Hello.

Thanks for joining us for this special edition of Sustaining US here on KLCS PBS.

I'm David Nazar.

What is going on with the current state of the news media?

Many are asking that question these days broadcast, print, online, digital, all taking such a hit.

And let's be honest, some of the criticism from the public is justified and some of that criticism, well, could be defended.

Many critics argue that today's journalists are either activists for the left or activists for the right disguising themselves as journalists.

TV news ratings have plummeted with viewership and readership drastically decreased.

Is there a better news solution so the media can be more sustainable with a better future?

Well, that's where we begin our broadcast with a special half hour Zoom episode, talking to some of the most well-respected news journalists throughout Southern California.

And joining me now is an amazing panel.

Elizabeth Espinosa is director of communications for the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department.

And prior to LSD, Elizabeth was one of the most well-known Los Angeles reporters and host with several stations over the years, including KTLA, PBS, SoCal, CNN and others.

Norberto Santana is the publisher and editor in chief of Voice of O.C., an award winning local news source.

And prior to that, Norberto was a lead investigative reporter with the Orange County Register.

Adam Marek is a great investigative reporter with the Los Angeles Times, part of an I-Team.

And Adam has reported in Orange County and L.A. for many years now.

Rick Reiff has been with the Orange County Business Journal for over 30 years as an editor, a columnist and now editor at large.

Rick was also a former host of several news and public affairs programs on PBS.

Dr. Angela Williamson My colleague here at Cal See us, is a journalist, author, teacher and the host of Everybody with Angela Williamson, which airs every Wednesday night at ten, 1030 after our Sustaining US broadcasts.

And Jim, Rick Heimer is a former mayor of Costa mesa and a popular conservative voice on talk radio.

Amy, 70 The answer Every Sunday morning throughout Southern California and beyond.

Thank you all so much for being here.

Thank you.

Thank you.

What an honor.

Now, listen, we have 30 minutes and two questions, but two complicated questions.

And I'm going to sort of put the foundation this way.

The first question is the media to bias a bit of context.

So, for example, the media today, is it too far left?

You seemingly are they part of the DNC, the Democratic National Committee, or is the reporting fair and balanced the way MSNBC or CNN like to claim?

Then you've got the right, you got Fox News, an example.

Fox News says they are truly fair and balanced.

They claim, well, whether it's CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, The Washington Post, New York Times, town Hall, Breitbart, or even social media, these outlets have been accused all too often of sort of directing the narrative for their own personal angle and agenda instead of just simply reporting the news.

So, Elizabeth Espinosa, I begin with you.

Is the media too biased these days?

You know, here's what I would say.

Like, there's no question that we all walk in with our own lens of the world.

So we are a product of our own individual experiences, right?

So a lot of folks know that I'm a big specialist advocate of a brother, rather severe disability.

So if you gave me a topic about, you know, the lettering act here in California, for example, or the regional centers and what's happy with that world, I certainly already have a lot of baseline information that most people would have, right?

So that would influence my reporting and that I would know how to ask better questions.

I think it's very naive to say that everybody goes into a story and never, ever has a bias.

Of course you do.

But of course, the good you know, the true journalist tries to expose both sides of the story to the reader, to the viewer.

And I would say today we are seeing a lot of opinion TV, a lot of opinion in print.

But I think the real culprit in all this, truthfully and I would love to hear from the panel, is social media.

I mean, I think the misinformation comes from so many different outlets and so many different avenues.

I think it's like overload for folks.

And so it's sad that it has become who makes the most outrageous statement on who makes the most noise.

And, you know, and that's what ends up getting coverage.

So I think that's part of the problem.

Norberto Santana voice Rosie is making a lot of noise these days.

You know, But I think that's the reason for nonprofit media.

One of the biggest challenges, I think, that we face, it's not so much bias.

It's the fact that news has become an entertainment vehicle and the monetization of news.

This drive for page views causes reporters to go and in a sense, framed things in a way that in sometimes in government things are not as simple as good guy, bad guy.

There's issues and implications from choices.

And these days you don't have enough reporters, the reporters that you have not have enough time to get public records and get a deep understanding of stories.

And I think that, again, because of the way our industry has traditionally monetized itself and it doesn't realize that, I think a lot of times news becomes packaged as an entertainment product.

