Former Michigan TV anchor, Dave Bondy, had it all. On the surface, it sure looked like it. So, why did he give it all up? Why did he decide to pull the plug and leave it all behind?
Dave dishes while talking the latest stories you won’t hear anywhere else on this latest episode. He shares how the sausage is made.
Dave spills the good, the bad, & the ugly about what he saw from the inside and why he left..
Get Dave’s exclusive reports on LOCALS: https://davebondy.locals.com
Transcript
Dave Bondy
[00:00:00] Dave: two and a half years ago, I almost had a panic attack on the air.
[00:00:03] Dave: I’ve never told that to anyone. Because of just the stress and just everything going on. And then I knew, I said I gotta do something.
[00:00:11] Get ready to strap in, it’s going to be a heck of a ride. It’s like drinking from a fire hose. Never a dull moment. But yes, you’ll hear the stories you won’t hear anywhere else, and we appreciate you being here with us for today. I’m Justin Barclay.
[00:00:29] Justin: Welcome in. Our guest is Dave Bondy. You know him cuz he keeps it real. He’s a man who is in mainstream media and he gave it all up. He kind of unplugged just to start his own thing and do some other things behind the scenes. We’ll find out exactly what he’s up to, but Dave has an amazing page over on locals now, so we’ll give you the, uh, address so you can go find him and dig in.
[00:00:52] Justin: I wanna talk to Dave about all kinds of things. Why he left, what he saw, what he experienced behind the scenes while he was there, and, uh, [00:01:00] maybe we’ll get him to spill the beans on some stuff he’s never talked about before. Dave Bondy, welcome in, man. Appreciate you hanging with us, uh, on this podcast.
[00:01:08] Justin: We’re taping this on a Friday night, so it’s kind of like a, a different feel for me and I think it, it probably is for you. But, uh, thank you for doing this, man.
[00:01:17] Dave: Yeah, it’s great to be here. We’ve talked for, oh, it’s been maybe a couple years now. Mm-hmm. And off and on and, uh, about social media and other things.
[00:01:25] Dave: And you’re right now I am, I feel free. After leaving TV news, I was in local TV news for 25 years. Wow. Seven different stations. Yeah. And honestly, I was afraid I would miss it. I don’t miss it at all.
[00:01:40] Yeah.
[00:01:41] Justin: How so? How old are you? 48. Okay. So you’re a little older than me, but you, uh, you, you kind of did what I did in radio.
[00:01:49] Justin: You, you bounced around, climbed the ladder, and, and, uh, you’ve been worked in some pretty, uh, pretty big markets, fund markets, and, uh, you probably got a chance to see. [00:02:00] Like everything from the inside out, the good, the bad, and the ugly. Oh yeah.
[00:02:04] Dave: I was in, the last market was Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, top 25 market.
[00:02:09] Dave: And I went down in size to come back home because my mom was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Um, and I was starting to realize as I get older, family is obviously really, really important. And maybe with you, I’ve, I’ve had the chances to move to, um, heck just about five months ago I was, had an offer to go to Washington, DC for a network to do digital news.
[00:02:32] Dave: And I just, I had to say no because I live in a nice community. I’m not gonna say where I live cuz there’s crazy people out there, as you know. Um, but family, it’s all about family. It’s not about moving up the corporate ladder anymore. For me, it’s about my kids now. And I know you have. The you’re in the same situation.
[00:02:50] Dave: It’s about making their life better. And me going to New York City or DC I definitely wasn’t gonna do it. And, um, it’s time to stop moving. I’ve been [00:03:00] in too many places.
[00:03:02] Justin: Yeah, I know what you mean. That kind of happened to me in 2012. I left, uh, Detroit and, um, I had some opportunities to go to a couple places, Philadelphia and, and a few other places.
[00:03:16] Justin: And I just decided like, this is it. We’re home. Uh, my wife is from where we’re at in, in, uh, west Michigan and Grand Rapids. And, uh, we wanted to be back with family. And, um, that made all the difference. And I kind of settled in here and I was just like, man, I think you, uh, I, I get the sense that you’re like me.
