[John Ralston] - Hi.

- [Audience member] I'd like to ask a two-part question, if I could.

- You can.

- As a former Sinclair employee, what would be your advice for all of us liberals here in Austin that not only have a FOX station but a Sinclair station, and the other part of my question is, would you please compare Harry Reid to Chuck Schumer?

(several laugh) - I'll answer the second one first.

[Evan Smith]- The second answer will be a fun answer, too.

(several laugh) - So, you know, Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer were very close friends, and they were opposites, and I interviewed Schumer for the book, and it was actually a pretty good interview, although he took some moments during that interview to say, I told you so, saying he gave Reid advice that he didn't take, which I thought was not the most tasteful thing to do because this was after he had passed away.

- He wasn't there to defend himself, right?

- Yeah, right.

But I think, if I had to tell you what I really thought, I think that Reid would not be happy with the job that Schumer's doing.

He would think that you have to be, especially during these times, much more confrontational and smash mouth and have a better message.

And I had some indication from Reid that he wasn't happy with Schumer right before he died, and I think he'd be even less happy now.

So the first question was about - Sinclair and FOX and, yeah.

- Advice to Sinclair, and so can I tell my Sinclair story?

- Go.

- So, I worked for the NBC affiliate in Nevada; my TV show was on the NBC affiliate for many years.

And that small world of Nevada was owned by a guy by the name of Jim Rogers, who was a very, very close friend of Harry Reid's.

And I was not always giving Reid great coverage.

And so, he would regularly, I know this 'cause Rogers told me, call him and complain about me and would often ask him to fire me, which Rogers never did, even though he kind of fired me for an afternoon, and I came back and talked him into letting me on the air that night.

After Rogers passed away, the station was sold to Sinclair, and I told my producer on the day that that happened, our days are numbered.

And a few months later, we got called into the general manager's office, and the show was no longer on NBC, and that's when I went to PBS.

What I found in the archive, and I suspected, this is what I found in the archive, is no matter how hard he had fought with his friend, Jim Rogers, to get me fired, as soon as the show was, the station was sold to Sinclair, they had a license, they had to get approval to get this station, Reid went to them at that very vulnerable time and essentially told them to fire me.

- There's nothing that sounds familiar today, is there?

(Jon laughs) (audience laughs) Right?

- Exactly, exactly.

- I mean, it has real overtones of this minute.

- And I had sensed as much, perhaps at that time, Evan, - Yeah.

- but I found the smoking gun - It was right there.

- with his emails - It was right there.

- Between him and his chief of staff were, and the head of Sinclair being, you know, a genius, sent an email saying, we have taken care of that person that the senator wanted off the air.

Right there in an email.

- Yeah.

- Well, that is now published somewhere in here (laughs).

- Somewhere in this, (audience laughs) in this book.

All right, what else for Jon Ralston?

Anybody else?

- Do you have a question?

- Ma'am, come on.

- We have one more comment.

- [Evan] Thank you.

Hi.

- Hi, hello, good evening.

My name is Viviana Novelo, and I'm a student at UT Austin.

I'm here with my class.

We're in the Plan II honors program.

I just wanna firstly thank you both for being able to take the time out of your day to speak to us; and my question to both of you is, if you had to compare or, yeah, yeah, yes, if you had to compare between the topics that you guys are covering most often, let's say in Texas or in Nevada, in this case, which topics do you find yourself talking about the most?

And I'm curious to see if topics are different depending on the state that you're in and how that kind of contributes to the commentary of the United States as, like, this polarizing country, where people don't really know what sides to take.

(audience laughs) (Jon laughs) - Nothing polarized here.

(Jon laughs) What is the one issue that is animating people right now in Nevada, do you think?

- Well, we talked about this earlier, and I think, because of the large Hispanic population in Nevada, and we also have one of the larger by percentage populations of undocumented workers, even though we're not a border state as Texas is, that issue is huge in Nevada right now, and while it's, ICE is not as visible in Las Vegas as, say, it was in Minneapolis.

- Yeah.

There have been incidents, and we have a great reporter covering that.

And that gets tremendous response from people because I think it goes beyond the immigration issue.

It goes to where we are as a country and what's being done about illegal immigration.

And I think people think that, you know, if you talk about Minneapolis, what, you know, people should not just be shot in the street.

Now, nothing like that has happened in Nevada, but people have been detained for no reason.

The conditions of the which they've been detained are not great, and so, I think people are very, very concerned.

I think it's a touchstone for people of all ideological persuasions, cuts across all demographic groups.

- [Evan] Yeah, I mean, I would say to the question of the differences between Nevada and Texas, here, I'm gonna say there's a similarity.

I do think that the issue of immigration, ICE, I mean, we are the state with the most contiguous miles with the southern border of any in the country.

1.6 million undocumented people in Texas, pre-Trump second term.

Don't know what the numbers are a year later, but it was 1.6 million folks in this country who are in this state who are undocumented.

This is very much our issue, but I will also say a slightly different answer as well.

We have one of the absolutely most interesting senate races going on right now in this state on both sides.

We haven't had a senate race like this in Texas.

Even the 2018 Senate race wasn't as interesting as this race.

- Can I tell you a real funny story about that?

- Yeah.