Nonprofit media, for example, we've tried to turn that on its head and used news as an engagement product.

And I think at that point we have been getting a very good response at the local level.

The challenge of nonprofit media is that it's not monetized.

It doesn't have the venture capital take off that many of the for profit entities do.

But again, the for profit entities, I think get tied up a bit in the Chase for page views.

I don't know that it's so much biased, but it's trying to package stories in a way to attract readership.

Things like your budget, straight, sweeping pensions, law enforcement oversight.

These are not entertaining topics, but they can be very engaging.

What we found with our readership is that when you put this kind of information that's meant to connect people to their local civic life, it resonates very, very, very strongly.

And every reader survey I've ever seen, things like watchdog investigative reporting are top of the list because people, I think, see that value in it, especially in a local community.

Adam Eric, you are an investigative reporter.

You're certainly not with a nonprofit paper.

The L.A. Times is certainly for profit.

What's your opinion?

The idea that the reporting has has ever been completely and entirely unbiased and neutral is really just a myth.

There's there's no such thing.

I mean, every time you decide to cover a story, you're implicitly staking a claim.

You're saying this story is important to the public.

That's really a form of editorializing in itself.

Then there's the language that we decide to use or not to use.

Let's say we're talking about people in the country illegally, which is how my newspaper terms, people who are here without, you know, were not citizens and who didn't enter the country legally, if you call them undocumented immigrants, you're you're implicitly staking a claim.

If you call them illegal immigrants, you're staking a political claim.

So in the language that we use, we're always kind of staking a political claim.

And I think that we've led the public to believe that entirely unbiased, neutral news reporting is possible when in fact, it's really not.

But, you know, Adam, I think that's one of the dangers.

Yes.

And I was I always kind of objected to the term objective because nobody's really objective.

But I do believe that.

And let's stipulate, journalists, by and large, have always been overwhelmingly liberal.

And I've been in the business for more than 40 years.

That's always been the case.

But it's different now because in the past, yeah, journalists were more liberal, but they were also professionals and they strive to be accurate, They strive to be fair and nuanced.

And now they, you know, the accuracy still there.

I mean, there's good reporting going on, but everything is so biased because everybody's driven for eyeballs or for ratings.

FOX doesn't gain.

A Fox loses its audience a bit, says something nice about Joe Biden and CNN and MSNBC are going to lose viewers if they don't go after Donald Trump.

But you know that even the newspapers, these dying, revenue draining institutions, that ought to be the the the objective, the not the fair and the nuance in their reporting.

Increasingly, Adam, I'm not sure how you feel, but I mean, these young journalists coming up now, they don't they say, you know, objectivity isn't just something.

I mean, they they deny it exists.

And they become advocates and activists.

And they even say that they see their job as a journalist is to be an advocate and an activist.

And that loses that loses a lot of audience unless you're giving, you know, your your audience, the people that you know are coming to you, you give them what they want and, you know, how do you feel about them?

I mean, I really see that in the newsrooms now.

I mean, they're even purging.

You know, if you're a reporter and you say something wrong, you know, I mean, you know, or you're an editor, I mean, how many editors have we seen resigning, you know, either because of something they tweeted 15 years ago or because they're not perceived as being in line with the ideology of the newsroom?

Well, you know, there's a couple of things that actually come out of this thing.

Think one of it is the the financial aspect of how it all works.

I mean, it was literally I remember years ago at the Internet when Craigslist came out and you all said you could put ads for cheap.

Those things used to cost 100, $200.

And the L.A. Times to put an ad in that was the revenue source.

And that revenue source paid for all the reporters.

So I'm on a city council and somebody tries to pull a stunt on a budget or do something weird.

We had reporters to talk to.

They'd follow up on the story.

They'd come back the next day.

It would go on until was solved and people knew what was happening.

You don't have that now.

So now you've got to figure another way to finance your business.

And so you finance it by saying, as you were just saying, to kind of the left or the right or whatever.

And we have out there right now.

So to somebody is it's an illegal alien to somebody, it's it's insurrection, a three and a half hour event, you know, So it's always kind of playing to your audience because you've got to pay the bills.

You got to got to put that out there right now.

And there's really no financial way to do it.

I mean, I was half joking when somebody said The L.A. Times is a for profit organization.