[00:03:37] Justin: It’s like, you know, there’s so, there, there’s, I’ve done all that other stuff. I’ve cl it was kind of empty. Yes. Did you, did you feel that way too? I mean, did you get to like, there’s like to this idea, like I think it’s in media, it’s, it’s in all kinds of different, but you gotta climb this ladder and once you get to that top rung, it’s gonna feel so good and just, just, uh, felt empty.[00:04:00]
[00:04:00] Dave: Yeah. It, it, it did And all. But also the, the, the medium media changed over the last five, six years. Yeah. It’s not what it was When I was in college. I interned at CNN in 1997. Now CNN in 1997, they’re not even a shell of themselves. What? They were back, but they are totally nothing like they were. Um, when I interned there, Tucker Carlson was at c n n.
[00:04:27] Dave: Um, but back in the day, at least c n n News was news. Editorial was editorial. Mm-hmm. Now he got CNN and it’s editorial every 20 seconds thrown in. So, and even in the last five years, and we’ll get into this with Covid, even on the local level, things have changed. Um, investigative reporting doesn’t exist that much on the local level.
[00:04:50] Dave: There are many stations that do it, but I’ll talk about Flint, where corporations are just sucking the money and the talent out. It’s, [00:05:00] it, it’s sad. It, it’s really changed and I thought I would miss the breaking news part when there’s big breaking news, but yeah, I don’t, and one last thing I knew I was, I knew I was ready to get out when the Michigan State University shooting happened, and the boss asked me, would you like to go field, anchor the news from there and you can, you know, try to talk to students and so forth?
[00:05:20] Dave: And I just said, no, I, I’m done. I, I’m, I’m done with that. And then I knew that, yep, I could walk away.
[00:05:30] Justin: There is this, um, uh, I’ve seen it with, with tv, but it, I think it’s, it’s in all media in a lot of ways. But like there is this, um, idea that like the story is bigger than anything else. And, and, uh, there’s this very human thing that you just talked about, like you’re dealing with human beings and some of the toughest parts, some of the toughest points of, of their lives for a lot of folks, massive tragedy, trauma, all these things.
[00:05:58] Justin: Um, but they want you to [00:06:00] go stick a microphone in somebody’s face. And it really is about the ratings or the clicks now, more than ever. More than, than it is about that person for sure. They, they don’t. They don’t seem to care about the human being. No.
[00:06:14] Dave: And I, I work with, and work worked with amazing people, but, um, not at my pass station, but when I worked in, I’ll tell you a story about that.
[00:06:23] Dave: When I worked in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, there was a mass stabbing at a high school. A kid stabbed 19 people so you can, you know, ban knives. Um, but he stabbed 19 people and the networks flew into town and you probably know what a network booker is. Mm-hmm. They, you know, they book guests. But at the network level, they are intense.
[00:06:45] Dave: A, B, C news gets five people on a plane, flies them into the town where the tragedy is happening. And the goal of those network bookers are to get the victims’ families crying on Good Morning America at whatever cost it [00:07:00] is. And I’ve seen them in major, big events and over my years, networks offer after offer victims families, Disney tickets, um, uh, Cancun tickets, tickets to New York.
[00:07:14] Dave: Um, one time they even offered to, or they did buy a family, all new furniture if they would go on camera, that happens. And I saw it and I was just disgusted. And that’s the network level And at the local level, I had a boss I at, at a former station, um, there was a mother in Saginaw. Narrowing it down now, but not, not my last station that her chil a child was shot and killed in a drive-by like a five, six year old girl.
[00:07:43] Dave: And I went to, you know, we have to interview the family. I went to the door, she said, get the hell outta here. I left respectful obvi. I didn’t wanna stick around. My boss says, you have to get her on camera, you have to get her crying. I said, no, I don’t. And he said, take my credit card. Go buy a dozen roses.
[00:07:59] Dave: [00:08:00] Whatever it takes. Get her on camera. Oh my goodness. I refused. I was suspended for three days. That’s the rare exception with me. But it happens. It happens more to other reporters. I’ve had good experiences, but those are the bad. But all it takes is that bad experience to give the bad name to all of us.
