  day. We were moving really really fast in and out of everything. There
• 1:10:08
  was some value in having a light footprint and being able to move quickly.
• 1:10:15
  Now would the quality of the work been better with a photographer one thousand percent,
• 1:10:20
  But the security apparatus in I mean it was kind of weird the way
• 1:10:26
  that they do stuff, to the point where like they needed all of the
• 1:10:30
  serial numbers of every camera like weeks in advance. Their whole thing is just
• 1:10:36
  very different. And of course, during the entire time we were there,
• 1:10:41
  we were given zero opportunity to ask any questions of any Chinese officials, and
• 1:10:45
  we didn't see any media members ask them any questions because that's just not what
• 1:10:49
  they do. And look, I know that you're in a kind of vulnerable
• 1:10:55
  position here because you just took this trip with the governor and you know that
• 1:10:59
  you were doing it because they invited you. But I don't think it's an
• 1:11:02
  unfair assessment on my part to say, at the very least, the Gavin
• 1:11:08
  Newsom people could and the Governor of California people could have done a little bit
• 1:11:11
  better job in paving the way for you guys. Right, they had some
• 1:11:15
  leverage with China. China wanted them to come. It doesn't feel as if
• 1:11:19
  they were doing you guys any favors. Is that an unfair assessment? Look,
• 1:11:25
  I don't want to comment on the negotiations that happened before I was there,
• 1:11:30
  because I wasn't a part of that, and I don't I can't speak
• 1:11:31
  to that. I will say that when we were there, the Newsome team
• 1:11:36
  did fight hard for us to get access to the meetings whenever the Chinese media
• 1:11:42
  was and would often I could see physically get in their faces about no,
• 1:11:47
  we need our reporters in there, and they did sort of go to bat
• 1:11:55
  for us during the trip. All right, fair enough, Now, the
• 1:12:00
  fact that you showed interest in going and the fact that you were selected is
• 1:12:03
  not a surprise, because you have a reputation of getting access to Gavin Newsom
• 1:12:09
  when other reporters and anchors do not, and that, like you've already alluded
• 1:12:14
  to, is a double edged sword because people who like gavenus some look at
• 1:12:17
  you and go, wow, that's really a great feather in your cap.
• 1:12:21
  People don't like gavenussm like me look at that and go, wait a minute,
• 1:12:27
  is he getting access to GAVENUSA because their buddy buddy and Newsom thinks that
• 1:12:31
  he's that Michaelson's on his team. So what is your reaction to that particular
• 1:12:40
  issue that people like me see the access that you get to Gavin Newsom and
• 1:12:44
  we go, well, gee, he must be buddy buddy with Newsom.
• 1:12:48
  Look, I think that one of the cool things that Fox eleven has created
• 1:12:56
  with our show. The issue is is it is indicated in every market in
• 1:13:00
  California, and it is the only political talk show that is in every market
• 1:13:05
  in California. So when you're talking to me on the issue is you're not
• 1:13:10
  just talking to Los Angeles as most of my competitors have shows. You're talking
• 1:13:15
  to Los Angeles and Bakersfield and Fresno and Palm springs in San Francisco and San
• 1:13:18
  Diego and all the rest of them. So there is a show that was
• 1:13:23
  created sort of with the issue as model that airs in six markets called Inside
• 1:13:27
  California Politics, and they do a good job and I appreciate them, but
• 1:13:30
  our show airs in more markets, So I'm not exactly on the same apples
• 1:13:36
  to apples with every other reporter. I mean, if if you're you know,
• 1:13:40
  I'm the only one that hosts the state wide show, and he's the
• 1:13:43
  governor of the state, most important player in the state wide politics, so
• 1:13:46
  it makes sense that we would talk to him a lot. That being said,
• 1:13:50
  I think one of the main reasons that frankly I get I talk to
• 1:13:56
  him more than other people is because I show up more than other people.
• 1:14:00
  He's not like coming to our studio. He hasn't come to our studios since,
• 1:14:03
  you know, before he was governor. I go to places and put
• 1:14:08
  myself in positions to talk to him, and almost all of the interviews that
• 1:14:12
  I've done with him are at locations that nobody else came to. Nobody else
• 1:14:17
  came to China. I wasn't the only one invited. Other people just chose
• 1:14:20
  not to go because they didn't want to spend the money and they didn't think
• 1:14:24
  it was worth it. Including our competitors for Inside California Politics, they were
• 1:14:28
  on the call, they just chose not to go. I mean, I've
• 1:14:30
  talked to him at this big conference that they did in Beverly Hills, the
• 1:14:33
  Milken Conference. I was the only reporter that applied for credentials. It was
• 1:14:36
  open to everybody. I was the only one who was there. I mean
• 1:14:40
  I talked to him last year at this other big conference in Los Angeles,
• 1:14:44
  big world conference, and I was the only one who was there. So
• 1:14:48
  that's part of it. But at the same time, I also take that
• 1:14:53
  same strategy and approach with Republicans. I mean Donald Trump and I had a
• 1:15:00
  I know, he's another one of your favorites, but like we had,
• 1:15:03
  you know, I would show up and cover a lot of their stuff.
• 1:15:06
  He was thought that I was fair towards him, and so much so that
• 1:15:13
  he said to his press secretary, you know, we should include him.
• 1:15:16
  And I was the pool reporter on every one of his California trips. I
• 1:15:20
  mean I interviewed Larry Elder more than anybody else during the recall and had Kevin
• 1:15:26
  Faulkner on my show and Kevin Kylie I was the first moderator of the first
• 1:15:30
  debate and the gubernatorial recall campaign against Newsom. I mean we had Pete Boudaja
• 1:15:34
  John more than anybody when he ran, and Bernie Sanders on more. Part
• 1:15:38
  of it, I think is is being fair and people feeling like we give
• 1:15:43
  them a space where they can talk. And part of it is working hard
• 1:15:47
  and being willing to put in more hours because, as you know, a
• 1:15:53
  lot of this when you're dealing with people this busy is not like necessarily on
• 1:15:57
  your schedule. It's doing things on their schedule and willing to sort of make
• 1:16:00
  it work. That's a very fair answer, and showing up really is ninety
• 1:16:05
  percent of the deal often. However, I will ask you this more straightforward
• 1:16:11
  question. It certainly seems to me and many others that you and governor Whos
• 1:16:16
  have a fondness for each other. Is that a fair assessment in your mind?
• 1:16:21
  Look, I don't think we're like I know there's that perception that we're
• 1:16:28
  like buddy buddy and we're hanging out all the time, Like I don't have
• 1:16:30
  his cell phone number. We have had almost no private conversations. I don't.
• 1:16:39
  In truth, there are a lot of other politicians from both the Republican
• 1:16:44
  and Democratic side that I've spent way more time with privately, that I've done
• 1:16:48
  way more with in terms of conversations like that. But I think, you
• 1:16:55
  know, I think it is true, though, that I've been interviewing him
• 1:16:59
  more than probably anybody other else in the state, and there is a certain
• 1:17:04
  feeling of mutual respect that comes from years of doing this, and so I
• 1:17:13
  think there is that. I think there's a familiarity that comes with that.