They hope to be a for profit organization, but they may not be a for profit organization because it's very, very hard to finance, you know, these businesses.

Let me get Angela's take on all of this and then we'll go around the table once again.

Angela, your opinion about media bias today?

I'm looking at it from an educator background and how now my fellow colleagues and how we are educating our future journalists.

And when I look at some of the classes that I teach and how students prepare their works of art and their stories.

One thing that is missing that I that I remember when I was taking journalism 1 to 1 is your fact checking and making sure that your facts are correct before everything's in print and what it is is that going back to and I love listening to everyone's opinion, but going back to what I was listening to Elizabeth Espinosa say, it's social media and it's social media has changed how educators can teach journalism and how to be a smart journalist.

And we all do come in with our own bias.

But how do we put that aside and look at the fact facts?

And I think a lot of this is because is when young people who will soon be replacing all of us, we retire when they see journalism, they see how can I get something that goes viral?

How can I get the most like it doesn't matter if I haven't researched it.

And so I think there's so many different angles to this.

Yes, there's the financial angle, just like James said, and also Adams said as well.

But there's also, too, how do we get that next generation to see journalism the way that it should be told and not really put it on?

How many likes can I get?

How big of a following can I get?

And so that's I mean, there's so much there.

There's so many different layers.

Look, I think that news news has to be aggressive and it has to be locally based.

I remember that quote to Orwell.

That news is what they don't want you to know.

Everything else is PR.

And more and more, we live in a world of PR, even where the reporters some days are reporting for government agencies.

I think that the reporters and editors and publishers really have to focus in on what is it that, you know, what is it that the special interests that the government agencies don't want the public to know and then go after that very aggressively?

They should be checking Democrat Republicans at agencies, as Jim retirement said earlier, like in Costa mesa.

We don't know what we don't know.

That's what's very scary right now on the streets of Cuba, people are running around screaming for more freedom and more liberty.

And in many cases here in the United States, we know incredibly small amounts about our local government, how it's financed, how many employees they have, what are the made major jobs, and how can that government help us as citizens, or how can we defend our own quality of life?

So I think that news agencies in a lot of ways should be much more aggressive with everybody, with Republicans, with Democrats, with special interests, with the Chamber of Commerce, with unions.

They should be asking a lot more aggressive questions of all of these government agencies and remembering that there are other countries in which reporters face big threats to ask these kinds of questions.

That's what I mean.

We try to tell our reporters, remember, there are many other reporters across the world that would really die to be able to ask questions of government officials.

And if you aren't frustrating them a little bit and I don't mean that we have a bias, I just mean that reporters should be very difficult.

They should be asking lots of questions.

They should be doing lots of public records, request, you know, this idea of trust with the numbers that you can see as opposed to what a politician says about it.

We celebrate politicians way too much in our media.

I find later on there's an investigative team to come back and tell you how really things are happening.

But too much of the Daily News coverage I find is not aggressive enough and it's not locally based enough for the readers to really see themselves.

And let's talk about diversity to America's newsrooms are the most are the least diverse places in America.

If there was any other employer that had this horrible record of diversity, most reporters would be absolutely tearing into them.

Because I think in some ways other industries are much more diverse.

And we've had this problem in American reporting for years, and it doesn't seem to change.

And I think that's one of the biggest threats that faces American reporting today, that most of America's most of America does not see itself in the news pages or in the news TV programs and content.

And I'm stunned that that more producers and owners don't get that.

I think one of the big things that journalists need to do is sometimes step back, accept the fact that this criticism that's coming from the public, I mean, most most Americans do not trust the media at all.

It's something like 56% believe that journalists intentionally mislead people.

And, you know, I mean, we can sit here and debate that, but we ought to listen to that.

And I don't think you know, Norberto just mentioned diversity.

I think there's plenty of reporting on diversity and certainly newsrooms, lots of other places.

You know, I mean, we're a society obsessed with diversity at this point.

I don't think there's there's that I don't think we need more reporting on diversity item.

We should look at what do people care about.

I would say that they care about safe neighborhoods.

They want good schools.

And, you know, I mean, let's talk about the reporting in the mainstream media about education.

If you want to talk about structural racism, let's talk about inner city public schools.

But you don't hear much discussion about that.