[00:08:19] Justin: Yeah. And I think there’s something that, uh, that does to your soul, you know, uh, after so many times of dealing with that, you become in empty, you become, um, numb to it all. Did you, did you feel that, I mean, did you experience like, uh, like there was, uh, something along those lines when you covering
[00:08:41] Dave: those sort of things?
[00:08:42] Dave: Yeah, it was, yeah. I mean, I would have to distance myself on just horrible, horrible tragedies or I wouldn’t be, it would hit me at night when I’d go home or, you know, when I’d come home and see my kids. Just, I don’t know how police officers [00:09:00] do it. I, you know, I do not know how they mentally, I, that’s why I give them so much credit all the time that they’re able to do what they do and what we do is nothing near what they do.
[00:09:11] Dave: Mm-hmm. But being around all of that, um, It’s tough. And also why I left. I think the media focuses too much on the bad. I was at a station. Yeah. Where all we did was literally ambulance chase. We would go cover every crash, every fire, every murder. And, and they’d want us to interview the victim’s family of every murder, every deadly fire and mm-hmm.
[00:09:33] Dave: It got to be, it got to be so much. I’m like, I don’t think people wanna see all this. Yeah. So it, yeah, you’re right. It, it was tough. Um, but I have a heart. But if I wanted some people who don’t care, like some network executives or bookers, you know, I know people real quick. I was a photographer, my first job in Evansville, Indiana, and there was a reporter,
[00:09:56] Justin: I dunno if you know this, but that’s my hometown.
[00:09:58] Justin: Evansville. [00:10:00] Yeah. The, we, we got a little back, little back connection there. What station did you work at? W E V V. It
[00:10:06] Dave: was CBS 44. Yeah. Yeah. What year was I there? 1999.
[00:10:13] Justin: I was gone. Probably gone by then though. Well, no, actually, Dave, I was working for W S T O in 1999.
[00:10:22] Dave: Is that, are they in Evans?
[00:10:24] Justin: 96.1? Is the, yeah, on the casino.
[00:10:27] Justin: It was hot 96 or something like that at the time. I don’t remember what they called. Those were the
[00:10:31] Dave: days.
[00:10:33] Justin: Wow. Yeah. It’s a small world. We were downtown, we were right by, we were probably right by where you guys were too at the time. Yeah, yeah. I was making 18,000 a
[00:10:41] Dave: year
[00:10:41] Justin: and, uh, oh dude, that was, those were the days, man.
[00:10:43] Justin: I remember, I think before that I was not quite making that much. My fir like my first, it was 19 if I could just make $19,000. Yeah. But man, you were doing what you loved, right? Doing what I
[00:10:55] Dave: loved. Mm-hmm. And, um, how’d I relate to this? Oh, there a [00:11:00] reporter. I was a photographer. I took any job I could get to start out and I was a photographer and Wow.
[00:11:06] Dave: A reporter I would go out with. It was highly unethical. He would ask people when he was interviewing them, I remember. And I was, and I was like, is this normal? He would ask people, okay, your mother, your mother just died. Can you repeat and say how you felt in under 10 seconds and cry a little bit? Oh my gosh.
[00:11:23] Dave: Guess what? He ended up in Chicago at the network level. Oh my God. Um, but I quickly learned then that yeah, it’s, it’s interesting. But yeah, it’s a small world, but it was the good time. Is that the
[00:11:36] Justin: psychopath, is this a level of psychopath or psycho, like what’s, because you have to be kinda like disc disconnected somehow emotionally from all that
[00:11:46] Dave: stuff.
[00:11:46] Dave: Yeah. I, and I, I could never do that. No, I could not be like that. And I was still emotional on every, on many of the stories. It, it would hit me and it, it took a toll and my wife was happy I left that job because [00:12:00]emotionally it was for several reasons. It was getting tough and Yeah. Yeah, like two years ago, two and a half years ago, I almost had a panic attack on the air.
[00:12:11] Dave: I’ve never told that to anyone. Um, because of just the stress and just everything going on. And then I knew, I said I gotta do something.
[00:12:20] Justin: Well, what was it that drove that? Was it just culmination of everything or was there a particular
[00:12:25] Dave: culmination of everything of, you know, where we were, where I worked, staffing, the corporate where I worked, they were cutting, cutting, cutting, cutting.