• 1:17:17
  But I don't think we're as tight as people think we are. But I
• 1:17:20
  understand part of what my interview strategy has been with people is to give them,
• 1:17:28
  make them feel comfortable and allow themselves to open up. And I think
• 1:17:32
  you often get more revealing answers about people when they're not, you know,
• 1:17:38
  jukes up, but that they sort of relax back and more free to be
• 1:17:44
  who they are. And I think there's value in trying to get politicians off
• 1:17:47
  of their talking points, to show a little bit more of their human side
• 1:17:51
  and to get a sense of who they are, and that you might actually
• 1:17:55
  break news in those scenarios. I know some people criticize that strategy, but
• 1:18:00
  I do think that that strategy often elicits more news than some of the other
• 1:18:05
  strategies do. All right, before we talk the specifics of the journalism on
• 1:18:12
  that trip, I want to ask one more question about the trip in general,
• 1:18:15
  which might be the most important question that to some listeners of this podcast,
• 1:18:20
  and that is, did you get the impression, having gone through this
• 1:18:26
  trip for a week and everything that entailed, that this was part of an
• 1:18:30
  effort by Governor Newsom to put himself in a position to take over for Joe
• 1:18:38
  Biden should Joe Biden decide not to run for president, Because that is the
• 1:18:42
  perception nationally that this was done as a way for Newsom to kind of create
• 1:18:48
  some foreign policy credentials in case the opportunity should arise from the standpoint of the
• 1:18:56
  Democratic presidential nomination. Did you get any sense that that was the motivation?
• 1:19:01
  I mean, look, I think that if you look at his actions,
• 1:19:05
  not his rhetoric, over the last year, there seems to be a lot
• 1:19:10
  more of an emphasis on national and international issues than on local issues, in
• 1:19:16
  the way that one would focus on if their only ambition was to be the
• 1:19:21
  governor of California. That being said, he was not the you know,
• 1:19:27
  he's not the only California governor to do this. Arnold Schwarzenegger went on multiple
• 1:19:31
  trips to China, while California Governor Jerry Brown went on multiple trips to China.
• 1:19:35
  While California Governor Jijingping had also met with Jerry Brown when he was California
• 1:19:42
  governor. The only other governor he's ever met with California and China on are
• 1:19:47
  you know China's number one trading partner for California. There are two million Chinese
• 1:19:53
  Americans that live in California. Jijingping was about to come to Apec or this
• 1:19:59
  was part of the process of getting him to come to Apec to meet with
• 1:20:01
  Joe Biden in San Francisco, which is happening next week. So it's I
• 1:20:09
  don't clearly that's a subtext for almost everything that everybody sees of him. But
• 1:20:15
  it wasn't an entirely unprecedented trip for a California governor to do this, all
• 1:20:20
  right. And so while you're there, you do get an interview. Did
• 1:20:24
  you only get the one interview with Governor Newson? Was that accurate? Did
• 1:20:27
  you only have one interview or did you have multiple There was one formal sit
• 1:20:31
  down with him that we had a group interview with him shortly after the jijing
• 1:20:38
  Ping meeting, and then I attempted, even though they weren't organized, to
• 1:20:43
  like walk up to him with my cell phone at some of these events because
• 1:20:46
  they did not build in time for more of a back and forth. And
• 1:20:50
  one of the criticisms that I gave them at the end of the trip was
• 1:20:55
  we would have been better off having even if it was a few minutes of
• 1:20:59
  daily time for q and a with him would have made the coverage better for
• 1:21:02
  us, and I think it would have been better for him. You know,
• 1:21:05
  he was moving so quickly, and I think at the beginning of the
• 1:21:10
  trip it would not be unfair to say that I think he was concerned about
• 1:21:15
  saying something that may put his meeting with Jijingping in jeopardy. That meeting was
• 1:21:23
  not guaranteed. They didn't know that it was going to happen for sure until
• 1:21:27
  he was literally in the room, and his vibe and the media access to
• 1:21:31
  him changed dramatically once it happened. Interesting, Okay, So he felt as
• 1:21:38
  if they had leverage over him, and he didn't want to get out of
• 1:21:41
  line or do anything that would upset them because he might lose out on the
• 1:21:45
  meeting, which would be kind of the most newsmaking element of his trip from
• 1:21:48
  his perspective. So you finally do get a sit down, and you were
• 1:21:53
  very honest about the technical issues with that because you were a one man ban
• 1:21:57
  and you're not trained to do that. I wouldn't be trained to do that
• 1:22:00
  either. It's a very difficult job. That's why people, you know,
• 1:22:02
  have full time jobs making significant amounts of money doing that kind of stuff.
• 1:22:06
  And you're there all alone. How much do you remember how much time he
• 1:22:10
  gave you for the full interview? We got twenty. So the way that
• 1:22:16
  that was all done was we were told before we went, and there were
• 1:22:23
  four of us on the trip. I wasn't the only reporter there. There
• 1:22:25
  were reporters for the San Francisco Chronicle, Politico, La Times, and me.
• 1:22:30
  I was the only TV crew there, which is different, but they
• 1:22:33
  were there as well, and we all sort of worked together to try to
• 1:22:38
  get as much access as a group as possible and to use our combined leverage
• 1:22:42
  to try to get our way into things. They were all given interviews the
• 1:22:48
  day before during this high speed rail because high speed rail actually works in China,
• 1:22:53
  but that's a whole other thing. Into we had like two hours on
• 1:22:58
  a train and they were taken back and I said, I said, look,
• 1:23:00
  to be honest, I'm shooting this thing by myself. It's I got
• 1:23:03
  to set up you know, three tripods and do the audio and all the
• 1:23:06
  rest of it, and being on a moving vehicle is not going to help
• 1:23:11
  in terms of audio or all the rest of it. Can I get time
• 1:23:14
  the next day? And so I was basically given the same amount of time
• 1:23:17
  that they were given, which was about like twenty to twenty five minutes for
• 1:23:21
  our one on one, which happened the last day of the trip, you
• 1:23:25
  know, on a day where where it was operating on two hours of sleep
• 1:23:30
  and had just worked you know, nine days in a row where there wasn't
• 1:23:32
  a night where I slept more than four hours. So just just for context
• 1:23:36
  of like where we were at at that point, that's when that was the
• 1:23:40
  moment that we were given the interview. Okay, So in the course of
• 1:23:45
  a rather short interview, given the fact that you're giving a week of your
• 1:23:48
  life and traveling all the way to China and you're covering the governor and you're
• 1:23:53
  you're basically, you know, doing this in his mind on his behalf.
• 1:23:57
  I mean, it's obviously no one cares about the tree, no one back
• 1:24:00
  home is learning about it in the news coverage. So he gives you a
• 1:24:04
  fairly short interview. And this is where I actually have empathy for your situation,
• 1:24:11
  because you decide you're going to put in a question about the COVID response
• 1:24:15
  because obviously it's a huge, huge news story for several years still is there's
• 1:24:20
  always news related to it. And I agree that Newsom has actually faced very
• 1:24:27
  very few legitimate questions in the last three and a half years on the topic.
• 1:24:30
  And you raised the issue, but you you raised it in a way
• 1:24:35
  that was limited because of the time that you had. There was no opportunity
• 1:24:41
  for follow ups. And it's a very complicated topic. So talk to me
• 1:24:45
  about talk to me about the difficulty in deciding, all right, do I
• 1:24:49
  address COVID in what format do I address it? How do I do it?
