Santa Barbara Talks with Josh Molina

Santa Barbara Talks: Josh Molina Show Talks Censorship, Media Bias, Local Journalism

Journalist Josh Molina talks about how AI further erodes the quality of journalism and says news outlets should hire more journalists to save the industry. He also talks about media bias, explains what censorship is and what it is isn't talks the difference between on-the-ground news gatherers and influencers. Josh Molina is a college instructor and journalists who interviews people on a variety of issues, including housing, education, culture, business and politics. Santa Barbara Talks is a place for all perspectives to discuss solutions on topics that affect all of us. Visit SantaBarbaraTalks.com to make a contribution. Please hit subscribe on YouTube.

Duration:: 17m
Broadcast on:: 10 Sep 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

Hey everyone, welcome to Santa Barbara Talks with Josh Molina if you're new to this podcast, please hit subscribe on YouTube and also visit SantaBarberTalks.com, consider making a contribution to support these podcasts. I want to talk to you for about 15 minutes about journalism and a couple of things related to artificial intelligence as well as the importance of journalism and local news and a little bit of media bias. Let me talk to you first about this story that recently came out where ESPN will be using AI to write stories. This is for lower level stories, high school, college, professional sports that they deem as important, but that are not really big enough to devote lots of real human resources to it. This is the dumbest idea on the planet. This is terrible, and we need to invite we, journalists, but really the public, non-journalists as well. We need to really push back on this and stop normalizing the use of AI as a potential way to news gather. I'm going to end with AI. I want to give you some data, some statistics first. ESPN should be hiring reporters, not figuring out ways to get by with fewer of them. There are 204 counties without any local news outlet in this country. This is according to a Northwestern study, and 1,562 counties only have one remaining local news source. This is the real issue. The real issue is not about embracing AI. The real issue is we need to hire more reporters. If you're a news agency, if you're a news outlet, we want to figure out a way to support human beings, reporting, researching, and writing stories that benefit everybody. This country loses two and a half newspapers per week. This is a pace that's accelerating, and we have lost 43,000 journalism jobs since 2005. That's about two-thirds of the number of journalists that we had. This is ridiculous. I want to just talk to you a little bit about this. If you're one of these people who is cheering the decline of journalism, of the news media, you're being part of the problem, you're being ridiculous, and you're showing your own lack of media literacy. No one should be happy or cheering that we have fewer people to exercise their First Amendment when it comes to freedom of speech and news gathering. This is a decline that hurts all of us. Let's talk a little bit about why this is important. When you lose journalists in a local community, when you lose them in the state, across the country, that means you have fewer people who are down in the stories. Fewer people who are comforting, de-afflicted, and afflicting the comfortable. That's what we do. We seek to equalize the distribution of information so that everybody has the power equal access to know what's going on in the world and make decisions. That's what we do here. We're not activists in the sense of we want a certain outcome. We are activists in the sense of we want information to be shared among everybody. That's a problem. That's a challenge because people who have information generally don't want to share it. We want to continue to benefit from that information and benefit from the fact that people have less information. It perpetuates their systems, their wealth, and their power. The people without those, they're kept in the dark. Therefore, we never see this gap closing between the haves and the have-nots because people in power, technically, for the most part, don't want to share it or they'll share it just enough so that it doesn't affect them too much. That's where journalists come into play. We are there to comfort the afflicted and what does that mean? People don't have time to go to a government meeting. They don't have time to hold the Board of Supervisors or the City Council or any government agency accountable because they are, in many cases, certainly in this community, working multiple jobs, trying to pay the bills, paying for all of the expenses that we have in a community like this, but we're not that unique. This goes on all over the state, the country, people are doing that. They don't have the time, but we journalists do. It is our job to go out there and shine a light, sunshine, make sure that people are making the right decisions in the light of day that benefit the most amount of people. That's what we do. When we have fewer journalists to do that, that means everyone suffers and I don't care if you're a liberal, I don't care if you're a conservative, I don't care if you're a libertarian. It doesn't really matter. We all suffer. There's people