Nobody takes on the teachers unions, you know, and nobody saying even that a lot of this pandemic stuff, you know, having having kids wear masks in school, you never hear from the mainstream media.

The undercurrent about which is pressure from public employees unions.

Now, maybe that's showing my bias In a way, I think so.

But again, as a journalist.

Yes, but but I'm saying the mainstream media takes sides on these things.

You know, one other example, Joe Biden, you know, calling the these four foot these Republican election reform things, Jim Crow 2.0.

You can have a difference of opinion on things, but any objective analysis is that these reforms, yes, are more stringent than the COVID regulations overall.

But they're actually they're more open for voting than what existed before the pandemic.

Angela Anderson, let me just jump in for one second.

Angela Williamson, Norberto talked about more diversity in the newsrooms.

Rick is saying there is enough diversity.

They both have their arguments.

Angela, as I know, I've known you for a while.

You're a centrist person.

You have a very centered approach to things.

I want your take on what Rick and Norberto had to say, and then we're going to get to Adam and Jim.

Rick Heimer.

David, can I just say, I didn't say there's too much diversity.

I just said we're obsessed with correct a person.

Correct.

And I said that American newsrooms are not diverse themselves.

They don't hire people from the communities that they want to sell papers to.

And thus that's why many times they don't look anything like the communities that they report on and don't have a lot of sense of the variety of opinion and issues.

They're impacted because they don't hire in a diverse manner.

It's not so much the reporting is not diverse.

They do not hire, they do not promote.

It's one class of people that have run American newsrooms for 30 years and for the record, have run them into the ground.

Angela Williamson And I'm going to take both under consideration or Raquel and Rick, as I not you, sir.

You know what?

I, I feel a lot and I think you're going back to a lot of conversations that we had behind the scenes.

And now I'll talk about that in front of my colleagues here, is that I believe that when I look at newsrooms now versus when I was, you know, bright eyed and starry eyed person wanting to be in this industry.

I felt in the beginning that I was always listening to both sides of the equation so that I can make a decision.

But when I now look at the media and we talk about diversity, a lot of times I feel that there are statements that are made about groups of people and they are made as a fact instead of an opinion.

And I don't even fit into that especially and we can all look at that when they're saying we want to look at all African-Americans and what they say and they're not getting vaccinated or they are getting vaccinated.

What I'm feeling is that we are now just as journalists and looking at just one side of the story and not asking those questions.

And that's why I think it's so important that we've heard this.

We're not asking those questions to get both sides.

And so when a majority hears one side of the equation, they are taking that as fact.

And I think that's the biggest problem that's right now is that we are saying, well, people aren't educated.

Well, no, let's dig deeper than that.

What kind of information are we giving people?

So they are now making their opinions and making their decisions on it.

And we're only giving them one side of the equation.

We're not giving them what they all the information they should know.

And we all know we don't get all the information to make a decision.

Sometimes that decision is wise.

So I see I see a problem there and and it may go back to having more diversity in the newsroom.

It may go back to saying, no, we just need to stop just focusing on diversity.

We need to look at the entire picture.

I don't know the answer to that.

All I know is that how has the information is being sent and so people are making their decisions based on that.

And that's where I see the biggest problem right now.

And in saying we don't have someone we don't have any organization in the middle and we have journalists that are in the middle, but sometimes they're censored.

You got to start with authenticity.

I think we have to start with a baseline of good information, right?

We've got to get out there and say, what are we doing?

Like, what's the purpose of the story?

It's got to have, you know, the betterment of society, right?

So we've got to hold institutions accountable and we've got to ask the right questions so we can get to the right answer.

It shouldn't be agenda driven.

I think that's a problem.

I will say I remember my experience being a journalist I would go out with sometimes my own preconceived notions of what the story was going to be, and until I got there and asked all the questions again, you have to be open to.

You might suspect this is the story, but when you get there and you get all the facts and you do the homework, you realize maybe it's a different story, it's a different headline.

And so we have to be honest about about the story.

We have to be genuine.

We have to do the work and be prepared.

But I think it's tough because as our colleagues here have mentioned, there are a number of elements happening, right?

There's the we have to survive.

We've got to get good, right?

And then it's it's in a hurry.

It's in a hurry.

24 hour news channels.

You got to feed the beast.