• 1:24:55
  So give me the thinking as to what went into it in asking the
• 1:24:59
  question and how how you thought it went from there. So I know you
• 1:25:05
  and a lot of your viewers and people that message me and would like to
• 1:25:09
  see him ask more about COVID, and I think that that conversation needs to
• 1:25:15
  happen in a more thoughtful, more thorough way than it has. Part of
• 1:25:19
  the thinking and theme of what they talked over and over again during the week
• 1:25:25
  is that he's the first governor to come there since twenty nineteen, and obviously
• 1:25:30
  a big reason for that is because of COVID and because of the politics after
• 1:25:34
  COVID, and a big theme of what he keeps saying over and over is
• 1:25:39
  again open hand, not closed fist. We need to prepare our relations with
• 1:25:43
  China. We can't have a war with China. What Republicans are saying is
• 1:25:45
  not helpful. Let's get together on this. So my thinking is, then,
• 1:25:51
  okay, that opens up a question about COVID. If the whole context
• 1:25:56
  of all this is that COVID set this up, you know, to ask
• 1:25:59
  a ques question. I had seen that he was on Meet the Press with
• 1:26:01
  Chuck Todd on Chuck Todd's last episode, and Chuck Todd had talked to him
• 1:26:06
  about COVID, and he I thought, surprisingly was a little more candid about
• 1:26:13
  the fact that there were mistakes made, and that he had set up this
• 1:26:15
  group to study it and that they it's important to talk about what we did
• 1:26:20
  wrong so that we don't do it again. And I had asked Tony Thurman,
• 1:26:25
  the secretary of our Superintendent of Public Instruction, on my show, the
• 1:26:29
  issue is about that, and asked him basically the same question I asked Newsom,
• 1:26:32
  which is, if you're in charge and this happens again, what did
• 1:26:35
  we do wrong and how do we do it differently? Because I think a
• 1:26:39
  lot of people, frankly, have a hard time going backwards, but maybe
• 1:26:46
  more willing to admit mistakes going forward, and frankly, that's kind of more
• 1:26:50
  productive anyways, Like you can't relitigate the past, but we can think about
• 1:26:55
  how we would deal with this in the future. And Tony Thurman's answer is
• 1:27:00
  kind of incredulous in saying that we did everything right and not admitting any wrongdoing,
• 1:27:08
  and he got a lot of heat for that, and that clip went
• 1:27:11
  all over the place, and I was praised by a lot of the people
• 1:27:13
  online that critique me for the new something for that. So I asked Newsom
• 1:27:18
  the same question, and he went off on an answer that was a little
• 1:27:25
  meandering and kind of filibustery, saying that you know, comparing us and that
• 1:27:31
  nobody's really looked at this seriously, but saying that he's going to look at
• 1:27:34
  it seriously, but he wants to do it not through a political lens,
• 1:27:39
  and not really giving much meat on that. So I said, Okay,
• 1:27:45
  it was long, and I'm like, okay, I got to at least
• 1:27:49
  throw one follow up in there, and so to me, the most important
• 1:27:54
  issue, which I think you would say is the most important issue, is
• 1:27:57
  what happened with schools. So I did throw in a follow up of we
• 1:28:02
  close the schools too too long, right, basically giving him the option to
• 1:28:08
  go there. And he then blasted Florida and their test scores and then went
• 1:28:16
  on a rant about local control and saying that it's up to the districts and
• 1:28:24
  kind of claiming that he had no ability to or no influence, and he
• 1:28:28
  was kind of like an observer and saying that, you know, the big
• 1:28:33
  question next time is should Sacramento have more control? And this is where if
• 1:28:40
  I got to do it differently, I would I should have followed up on
• 1:28:45
  do you mean we need to have more local control or less local control,
• 1:28:48
  because that would have been an interesting response, or saying to him, are
• 1:28:54
  you claiming that you had no influence at all when it came to what happened
• 1:28:58
  with the school districts and all of the health mandates that were coming from the
• 1:29:01
  state by people that you appointed. That would have been a better thing for
• 1:29:06
  me to say. I didn't say it at the time, in part because
• 1:29:13
  the interview wasn't about COVID. It was about the China trip. I was
• 1:29:15
  doing a half hour special about the China trip, not about COVID. I
• 1:29:19
  was running out of time. This section was already almost four minutes out of
• 1:29:25
  the twenty minutes that I had on something that I didn't need for what I
• 1:29:29
  was actually talking about. And I thought what he said was interesting and that
• 1:29:33
  people could react to it. I made the decision to post it because I
• 1:29:36
  thought it still was illuminating the fact that he didn't really answer the question and
• 1:29:42
  then he brought that up. Hopefully it's not the last time I talked to
• 1:29:46
  him, or other people talk to him, and we can, you know,
• 1:29:50
  get at it some more the next time. Looking back on it,
• 1:29:56
  you know, sometimes when you're in the fog of war, you know,
• 1:29:58
  you wish you could do things differently, wish I could have done it differently,
• 1:30:01
  but that was my thinking at the time, and that's why it ended
• 1:30:04
  up being that way. And I also part of the reason I invited Kelly
• 1:30:09
  Victory on the show and want to have more conversations with other people like Kevin,
• 1:30:13
  Kylie or some of the other critics and have had those conversations on the
• 1:30:15
  air for years, is to give other people an opportunity to respond and to
• 1:30:23
  lay out a different perspective. This is why I like you, Alex,
• 1:30:27
  because you just you just made a better Mia Kopa on a fairly small issue,
• 1:30:32
  although significant issue, which is your interview with Gavin Newsom about COVID.
• 1:30:36
  The Newsom ever has on the mistakes related to COVID. So yeah, I
• 1:30:41
  really appreciate I really appreciate you doing that, and just to emphasize the point
• 1:30:45
  though you did reference it to me, the most outrageous part of the whole
• 1:30:50
  response, and why I would have loved for you to be able to follow
• 1:30:55
  up, was the idea that Newsom was claiming this really wasn't my doing.
• 1:31:00
  That's the way I took it was that somehow all the schools in California,
• 1:31:03
  you were closed, and the guy who was running the show was who was
• 1:31:08
  really effectively a dictator because of the state of emergency that he declared had no
• 1:31:14
  power over this, and that he was just giving this to all the local
• 1:31:17
  school districts, which is in my view, a complete lie about what was
• 1:31:23
  really happening. And don't you and I know that you had doctor Victory on
• 1:31:28
  and she kind of didn't address the school issue as much as I would have
• 1:31:31
  liked her too. I hope that someone else will do that in the future
• 1:31:34
  on your programs. But you can understand where someone like me is coming from.
• 1:31:40
  Where we go Wait a minute, I lived through this for two years.
• 1:31:43
  This was all about Knowsom, right, and he I think likes to
• 1:31:47
  you know, like most politicians, and he's a good politician. I know
• 1:31:50
  you don't like him, but he's good at like finding a way out of
• 1:31:53
  stuff. He you know, looks towards technicalities, and it is technically true
• 1:31:59
  that in a lot of situations, especially towards the end, when I think
• 1:32:02
  Gavin Newsom would have liked some of those schools to open because it would have
• 1:32:06
  been better politics towards him. Towards the end, of the COVID thing,
• 1:32:11
  and a lot of the school or the teachers' unions were kind of holding the
• 1:32:15
  district's hostage. That he didn't have that much control at that point. But
• 1:32:23
  I think he did have a lot of control in the early days setting up
• 1:32:27
  the situation where the teachers' union would have that much leverage and be in that
• 1:32:31
  situation. And he also has the power as the most important person in the
• 1:32:38
  state of the bully pulpit, and if he was more willing to publicly call
• 1:32:44
  for things, even if he doesn't technically have the power, that probably would
• 1:32:47
  have gone a long way as well. I disagree with your assessment. I
• 1:32:54
  mean it's too detailed to get into, but he had the whole color coded
• 1:32:58
  business, right, I mean, all that framework was set up by him.