saying, "Well, Josh, the media has only got itself to blame for its decline because of its agenda and its ability to want to benefit certain people at the expense of others." This is an argument we hear most often from conservatives. We do hear it from people on the left as well. But that is wrong. That is just nonsense. Journalism is not declining because journalism is declining because we don't have enough reporters to cover the news. This is to blame because we have had changes in technology. We have the fact that people can access information, word of mouth, on the internet, social media, anybody can say anything. It can be tweeted. Do we still call them tweets? It can be shared. It can be posted. As a culture, as a society, we've come to accept that as almost at the same level of a traditional legacy media outlet would produce. That's not right. If you're somebody who is cheering the death of local media and you're blaming us for that, that's blaming the victim. That is horrible. There are fewer advertisers who support local news. The advertisers went targeted directly the audience. On the internet, through digital ads, they are targeting them based off how they use the internet. They don't have a general ad that says people who read newspapers. There aren't still some who advertise, of course, but it's far fewer. When news agencies have less dollars, fewer dollars, they can't hire as many journalists. What does that mean? That's a self-perpetuating problem. If you have fewer journalists, whether you're liberal or conservative, that means fewer people to cover the issues you care about, fewer people to dig in and uncover and investigate and expose issues that are going on in a community. That means that we all suffer. Journalism, just a quick note. If you're over there reading the Babylon Bee, if you're over there reading the Onion or you watch Man Shapiro or Matt Walsh for the Daily Wire people or liberal, like David Pac-Man or Don Lemon, if you're one of these people, you're like, "This is what we need in the mainstream media." You're wrong. We don't need that in the mainstream media because those people are biased. That's okay. If we understand what we're viewing or what we're watching, they're not trying to be on the ground, being burst-hand news gatherers. They are speaking to their audience and they have a perspective. That's fine. There's a place for all of that. I certainly get caught up on YouTube watching all of these people and just sort of marveling at, like, "I can't believe this content that they're putting out." The problem is, if you're watching any of that content or anything on the internet and you're thinking, "That's news," you're wrong. That's not news. I think Comedy Central and John Stewart, they reintroduced to a whole generation of how to consume news, make it by me. We have to understand what we're reading. I'm not saying there's not a place for all of that. There clearly is because all of these outlets are popular, but don't blame the media for being biased because you're watching these outlets and you think that's how the mainstream media should be. The mainstream media makes everyone happy and no one happy at the same time. You know how hard it is to be able to talk to people in power, to talk to people who don't feel like they have a voice and try to get them to say things on the record and research it and report it and write it in a way that everyone sort of feels like they get some value? That's really difficult. We have a First Amendment right to report, to talk. There's nothing that forces anybody to talk to journalists. No one has to really talk to us outside of law enforcement or government in certain situations. That's a challenge. Whether you're a rookie reporter, whether you're a reporter with 20, 30, 40, 50 years, if there's fewer of us, we're not going to get those stories that you want. Whether they're stories, whether it's the housing story or whether it's the state street story, or whether it's the budget story, whatever your perspective is, whatever you think is news, if we don't have journalists to cover those, you're not going to get it. So we need to stop blaming the victim. The victim, the journalists, we're seeing fewer of them. Newspapers are still laying off people. They've been laying off people for 20 years. They've been forcing people into buyouts. We have a smaller group of people. If you're the Rams and you're like, "We're going to win the football game with five people on the field," and you're going up against the Lions with 11 on the field, and then you're blaming the Rams because they suck and they can't win a game, well, who's wrong there? That's what we see in the news media. You're expecting journalists to be this thing in your head that you think we should be when there's just not enough of us to do it. So fine. It's not your problem to solve all the business model issues that are happening in the industry, but don't blame us for being biased at the same time because we're all just trying to do everything that we can. Okay. Journalists, the ones who have left the industry, they go into public relations. They go work for the governments that they cover, and they get treated better. They get paid better. I mean, some PR people in this town are making three, four times more than the journalists. They have to get a prepared statement