So you got to put content out there.

And even if it's not accurate, nothing is going to fill airtime or you repeat the same story.

And it's horrible because I see it all the time.

Reporters don't have time to get all the whole, you know, for lack of a better term, the whole enchilada to the story.

And they just go on air with what they have.

And that's not doing anybody a service.

The only thing it's doing is filling airtime and giving the viewer, the reader that information.

And I think ultimately it's US citizens, residents.

We all need to make up our own minds with us giving out the information.

Look, there are some people that are never much like the vaccine, right?

So people that are never going to take the vaccine and there are some people that will never believe the media.

Well, that's up to them.

But I think that once you at some point or somewhere, you've got to get the information.

So if we just as journalists go out there like you have done exceptionally well, our is to say, here's the information.

You decide this, this there's this.

Now you decide.

And Adam and Jim, we have a couple of minutes left.

I'm gonna give each of you about a minute.

Adam Emmerich with the L.A. Times talk about regaining the trust.

And then we go to our staunch conservative, Jim Rick Heimer, to talk about regaining the trust.

And we begin with you.

Go ahead.

I agree with Norberto 100%.

And full disclosure, he is my former editor, but one on a couple of things.

One is, you know, I think that journalists have made huge mistakes in the past that massively damaged credibility.

A lot of the people think that we're in league with the elite and powerful with the government.

You know, I think back to the Iraq war, when we went to war on a false claim that Saddam had WMD and The New York Times published uncritically just the garbage that the CIA was was feeding that and the Bush administration was feeding that without vetting it or checking it, that kind of thing that led us into a war that killed hundreds of thousands of people, thousands of American soldiers that was basically assisted by the US media, massively damaged credibility in ways I don't think we fully understand yet.

But the other thing is that I think the Bureau is is completely right.

We need to be challenging the powerful and the government at every turn.

And look, the truth is newsrooms are not diverse enough to fully represent the full spectrum of views in the United States.

We're a very diverse country.

And, you know, even the L.A. Times, we're not is as bad as some papers, but we're we're far short of the diversity of the city of Los Angeles in terms of our staffing and diversity internally.

And if you want the trust of those people, people of color in those communities, you have to have staffing that basically represents that and they have to be able to see themselves in your staff.

If they don't, why would they trust you?

One of the issues that we haven't actually talked about much is what's happening with the canceling of people's voices out there.

Because we're on TV right now, we're doing it.

But, you know, we could be on YouTube or this channel could be put on YouTube.

And what's happening to these loud voices out there that are that have their shows, that have their podcast, that do a show every single day or every single week.

They do a half hour and they're to the left or to the right.

And we've got these situations now where someone decides that we don't like what they said or they say it's not fact check.

I mean, we can't put this stuff out.

I grew up in the generation of of Skokie, Illinois.

When you marched in the streets, the Nazis marched in the streets, and we were taught to just suck it up because that is what it is.

It's better for people to say things.

We can all make a decision about that.

My wife in the morning will look on her phone and see some story and we immediately say, Oh, where did you hear that?

Well, let's check it out.

Let's do it.

People aren't stupid.

We know when there's garbage out there to figure it out.

When they go, when it's when it's basically major organizations.

I think the Republican Party of California was just knocked off of YouTube or somebody a big CNN Australia got one strike on something.

This is crazy to have multibillion dollar corporations.

You talk about controlled multibillion dollar corporations deciding what can be put out or not be put on.

And some algorithm's going to give you three strikes and you're out as if it's a baseball game.

This is information I've always said there's conservatives and there's liberals, and we need both of us to work and operate.

I am inviting you all back formally for a part two of the symposium in a few months.

Are you all there with me there?

Absolutely respectful, meaningful conversations.

Oh, what can I say to my great friends and colleagues?

Elizabeth Espinosa, Norberto Santana, Adam, Eric, Rick Reif, Angela Williamson and Jim Rick Heimer.

Now for more information about our program, just click on KLCS.org and then click Contact us to send us your questions and comments or story ideas so we can hear from you.

I'll definitely get back with you.

Be sure to catch our program here on PBS or catch us on the PBS mobile app for All Things Sustainable.

Thank you so much for joining us for this edition of Sustaining US Here on KLCS PBS.

I'm David Nazar.