• 1:33:01
  And you are one hundred percent right that if he had used the bully
• 1:33:05
  pulpit as the essentially the dictator of California, because again it's a state of
• 1:33:10
  emergency, he gave himself ultimate power for a couple of years. You can't
• 1:33:15
  have it both ways. You can't make yourself a dictator and then say well,
• 1:33:18
  it wasn't me, it was local control. I mean, specifically,
• 1:33:24
  like maybe the last month of the whole thing, and like LAUSD is out
• 1:33:29
  of session, and there are other school districts that are in session, and
• 1:33:32
  the teachers union at LAUSD is fighting back really hard. At that point,
• 1:33:38
  I think the politics of it had flipped. I mean, Newsom is a
• 1:33:42
  lot of things, but he is pretty adept at understanding where the political wins
• 1:33:47
  have shifted. And as you've well documented on this podcast, the political wins
• 1:33:53
  shifted often during the COVID situation in different directions, and that's I think what
• 1:33:58
  he's focusing on. But by just focusing on that small portion of it,
• 1:34:03
  it's kind of ignoring the bigger picture, which is frankly a more important conversation.
• 1:34:10
  Okay, let's talk real quick about COVID in general. Newsom will be
• 1:34:14
  part of this, but you've already done your mia COPA on the Newsome interview,
• 1:34:16
  and you've tried to have other sides on so I really appreciate what you've
• 1:34:20
  done there. I think, actually, how you've handled the whole situation is
• 1:34:24
  about as well as you could have under the circumstances. So I have no
• 1:34:27
  problem with that at all, especially if you continue on that path in the
• 1:34:30
  future. But let's go back in time for a second, because I think,
• 1:34:34
  as is often the case in a big story, what happens at the
• 1:34:38
  beginning dictates everything, because we're in an unprecedented situation and new rules are being
• 1:34:45
  created, and I think that the media in general screwed the pooch on COVID
• 1:34:51
  in a catastrophic way, and specifically, obviously, being someone who lives in
• 1:34:58
  the Los Angeles market, I was watching your station quite a bit, and
• 1:35:01
  at the very beginning, you guys were kind of trying to be fair,
• 1:35:08
  at least in comparison to the rest of the media hoard, and I remember
• 1:35:13
  very specifically to me, one of the seminal moments was that you were doing
• 1:35:16
  a show. I think it was a special that was done. I think
• 1:35:20
  it was on a nightly basis with Doctor Drew right and Knight for a year.
• 1:35:27
  Yeah, okay, so you're on with Doctor Drew and the beginning.
• 1:35:31
  Doctor Drew, famous TV doctor, very well known nationally, of a based
• 1:35:36
  here in Los Angeles. He had a very at first contrarian view of how
• 1:35:42
  to handle COVID of you that I was sharing at the time, and I
• 1:35:47
  think would have been vindicated by history had he maintained it. But it was
• 1:35:53
  very very clear to me, knowing the way that this works in the media,
• 1:35:58
  that doctor Drew got scared, that Doctor Drew thought he was going to
• 1:36:02
  get canceled because he was getting an extreme amount of criticism for his contrarian view
• 1:36:09
  on COVID. And it's very obvious to me that he flipped in a dramatic
• 1:36:15
  fashion and that therefore the entire tone of your station flipped and went very much
• 1:36:20
  more consistent with the media horde and the whole lockdown mentality. And it's I
• 1:36:29
  run because now doctor Drew, three years later, once the dust is settled,
• 1:36:31
  has become one of the most contrarian people on COVID that there is,
• 1:36:35
  which I think further further validates my theory about what happened. That doctor Drew
• 1:36:40
  was effectively a hostage, was that he was he had a gun to his
• 1:36:44
  head, and that his entire view changed because of fear of cancelation. Where
• 1:36:49
  am I wrong, if at all in my analysis of that. Look,
• 1:36:54
  I don't want to speak I like doctor Drew a lot, and he was
• 1:36:56
  great to work with and I have sure great respect for him. I don't
• 1:36:59
  want to speak to his mindset or what he was thinking, because I don't
• 1:37:02
  know. I mean, he never articulated to me that he felt like he
• 1:37:05
  was a hostage. I don't think he's the only one, though, who
• 1:37:10
  went on different paths when it came to COVID at different times. I certainly
• 1:37:14
  did personally as well. I mean, I think that your point, which
• 1:37:17
  you made on a previous podcast, that there was probably high ratings and a
• 1:37:21
  lot of money to be made from being a contrarian on this more publicly is
• 1:37:27
  true. And in the early days when we did feature Drew and doctor Oz
• 1:37:33
  was on a lot with us and other views that weren't being articulated as much
• 1:37:38
  and as many other outlets, the ratings were incredibly high. And as a
• 1:37:44
  acknowledgment that there is and was at that moment a real audience for that,
• 1:37:49
  I think there also was a lot of fear and people had never seen something
• 1:37:54
  like this, and they didn't know what to do, and they were just
• 1:37:57
  sort of desperate for information, and it was complicated, and I think the
• 1:38:02
  first, you know, stretch of it was scary for a lot of people.
• 1:38:06
  And I think that there were a lot of people who at the beginning,
• 1:38:11
  you know, aired on the side of caution and didn't want to have
• 1:38:14
  you know, quote unquote blood on their hands, and so they thought better
• 1:38:18
  be safe than sorry. As we talked about the beginning of this conversation,
• 1:38:24
  so much of the incentive structure of the media is set up to not challenge
• 1:38:29
  or to orthodoxy, and doing so is not rewarded. In fact, you
• 1:38:34
  were often punished for doing that, and I think that an unhealthy group think
• 1:38:40
  set in with the entire media structure, and I think looking back at myself
• 1:38:45
  that I was probably part of that as well at the time, and wish
• 1:38:49
  twenty twenty hindsight had done certain things differently. But it's hard to look at
• 1:38:54
  where you're at at that moment and all the rest of it, which is
• 1:38:57
  why I think it's more productive to focus on what lessons did we learn,
• 1:39:00
  how can we apply that to the future, then trying to second guess what
• 1:39:02
  we did in real time. I think what is also true is the information
• 1:39:13
  that was fed to us from the government turned out to not be true in
• 1:39:16
  a lot of situations, and we you know, we're operating under bad info.
• 1:39:25
  You know, when we're told about the vaccines that they would stop transmission
• 1:39:30
  and stop stop transmission of COVID. The idea of a vaccine mandate is very
• 1:39:36
  different. Right, if we now have something and you can go into a
• 1:39:40
  room, if everybody's been vaccinated, then I'm one hundred percent guaranteed that I'm
• 1:39:44
  not going to get COVID or give COVID. That sounds reasonable that we would
• 1:39:48
  want to have a vaccine mandate, because that's how you stop COVID. Boom,
• 1:39:51
  done, We're done with all this shit. Get me out of here,
• 1:39:55
  like I'll take a shot. If that means I'm never going to get
• 1:39:58
  it, I can't pass it all the rest of it. I get that.
• 1:40:00
  But that wasn't the case. And then once we learned that, you
• 1:40:04
  know, to keep the same mandates in place based off of bad information just
• 1:40:14
  felt like a farce and felt absurd. It became clear that a lot of
• 1:40:19
  the early thoughts about masks turned out to be not true, especially when it
• 1:40:25
  comes to not you know, form fitting N ninety five high level masks.
• 1:40:29
  If you're wearing a cloth thing here and sliding off your face and in your
• 1:40:32
  car by yourself, or going for a walk outside, that's absurd and unhealthy
• 1:40:38
  to you. You're better off not having it. So I think not only
• 1:40:44
  did sort of the media get it wrong in real time, I think the
• 1:40:48
  worst error that we really should focus on is once we figured out that the
• 1:40:55
  info was bad, I think we were too slow to correct the record and
• 1:41:00
  too slow to change our behavior or encourage other people to change their behavior.