and send to the journalists when the journalists reach out to them. Think about that, okay? So this is an issue, no matter what your political spectrum is, we have fewer journalists trying to do the right thing. And I want to talk to you just real briefly, you know, because this idea spends censorship. There's all this talk like, oh, well, there's censorship going on on X or, you know, this political candidate promises to crack down, you know, a lot of that stuff is not just not true. In the context, it's old video, it's edited to make it seem like it's something else. If you're somebody who's perpetuating political agendas and then send the media is not covering it, it's probably because there's a reason why the media is not covering. It's probably because it's not true or it's taken out of context. So please understand that. And by the way, it is not censorship. You cannot force a private entity or company to publish what you want them to publish. The First Amendment does not guarantee that. The First Amendment guarantees you, me as an individual, to say and publish what I want on my platform that I create on my own. It does not guarantee me a right to go publish on the LA Times's new site or any other media outlet or Google or X does not because those are private companies. So the other question then is, well, just, you know, it's suppression then if it's not censorship. Sure. Okay. But I always have a hard time with how conservatives sort of talk about the free market, the free market, the free market. And then when it comes to the media, they call it censorship. You know what the free market says? The free market says, if any company does not want you on their platform too bad, we'll find a different platform. And we've seen that. We've seen media start rumble or these other conservative outlets. I mean, the Daily Wire is a great example of that, okay? But don't cry foul if these liberal outlets or any other outlet doesn't allow you to publish whatever you want because it's not a First Amendment right, read a publish on someone else's platform, the First Amendment right to publish on your own platform. That's why you can go protest. That's why you can go rally. That's why you can start an underground paper and publish it because you have that right, but you can't force someone else to say here, publish my stuff, all right? So stop calling it censorship, okay? Finds, you know, if the market doesn't want your stuff, then find an outlet that does. And that works. You know, we've seen that. We've seen liberal media rise from that. We've seen conservative media rise through that. So stop complaining or understand what you're talking about if you're going to do that. So please support local journalists, support local journalism, whether that's through advertising, whether that's through contributions, whether that's just, you know, taking, you know, sending an email to a journalist and saying you do a great job or whatever, because blaming the journalist for what's wrong in our country, what's wrong in our communities is like the worst possible thing that you can do, whether it's ESPN using AI or it's any other outlet that is using artificial intelligence to take the work away from journalists. It's, it's a bad thing, you know, it's like, I guess, like the self check out at Albert since, you know, they still have a person there to make sure that everything goes right. But, you know, that's not a union worker who's there helping check you out. And so we need to push back on that. We need to resist AI AI cannot replace any of us. You can't replace a Nick Welsh poodle can't replace a, you know, Jerry Roberts, newsmakers, story can't replace my news reporting, it can't replace any of us, whether you like us or don't like us, whether you think we're biased or not biased, you can't replace us because we're the ones on the ground trying to do this work and it's a tough job, right? And just a reminder, we're not trying to make you happy. We're not trying to make you like us. We're not trying to make you say, great job, right? We're trying to actually just say, hey, here's all this information and you need to know about it and you can decide what you're going to do with it on your own. And we do want you to respect us, respect us for trying, respecting us to, respecting us for doing everything we can to get information out there and remembering we're not perfect and there's fewer of us and there's far more of them than there is us in this daily battle of trying to access and distribute news. So please understand that, and please have some respect for the industry. And by the way, that big debate we got coming up with Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, let's hope those moderators push back, it's nothing worse than a debate where the moderators sit on their hands and let the people say whatever they want. So looking forward to that, you know, journalists are important, we're important in many ways. Thank you. Thanks for your time. Please hit subscribe on YouTube. Visit Santa Barbara Talks and I welcome any feedback, emails, anything, all right. Thanks a lot. Have a great day. Read a daily newspaper, weekly newspaper, read any kind of newspaper online in print today and understand that we need journalists. We need more of them immediately right away. Thanks a lot. [BLANK_AUDIO]