- The person covering the senate race for "The Texas Tribune," - "The Texas Tribune."

- left me, - We hired her away - left me, yeah.

- from "The Nevada Independent."

(audience laughs) - Left me.

And she left me to because she was attracted to cover this senate race.

She's a great reporter.

- Her name is Gabby Birenbaum.

She is an absolutely terrific reporter.

- She's something tremendous.

She worked for me for a while.

She did a great job for me.

- Yeah.

- When she came to me and said that she had been offered this job, and she was agonizing over it because she did love working at the Indie, and Nevada's a fascinating state to cover.

I said, it's the senate race, right?

And she said, yep.

(audience laughs) - It's a great senate race.

(Jon laughs) Karen.

- How much of, first of all, thank you for coming today.

How much of the legendary turnout political machine of Harry Reid still exists and how does that happen - That's a great question.

- and how can we learn here in Texas on how to turn out voters - That's a great question.

- In elections?

- It is a great question.

So I think reports of the demise of the Reid machine had been greatly exaggerated.

However, it's not what it used to be only because one of the things that Reid was able to do by being the leader is he, and he, unlike a lot of politicians, he loved to raise money.

He loved to twist arms.

You couldn't get the thing, you couldn't get any more money than he did to fund 'cause it cost a lot of money to do this kinda grassroots work, as you probably know.

So it's not as well funded as it used to be.

They've had to make some adjustments.

But even though Lombardo won in 2022, and real quickly, 'cause you, I don't wanna go into the detail, he only won by 15,000 votes.

My argument has been that he should have won that race by about five or six points 'cause the incumbent governor was suffering from what I'd call the COVID hangover.

He had made a lot of controversial decisions, and he had a scandal where a couple of his, one of his donors' two sons that got a COVID testing contract with him was a no-bid contract, and that blew up on him, and Lombardo ran a nearly perfect race and still, still barely won.

So they did their job because they won all the congressional seats, and there's a near supermajority in the legislature, but the state has changed and-- - So you think that was the Harry Reid machine still at work?

- I do.

- That's what almost got - I think they almost saved Sisolak.

- Sisolak over the line.

- I believe it, and they did.

They ended up winning both in '22 and '24, too.

Very, very close senate races.

Jacky Rosen and Catherine Cortez Masto got reelected in very, very close races.

And that was the democratic mschine.

- And, again, that's Harry Reid.

- That's Harry Reid.

- Yeah, sir.

(mic creaks) - Hello, my name's Andrew.

I'm also from UT, the Plan II class that's here.

Thank you so much for coming and answering our questions earlier.

It was really good to hear from you.

This is a bit more general, but I was wondering what would you say about sort of the impact of, like, algorithmic media consumption?

Like, I think a lot of people don't appreciate how much a lot of sort of places people go for media being social media X, in all those spaces, there's sort of a kind of an algorithm that sort of decides what to give to different people.

And so, I mean, how much of an impact do you think that has on sort of this kind of dichotomy where people can kinda go to the same source or website, I should say, and come up with two completely different sets of information on both sides?

I mean, what role does that play?

- [Evan] I suspect we're aligned on this.

Social media has been a cancer on democracy, period, right?

- Yes, absolutely.

Listen, oh, I thought you were gonna go first this time.

(audience laughs) - No.

(Jon laughs) You're the guest.

No, I wasn't raised by a wolf, you know; you get to go first.

- So (laughs).

(audience laughs) - So, listen, this is the greatest age of information in the history of mankind.

And it's also the greatest age of bad, really bad, and malicious information in the history of mankind.

And this is only going to get worse.

And I think it's pretty obvious why, but I'll say it anyhow, because of what is going on with AI, and it is going to, the kinds of things that are gonna happen this election cycle, they're gonna be much different than what happened than last election cycle.

And even though a lot happened, there is going to be so much stuff that it, journalists are not vigilant about this kind of thing, it's gonna do a lot of damage and probably will.

And I think people don't understand the impact that AI is going to have, not just in our business, but in everything, the amount of disruption that's gonna occur.

It was going like this, and it's about to go like this.

- Yeah.

- And it's going to be a real problem.

These algorithms are real, and silos are real, which is the most disturbing thing to me, is that people just can't get out of their own silos, their confirmation bias, the validation culture that exists.

They don't wanna listen to other points of view.

They don't wanna even consider other points of view have any validity whatsoever.

And that's why, and you used the right word, that's part of the reason social media's become a cancer in society, and it's affected our business, too.

And let me just end by saying, ironically, guess how most people get to "The Nevada Independent" site?

- Through that social media?

(Jon laughs) Well, it's, I mean, that, (audience laughs) it's kind of a terrible thing but also we kinda - Yeah.

- need it sort of?

- Yeah, yeah.

- It's awful.

I think the AI thing is exactly, I'm very concerned about AI in this, I think this is the first fully AI-enabled political campaign.

- Yep.

- In all kinds of ways that have the potential to be very dangerous.

- Yep.

- Anything else?

Okay, we're gonna wrap there.

Please give Jon Ralston a big hand.

Thank you all very much - Thank you.

- for coming.

- Thank you.

(audience applauds) - We'll see you again soon.

Good.

(audience applauds)