• 1:41:06
  I think that's a very fair thing. However, I do think we're in
• 1:41:10
  a little bit of a weird spot here where we're pretending that COVID was like
• 1:41:15
  a six week period and we didn't just have enough time to figure this out.
• 1:41:19
  This went in California, this went on for over two years. Yeah
• 1:41:23
  no, And in my view, we knew very quickly what was really going
• 1:41:29
  on and what the dangers were and how bad this was. And we knew
• 1:41:33
  for a long time that regular masks don't do anything and at masking kids in
• 1:41:39
  schools, and this to me, you know, I'm a big believer that
• 1:41:42
  if you're going to criticize, you should provide at least an alternative path of
• 1:41:45
  behavior. And so I'll ask a direct question, how is it that your
• 1:41:50
  station and no other station in at least that I'm aware of, ever did
• 1:41:57
  a continual report on my Thank god, why are we masking kids in schools
• 1:42:02
  when there is no evidence that they do anyive, anything positive, and it's
• 1:42:08
  obvious that they harm kids in numerous ways. I mean, how was this
• 1:42:12
  not like an Iranian hostage nightline situation where we're day fifty five of masking kids
• 1:42:18
  for no reason in schools. There was nothing remotely like that. We were
• 1:42:24
  torturing kids in schools out of a virtue signal and the media sat on their
• 1:42:30
  hands. How did that happen? I think what your suggesting would have been
• 1:42:36
  more effective at making the point, But I do want to give some credit
• 1:42:40
  to my colleague Marlateez, who went to Barbara Ferrer's briefings, called into every
• 1:42:46
  single one of them, oftentimes the only reporter there, and was pushing her
• 1:42:54
  on all of these issues in a public way, the oftentimes the only reporter
• 1:42:59
  doing it, And we featured that prominently every single week, sort of drilling
• 1:43:04
  down on these issues and had real conversations about them consistently, especially on our
• 1:43:10
  six o'clock and seven o'clock shows, in a way that other stations weren't.
• 1:43:15
  So I think more could have been done, and what you suggested certainly would
• 1:43:20
  have better articulated. But I do think that our station deserves some credit,
• 1:43:26
  and especially Marla for really highlighting these things in a way that other people weren't
• 1:43:33
  fair enough. Now, one or two more questions on COVID, and then
• 1:43:36
  we'll wrap this up, because you've been very, very patient, very fair,
• 1:43:41
  and very honest in your answers. But you seemingly have been listening to
• 1:43:45
  recent episodes of the podcast. I don't know if you heard me talk about
• 1:43:47
  this, but I happened to have played golf with Governor Newsom's brother in law
• 1:43:53
  this past week at a golf tournament that Senior California Amateur Senior Amateur Championship in
• 1:43:59
  the Lost Angelos area. And I didn't even know. His name is Jeff
• 1:44:02
  Callan. I don't know if you know Jeff. He's an actor. He's
• 1:44:05
  married to Gavin Newsom's sister anyway, so you're not aware of this. And
• 1:44:10
  he and I got into an interesting conversation, as you might expect. It
• 1:44:15
  was very polite for most for the most part, and obviously COVID came up,
• 1:44:20
  and he made the statement, and I'm just giving you this for context.
• 1:44:24
  He made the statement that you know, it wasn't just schools that COVID
• 1:44:30
  was tough on it was businesses too, And I said, Jeff, it
• 1:44:31
  wasn't COVID, it was Gavin that was tough on businesses and schools. And
• 1:44:36
  so then he says to me, well, I've studied the COVID issue very
• 1:44:41
  very carefully. And I said, oh really, And so we kind of
• 1:44:45
  tabled that. And so at the end of the our round of golf was
• 1:44:48
  a practice round for the tournament. I wanted to test him because I think
• 1:44:54
  that what Gavin Newsom did when he shut down California and effectively the country,
• 1:44:59
  was the most significant thing that's ever happened in the modern history of America.
• 1:45:02
  And I asked him the very specific question. I said, Jeff, do
• 1:45:05
  you know how many people Gavin Newsom claimed in an open letter to President Trump
• 1:45:12
  would get COVID in California in the next eight weeks after he shut down California,
• 1:45:19
  Because he said a very specific number of people would get COVID in eight
• 1:45:24
  weeks. This was back in March of twenty twenty. Now, Ix,
• 1:45:29
  I don't want to put you on the spot, but I'm gonna guess,
• 1:45:31
  did you happen to know the number? I'm not going to ask you to
• 1:45:33
  give me a number, but do you know what that number was? Was
• 1:45:36
  it twenty five million? You are very close, congratulations, twenty six point
• 1:45:44
  five million people. So thank you very much for essentially knowing the answer to
• 1:45:48
  that question. Because he based the shutdown, the lockdown, the unprecedented lockdown
• 1:45:54
  of the largest state in the United States, most influential state in the United
• 1:45:58
  States, off this domino effect. He's claimed there were gonna be twenty six
• 1:46:02
  point five million people in California that we're gonna get COVID in eight weeks.
• 1:46:09
  And I asked Jeff this question, who claimed that, you know he's knew
• 1:46:12
  to his brother in law, he claimed he knew everything about COVID. I
• 1:46:15
  said, do you know what that number is? He paused for half a
• 1:46:17
  second, he said fifty thousand, And I'm like, oh my god.
• 1:46:23
  Okay. And my point here is not his ignorance, okay, other than
• 1:46:27
  the fact that he claimed that he was a COVID expert. My point is
• 1:46:30
  you get points for knowing effectively what the number is. I am positive that
• 1:46:36
  ninety nine point eight percent of Californians have no idea that happened. And the
• 1:46:44
  most important thing that has happened in our lifetimes in California is completely unknown.
• 1:46:49
  It was based on a lie, not a mis calculation, a lie,
• 1:46:55
  And I wrote about it the next morning for media that this is a blatant,
• 1:46:59
  total, complete lie. Is that not an indication of media malpractice,
• 1:47:04
  that the media has not done their job, that almost no one in California
• 1:47:11
  knows the answer to that question. Yes it is. But the other thing
• 1:47:16
  that's kind of hard on that is it is always hard to prove a hypothetical
• 1:47:23
  one way or another. So what Gavin Newsom was arguing was that if we
• 1:47:27
  did nothing, if we don't shut down anything, and everybody is going about
• 1:47:32
  their business, no masks, no anything, everybody's you know, every business
• 1:47:38
  is open, and we just let COVID run through the population than twenty five
• 1:47:44
  million people out of our country of three hundred million, three hundred and thirty
• 1:47:47
  million or whatever it is, are going to get it. We have.
• 1:47:50
  I mean, I don't think that would have happened. It seems crazy,
• 1:47:55
  But we have no way to prove that or not prove that, because we
• 1:47:58
  never put ourselves in that situation. We actually the opposite of flix. We
• 1:48:01
  do have a way to prove well, you're going to say that in other
• 1:48:03
  countries where they didn't do all the mitigation techniques, that didn't happen. And
• 1:48:08
  just look at what happened in Sweden. Look what happened with Sweden. Yeah,
• 1:48:12
  and so it's not as if we have no evidence. I mean,
• 1:48:15
  and by the way, it's funny you said the same thing that Jeff did.