[00:12:34] Dave: I was working 16, 17 hours a day cuz I was a social media manager as well. Oh boy. Um, and, and always just trying to, I’m a person that I wanna win no matter what. And we were competing against stations that had much bigger staffs and I was still trying to compete, but also wanting to do stories and challenge narratives that really wasn’t allowed to do.
[00:12:56] Dave: So I was feeling bad that I couldn’t, you know, the [00:13:00]masks, when the mask masks first came out. I wanted to ask someone. Okay. Tell me the real science, what beg, you know, and like I interviewed Megan or recently. Interesting. Yeah. And I couldn’t, so it, it just all hit me at one time. And I remember being on air and I’ve just started freaking out and I’m like, okay, this is physically, so two years
[00:13:22] Justin: ago that was like right in the middle of the chaos, the insanity, all
[00:13:26] Dave: that.
[00:13:27] Dave: Yeah. And you know, I, I did work for a good place. They did let me challenge things, challenge the narrative. Um, but it was just the stress of also where I worked, they were cut and staff left and right. Yeah. And it was, yeah, literally right now they have two reporters on staff too. So
[00:13:43] Justin: this is something, uh, so there’s two things I want to, I wanna come back.
[00:13:47] Justin: You wanna unpack some of, they said challenge the narrative. So I wanna get into that. What does that mean? But also, uh, so remind, we’ll come back to that, but also you just said, um, something I think is very important. Most people don’t realize. [00:14:00] I think when you, you get a chance to look behind the curtain and see how the sausage is made, like you just said.
[00:14:04] Justin: So there’s, they’re cutting people. There’s not a lot of people there. Like at a, at a radio station, we used to have a full, um, a news radio station. We had a full newsroom. You had people doing stor. Now there’s barely any people there. So you’ve got lots of kids who are just outta college. They’re trying to keep up.
[00:14:23] Justin: They barely even know, you know, what the world is like, you know, let alone try to understand some of these complex stories. And on top of it, there’s not a lot of staffing and so there’s a number of things that go into it. But TV and radio in some ways are, um, struggling to stay relevant in a lot of ways and television particularly.
[00:14:49] Justin: Um, is that what’s driving a lot of this kind of race to the bottom stuff?
[00:14:58] Dave: It’s sad. It’s honestly [00:15:00] sad because the ones who are hurting are the viewers. Yeah. The people who rely that. The station I used to work at, they have two reporters right now. And our market, we cover Flint, Saginaw, bay City, Midland, Mount Pleasant, the thumb area.
[00:15:15] Dave: We all go all the way up to Ross Common, two reporters. You cannot properly cover that area. You can’t cover the City of Flint with two reporters. Yeah. And there is no such thing now as investigations or holding officials accountable that doesn’t exist at, at this level. Yeah. So, so break
[00:15:33] Justin: it down. Tell people like not, not how Dave Bondy gets his news and how he gets his stories, but like, how does it work in the average newsroom?
[00:15:44] Justin: Is there a place that. People are getting, you know, like the wire, you know, or whatever. They’re getting their stories. It’s coming down from one sort of centralized place. They’re maybe rewriting them if they’re lucky [00:16:00] here and there. Or they’re just taking what they have pulled down off the wire. They’re ripping and reading it.
[00:16:06] Justin: And what’s that look like? How is the sausage made behind the scenes?
[00:16:10] Dave: It’s, it’s more so what you just mentioned years ago. It was more local actually. You know, getting out on the street. When I started I was, I had beats, I covered crime, transportation and I had to, and when I worked in Pittsburgh even, and that was.
[00:16:27] Dave: 10 years ago I had three counties I had to cover and I would meet with police and courts and I’d work a beat, I’d break my own stories. Yeah. And that really, it doesn’t happen now. And most of the content associated press, so their, their gospel, whatever they say. Yeah. That makes new, that’s your big story of the day, usually
[00:16:47] Justin: the ap.
[00:16:47] Justin: So, so for people who aren’t, aren’t familiar, the Associated Press, what is that organization?