• 1:48:18
  You both reference well, because we use masks. We didn't use masks
• 1:48:23
  in those first eight weeks. There were no mask bad dates in those first
• 1:48:26
  eight weeks about masks, right, No I I and they lied about why
• 1:48:30
  not to have them and that whole thing too. No I, I understand
• 1:48:34
  what you're saying. The other thing that that is an uncomfortable conversation to have
• 1:48:41
  that may separate us and our outcomes from the Swedes is that country is more
• 1:48:46
  fit than our country is. And the people that really were hit by COVID
• 1:48:53
  were elderly people and people with weight issues. And you know, I think
• 1:49:00
  part of the media mistake with this whole thing too is instead of acknowledging that
• 1:49:05
  and talking about how can we incentivize working out healthier lifestyle choices, getting people
• 1:49:13
  to be responsible for that is there you know, tax regulations where we could
• 1:49:17
  incentivize gym membership or private training or other things. Is there. If we're
• 1:49:23
  going to subsidize something, you know, why not subsidize healthier food choices in
• 1:49:28
  low income neighborhoods, you know, and fruits and vegetables and things like that.
• 1:49:30
  Instead of having that conversation which everybody's afraid to have, we've just looked
• 1:49:35
  for more, you know, drugs that we can get people on to try
• 1:49:40
  to lose weight as a miracle drug. And I think that is a big
• 1:49:44
  miss and it is, frankly a big reason why America's outcomes with COVID we're
• 1:49:48
  as bad as they are. On top of you know, the terrible choices
• 1:49:51
  when it comes to nursing homes and basically having people stuck in like death factories
• 1:49:57
  is what you know that happened, especially in New York and in Californi as
• 1:50:00
  well. But we haven't, Alex, I could not agree with you more.
• 1:50:03
  That was a fantastic answer, and it's one of my I have so
• 1:50:06
  many pet peas when it comes to COVID, but it might be my top
• 1:50:10
  one when it comes to the news media, because there's an inherent problem what
• 1:50:15
  you just said, why was there no emphasis on eating properly exercise. Of
• 1:50:21
  course Newsom was telling us to say. Newsom was telling us to stay inside,
• 1:50:26
  which was insane and shutting down you know, the gyms, which was
• 1:50:29
  in insane. Right. I mean, it's bad politics to call out people
• 1:50:33
  for weight issues, and it's bad business. It is I mean people,
• 1:50:39
  and it's bad business for the media. It's bad business for the media to
• 1:50:43
  tell fat people to lose weight, right. I mean, that's that's right
• 1:50:45
  customers, right, I mean, that's their that's their customers if you view
• 1:50:51
  it that way, if you view with your audience as your customers that are
• 1:50:55
  buying a product. And by the way, a lot of the advertisers on
• 1:50:58
  the media are a lot of the companies that are contributing to this whole thing.
• 1:51:02
  What you just said, I was starting to sell do you want to
• 1:51:05
  be my co host moving forward? Because because that was I mean, what
• 1:51:10
  you just said there, what you just said there is the smoking gun of
• 1:51:14
  so much about what is broken in the news media, where you just acknowledged
• 1:51:18
  the one hundred percent truth that the news media was afraid of making physical fitness
• 1:51:23
  a primary issue during COVID because they it would be offensive to fat people,
• 1:51:29
  and if and people would therefore stop being the customers of that particular media outlet
• 1:51:34
  that emphasized that issue. Correct, I mean, it certainly seems to be
• 1:51:41
  that way. Yeah, I mean, and then and that that was a
• 1:51:45
  huge problem with the COVID coverage because then instead of weight loss and exercise and
• 1:51:54
  getting outside, ironically, the emphasis became as you already said, wait for
• 1:51:58
  a vaccine, where your man asked, you know, and hope for the
• 1:52:01
  best. Why that was totally wrong, And that is a different approach to
• 1:52:06
  like a country like Sweden. So the comparison is not entirely apples to apples
• 1:52:13
  when it comes to that. I think it is very, very very hard
• 1:52:17
  to imagine a scenario where twenty six million people would have gotten COVID in the
• 1:52:24
  time that he mentioned. But I do think if we are comparing different parts
• 1:52:29
  of the world, you know, America should have a hard conversation about what's
• 1:52:34
  in our food. Why do we have so many preservatives in our food,
• 1:52:39
  and why is it making so many people so sick and so obese? And
• 1:52:44
  what if you're really talking about costs of our to our government, what is
• 1:52:48
  that doing for Medicare and for our bottom line in terms of our budgets.
• 1:52:55
  And that's a Now I'm starting to get out of my lane in terms of
• 1:52:59
  being a journalist. I agree with everything you're saying, all right, So
• 1:53:03
  let me wrap this up with a couple of big picture questions about local news
• 1:53:08
  media and news media in general. One of my because we're leaving COVID for
• 1:53:13
  a second, which I'm sure you're happy about it at this point, one
• 1:53:16
  of my all time pet peeves, and to me, the smoking gun of
• 1:53:19
  what a joke local television news has become over the last couple decades is the
• 1:53:26
  issue of live car chases. Now. To me, that there's no way
• 1:53:31
  around it. I mean, the obsession, especially in Los Angeles, because
• 1:53:35
  of the nature of Los Angeles traffic and because there's so many people and at
• 1:53:40
  any given moment you're gonna have a theoretically a good car chase, and how
• 1:53:44
  easy it is in modern technology to cover a car chase. To me,
• 1:53:49
  I cannot take any news organization seriously as a journalistic enterprise that becomes obsessed.
• 1:53:57
  Now, it's weird. This seems to go in waves. It seems like
• 1:54:00
  you guys are obsessed with it for a while, then you drop it for
• 1:54:02
  a while and maybe it's the time of year or what else is going on
• 1:54:06
  in the news. But what is your view? What is your assessment of
• 1:54:11
  my view? I'll put it that way that this is completely anathetical to every
• 1:54:16
  journalistic characteristic or principle to be carrying live car chases on local television news.
• 1:54:27
  I don't disagree with you. I don't think that that's the best use of
• 1:54:31
  our airwaves. But oftentimes, because journalism is a business and it's not a
• 1:54:39
  nonprofit, the news organizations respond to their customers. And when car chases more
• 1:54:48
  than anything, more than anything, is a guaranteed ratings bump significant. I
• 1:54:58
  mean sometimes fifty percent higher or more if there is a car chase. I
• 1:55:02
  mean you can look as I look at the ratings every day, not that
• 1:55:05
  I'm focused on that, but I do think there's value in just being educated
• 1:55:10
  why things are happening, and you look at the ratings, and when there
• 1:55:14
  is a car chase, you can see the moment that the chase started,
• 1:55:16
  and you see the numbers go up across the board. Like people. There
• 1:55:21
  are apps where people tell each other car chases are happening, or it starts
• 1:55:25
  talking about it on social media, or they're pushed alerts and like people are
• 1:55:30
  more drawn to that story than any other story that local news in LA does.
• 1:55:35
  Now, in reality, the news media actually loses money from car chases
• 1:55:40
  because you can't run any commercials during it, so you have to blow out
• 1:55:45
  all of your programming. But the hope is that it then increases your regular
• 1:55:49
  ratings so you can charge more for those ads another time, and it's an
• 1:55:54
  investment that they make. I disagree with you in one sense. I don't
• 1:55:58
  think that there are seasons where the media is interested in it. Any time
• 1:56:01
  that there's a car chase will take it. There just seems to be more
• 1:56:05
  oftentimes when the car chases are happening. I don't know what that, why
• 1:56:10
  that is or the rest of it, or then we can get to it.
• 1:56:13
  But I think that the most important way that the audience could get better
• 1:56:19
  coverage, could get better, news could get more nuanced, news could get
• 1:56:24
  more fair news is to support it, is to demand it, is to
• 1:56:30
  watch when that is happening. Is to share it out on social media if
• 1:56:33
  they see it, because the audience has a role in it. I do
• 1:56:39
  think that as the media has gotten increasingly fragmented. The news organizations as sort
• 1:56:45
  of a desperate thing to get as many viewers as they can, are even
• 1:56:50
  more likely to respond to viewer demand and viewer interest, and so all of
• 1:56:59
  us have a role in if we want it to be different to you know,
• 1:57:02
  supporting good journalism. That's a really important point. One other thing on
• 1:57:08
  the car chases, though, I'm always wondering when I see it, especially
• 1:57:11
  if they go on for a long time, how pissed are reporters who have
• 1:57:16
  worked their ass off on a particular story and then it gets bumped that day
• 1:57:21
  and then and it's not a type of thing that you can then run the
• 1:57:25
  next day. How often does that happen? And is there a story you
• 1:57:29
  don't need to use names or something, but maybe even your own and your
• 1:57:30
  own experience. Is there a time you can remember when you were particularly irritated
• 1:57:34
  or upset that a story that you worked on or a story you were looking
• 1:57:39
  forward to running got bumped because of a car chase. It has definitely happened
• 1:57:44
  to me. I don't know, and nothing's coming to mind as a specific
• 1:57:47
  instance of it. I mean, the good news now, with the online
• 1:57:53
  nature of everything is, you can still get the story out there in different
• 1:57:58
  channels. I mean, obviously there's a lot of value in being on TV,
• 1:58:01
  but there are ways to at least get it out there. Whereas ten
• 1:58:05
  fifteen years ago, it wasn't as easy to just put everything online as it
• 1:58:11
  is now. So that isn't as much of an issue, but it is
• 1:58:15
  certainly frustrating. I've been in that situation many times where you think you have
• 1:58:19
  something smart and substantive and important and it's just following somebody slowly driving on an
• 1:58:27
  open freeway and that's all that You know, your story loses out to that,
• 1:58:33
  and I'm very sensitive to that. All right, last question, so
• 1:58:39
  the future of both local news and journalism, especially on television in general.
• 1:58:45
  As you know, i'm a pessimist. In general, I think it's going
• 1:58:49
  to get even worse. And I think it's going to get worse because the
• 1:58:54
  institutional memory that still exists to some extent within the news media, people like
• 1:58:59
  yourself. You know, you're a younger guy, but I mean there are
• 1:59:01
  still some older people who remember the way it was supposed to be and remember
• 1:59:06
  the way it was. In some ways, those people are every day going
• 1:59:12
  to be retiring, laid off, no longer in the business whatever, and
• 1:59:15
  that younger people have no institutional memory for the essence of what journalism was supposed
• 1:59:21
  to be, and they're going to take over more and more every day.
• 1:59:25
  And I think this, along with the incentive structure that we began this conversation
• 1:59:29
  with being very disfunctional, is going to create a perfect storm of circumstances where
• 1:59:33
  a car chase is actually going to be seen as substantive in local television news.
• 1:59:40
  What is your assessment of where we're going here? Well, not to
• 1:59:44
  jump on the pessimism train, but another another thing that I think is problematic
• 1:59:49
  if you look at the future of the business is because of all the fragmentation
• 1:59:56
  in audience and because the ratings are down, and because the networks aren't making
• 2:00:00
  the kind of money that they used to make, they're not paying the salaries
• 2:00:04
  that they used to pay, and so the caliber of person that may have
• 2:00:11
  been more interested in pursuing journalism because they watched TV themselves every day and the
• 2:00:16
  salary was enough to justify and support a family, because you know, there
• 2:00:23
  was a lot of money being thrown around and it was a glamorous thing to
• 2:00:27
  do. You had your picking of the cream of the crop in terms of
• 2:00:30
  the people to hire in terms of journalists. As that becomes less, the
• 2:00:36
  quality of journalists could become less. That person who may have pursued the journalism
• 2:00:44
  route may now try to be a TikTok influencer because there's more money in doing
• 2:00:47
  that, or go work for the tech company itself and try to learn to
• 2:00:51
  code because there's more money in that. And that worries me that the next
• 2:00:58
  generation of journalists you're drafting with a third or fourth round pick instead of a
• 2:01:02
  first round pick in terms of the caliber of person. That being said,
• 2:01:09
  you know, there are more cameras out there, which in some ways can
• 2:01:15
  potentially help with more transparency. There's more ways to get messages out than ever
• 2:01:20
  before. A lot more people can see stuff online if you have something that's
• 2:01:26
  really viral. I mean, I had a moment with Governor Newsom where he
• 2:01:29
  talked about him baiting Ron de Santis. That clip got like ten million views
• 2:01:32
  on Twitter alone, not to mention other sites, and went all over the
• 2:01:35
  place. If that was just a local broadcast, you know, fifteen years
• 2:01:40
  ago, that wouldn't have become a national thing. So if you do good
• 2:01:44
  work, you know, even the China trip got a ton of coverage all
• 2:01:48
  over the place. People were bashing me from all around the country or and
• 2:01:53
  some of them saying nicely, it was amazing, honestly in China. I
• 2:01:56
  have hundreds of thousands of views for that clip on YouTube, many of the
• 2:01:59
  comments in and from people that were watching it on the trip. I had
• 2:02:01
  people that were coming up to me in China, including Chinese reporters, who
• 2:02:06
  were saying they were following along my coverage on Twitter and YouTube to understand about
• 2:02:11
  the trip, even there where they have firewalls about that stuff, and they
• 2:02:15
  were using VPNs to watch my work there. So, you know, the
• 2:02:18
  opportunity if you do good work that's important and informative to get to people in
• 2:02:25
  all of their devices in different ways is also an interesting creative challenge. How
• 2:02:30
  do you make money from that? That's a real creative challenge. But in
• 2:02:34
  terms of getting you know, good information out there, there's never been more
• 2:02:40
  options to do that, and hopefully you know, smart minds like you can
• 2:02:45
  can work through with people like me and other people in ways to how can
• 2:02:50
  we fix this problem because fundamentally, you know, our country does not work
• 2:02:58
  without a free press. It's why it is the first Amendment. It's why
• 2:03:02
  I went into journalism in the first place. You know, democracy doesn't function
• 2:03:06
  without a press that holds journalists or politicians accountable, but also it informs the
• 2:03:13
  society so that they can make educated decisions. And I think we all have
• 2:03:19
  a role in ensuring that that works if we want our country and the democratic
• 2:03:25
  Republican experiment to work well. I would be remiss if I didn't mention,
• 2:03:30
  since you brought back up the China trip that, after all that work and
• 2:03:34
  all that journalism in your interview, the only thing that most people will remember
• 2:03:39
  from that trip the China was Gavin Newsom barreling over a Chinese kid playing basketball.
• 2:03:43
  I mean, because that's it happened. I said that literally in real
• 2:03:47
  time. They knew that the moment that it happened. And when I came
• 2:03:54
  back and went to a couple different events, including like an event with a
• 2:03:58
  lot of really smart, successful, some billionaire like business people that really are
• 2:04:04
  plugged in. The only thing that almost all of the masked about was the
• 2:04:08
  basketball kid. So that's why people like pursuits, right, It's simple,
• 2:04:15
  it's visual it's fast, it isn't nuanced, it doesn't need a lot of
• 2:04:18
  thinking. I mean, there is something inherently human about sort of being a
• 2:04:25
  voyeur on things that don't look quite right. And it's why, frankly,
• 2:04:29
  I think as we think differently about our news coverage online that doing it in
• 2:04:34
  a suit like I'm wearing right now, doing it with the anchor voice that
• 2:04:39
  some people use, doing it with all the trappings of broadcast is actually a
• 2:04:43
  turn off to a lot of people. And the more feeling of that it's
• 2:04:46
  raw and authentic and maybe a little messy and maybe not perfectly put together,
• 2:04:53
  actually makes a lot of people feel more comfortable and willing to listen to you,
• 2:04:57
  because that is how this new generation is used to processing information. Alex,
• 2:05:02
  I have to say that I've been doing this a long time. I've
• 2:05:05
  interviewed hundreds of people. I can't remember an interview where I think better about
• 2:05:11
  the subject more so at the end of the interview than I did at the
• 2:05:14
  beginning, and so you deserve a lot of credit for that. Now I'm
• 2:05:16
  being very serious, I mean, you handled this interview in a spectacular way.
• 2:05:21
  I really appreciate you doing it. I loved most of your of your
• 2:05:26
  answers, and you give me at least some hope for the state of journalism
• 2:05:30
  and the future of it. And you know, all I ever ask is
• 2:05:32
  for fairness. You've always been very transparent, willing to acknowledge when maybe something
• 2:05:39
  you did wasn't the best that it could be, and that's very rare in
• 2:05:42
  this day and age. So I thank you for that, and I thank
• 2:05:45
  you for your time and for coming on, and I hope we'll continue the
• 2:05:47
  discussion either on or off the air. Well, thank you for that,
• 2:05:50
  Thanks for the opportunity. People often mock me online for at My most common
• 2:05:58
  response to people is did you watch the show? Show? So many people
• 2:06:01
  criticize me for stuff that I actually did, they just don't bother to watch.
• 2:06:06
  So my whole thing with all of this is like, let's actually have
• 2:06:10
  a conversation and let's, you know, watch the work. I'm happy to
• 2:06:15
  have a constructive conversation about the work. I'm not perfect. Hopefully people have
• 2:06:19
  a better sense after listening to this all the pressures that are put on me.
• 2:06:24
  And also like I have to do all my own booking and my own
• 2:06:27
  writing, and that's complicated too. Which we didn't even get into. And
• 2:06:30
  so you know, there's a lot. There's a lot going on, and
• 2:06:33
  I think that having a conversation is good and being willing to like learn from
• 2:06:39
  what you did wrong is important too, and acknowledge that to get better on
• 2:06:43
  all of this. Nobody is perfect. I'm certainly not perfect. I just
• 2:06:46
  hope it comes from a good faith place to have a constructive conversation, and
• 2:06:53
  I'm always open to that, and I hope doing that invites more people in
• 2:06:59
  to have a to your point, fair conversation from a lot of perspectives,
• 2:07:02
  because the lack of conversation in this country in a real meaningful way between the
• 2:07:11
  different political factions is really dangerous and it's something that I am committed to working
• 2:07:17
  on in whatever small way that I can, and using my small platform to
• 2:07:21
  try to do whatever I can to try to fix that. Thanks again to
• 2:07:26
  Alex Michaelson for his time and his transparency and honesty there. I really did
• 2:07:30
  mean it when I said that I don't recall ever doing an interview with somebody
• 2:07:36
  where I felt better about that person at the end of the interview in comparison
• 2:07:41
  to the way I felt about them at the beginning then that particular discussion that
• 2:07:46
  you just heard. All I ever ask is someone to be sincere, someone
• 2:07:54
  to be transparent, someone to try to be fair, and Alix, it's
• 2:08:00
  all of those categories. Now. Is he clearly much more liberal than I
• 2:08:05
  am? Yeah, although if you listen carefully on the COVID issue, I
• 2:08:07
  don't think Elix is all that liberal, at least not based upon what the
• 2:08:11
  definition of liberal has become in the bizarre realm of COVID. But I give
• 2:08:18
  him a lot of credit for one willing to come on and two being very
• 2:08:22
  straight and transparent about his answers, and most importantly for trying to be fair.
• 2:08:30
  If every major news personality had the same set of principles and values as
• 2:08:37
  Elix seems to have, journalism would be, especially on the local television level
• 2:08:41
  and the national television level, in a much much better place. So I
• 2:08:46
  thank him for that, and I'm not going to stop chiding him. I'm
• 2:08:50
  not going to stop criticizing him, but hopefully maybe I'll even be a little
• 2:08:54
  bit more effective going forward, because I think he probably trusts me a little
• 2:08:58
  bit more knowing that we're really not all that far off and we're very much
• 2:09:03
  on the same page when it comes to our value system and our goals here.
• 2:09:07
  I don't want news to be completely biased in a right wing direction.
• 2:09:11
  I just want it to be fair. I just want the truth to matter.
• 2:09:15
  I just want there to be some semblance of accountability when it comes to
• 2:09:18
  news figures like for instance, Gaven Neuwsom, especially when they're doing things that
• 2:09:24
  destroy my children's lives and harm my state and my country. And so thanks
• 2:09:31
  again to Alex Michaelson for being willing to do this episode number one hundred and
• 2:09:35
  five. I've already promoted this, I'll promote it again. I've obviously done
• 2:09:41
  a lot of work in my lifetime on the JFK assassination. We're quickly coming
• 2:09:46
  up on the sixtieth anniversary of the JFK assassination on November twenty second. It'll
• 2:09:50
  be sixty years from nineteen sixty three. And Gerald Posner, the author of
• 2:09:56
  the book Case Closed, which in my view is the greatest book ever and
• 2:10:00
  about the Kennedy assassination. I've interviewed him many times over the years. He
• 2:10:05
  is incredibly busy, unfortunately on a number of levels. But I was able
• 2:10:11
  to tape a about a half hour interview with Gerald, and we will be
• 2:10:16
  playing that in the next episode of the podcast, episode number one hundred and
• 2:10:20
  five. Now, it's a good interview. It's probably the best interview you're
• 2:10:24
  going to hear about the Kennedy assassination. But it does get caught off,
• 2:10:30
  as I anticipated it would, sooner than I had hoped for, and there's
• 2:10:33
  a little bit of a technical problem. But it's absolutely worth waiting for.
• 2:10:37
  And I am hopeful because Gerald enjoyed the interview as well. I believe I
• 2:10:41
  am hopeful that we'll be able to schedule a part two before the anniversary of
• 2:10:46
  the Kennedy assassination. But he's under so much pressure to do these interviews.
• 2:10:52
  I mean, he's getting so many requests, especially in light of the new
• 2:10:56
  witness, the Secret Service agent Paul Landers, came forward with a book that
• 2:11:01
  may change the perceptions of what actually happened on that day in Dallas in nineteen
• 2:11:07
  sixty three. They're trying to schedule him is exceedingly difficult. I'm going to
• 2:11:09
  continue to try, and I am hopeful that we will have part two of
• 2:11:15
  that interview, but part one will air in episode number one hundred and five.
• 2:11:18
  Which will be out this Thursday morning. So thanks so much for listening
• 2:11:22
  to this episode number one hundred and four of the Death of Journalism podcasts.
• 2:11:26
  Please remember to subscribe, rate and review, and share this podcast episode with
• 2:11:30
  others. If you shared on social media, please tag me and I'll share
• 2:11:33
  it with my followers on Twitter and my friends on Facebook. Until next time,
• 2:11:39
  thanks again for listening. My name is John Zigler.