[00:16:54] Dave: And they’ve been around, I dunno, for how long, but, um, basically a nonprofit, I [00:17:00] believe, I’m not sure a lot of the history of the ap, but they were the, were, in my opinion, the gold standard of. News, if they said something, it was factual.
[00:17:09] Dave: It was usually non-biased, and it was just the information. And they have every newsroom in the country, radio, tv. Most places would get, uh, a little, you know, light would pop up on your screen, AP news alert and it, you press it and it’d give you the stories and every newsroom in the country would get it.
[00:17:28] Dave: And, um, they’ve even changed as well, but we rely way more on them. But also, C n n a lot of people don’t know this, that in this market and even in Grand Rapids, um, c n N has a side business called CNN News Source, and they provide video and scripts to all the local stations in the country, and they send them down on the satellite for all the local stations to use.
[00:17:55] Dave: And it’s good, like if I, we can’t make it to Detroit or Grand Rapids and something’s [00:18:00] happening, but they also have reporters. That send down their scripts and their packages as they’re called. Yeah. And we’re running and all the local stations are running lots of that. They don’t say C Nnn. Right. But they are, and that’s contents being filled as well.
[00:18:15] Dave: And the company I work for, the reason they could lay off a lot of people, they’re hubing it out of the corporate headquarters and they’re just feeding it all down from corporate. So the local part of it, you’re right’s not there. And news releases, um, the governor, governor Whitmer, she is, I will give her credit, she is amazing at writing news releases and with these young, young reporters and with a lack of staff at stations mm-hmm.
[00:18:39] Dave: Whitmer. And you’ve seen them probably the news releases, she writes them as to ready to air. Yes. You could read ’em on the air, on the radio probably, but you’re not supposed to do that. But it, it gets on the air, it gets on the web because it’s easy and fast to do cuz there’s no staff. Everyone’s hurrying, but the, the people are hurting.
[00:18:58] Dave: So,
[00:18:58] Justin: so to [00:19:00] one of the things, uh, To your point, and this has been like this for a while, but when in a, in another day and age, I lost your voice. What’s that? Did you lose me? Uhoh got some technical issues here. Dave lost me for some reason.
[00:19:21] Dave: Can you hear me now? Hold on. I lost your audio and I’m not sure why.
[00:19:25] Dave: It’s cuz we’re talking about the truth. Lemme plug into a headphone here and see if that’ll work. We’re share,
[00:19:29] Justin: we’re sharing the truth. I was just gonna share, actually, uh, I’m gonna share something, a story about
[00:19:36] Dave: actually, sorry.
[00:19:38] Justin: Oh no, it’s all good man. You got me now? No, I do not.
[00:19:49] Dave: Can you hear me, sir? I got you. Yeah. Okay. Oh, now I hear you through this earpiece I have. Okay. All good. I apologize days,
[00:19:58] Justin: you know. Yeah, I got one [00:20:00] too. But look at this. This is when we’re starting to share the, the juicy stories and the true Dave, I’m gonna have to send you one of these here, gonna have to send you a tinfoil hat.
[00:20:10] Justin: So like, that’s why we’re, we’re, we’re sharing the truth right now. That’s why, that’s why I cut out. Yeah. Um, uh, so, so no, here’s, so this is. Th this is, uh, from a different time, but I used to do, like, I’m a reformed radio shock jock. I sometimes I say like, so I spent all this time, uh, doing, um, you know, rock radio, top 40 radio doing, um, uh, nights and then morning shows and like, uh, part of the, the, the, the deal in radios, you, you’d wanna get as many people to listen to as possible.
[00:20:42] Justin: And what this really means is ratings. And how they determine ratings is, there’s a company now, it’s called Nielsen. Nielsen bought Arbitron. Arbitron was the company. They send you a little letter in the mail and in, in the mail would be this little, would you like to take part in our survey? And so [00:21:00] they will ask you to sit and listen to radio stations.
[00:21:02] Justin: At least that’s kind of how it sounds. Listen to your radio stations and uh, tell us what you listed. Write it down like journal form, diary form is how you did it. So in order to be remembered, you had to constantly do. Things that kept you top of mind, you’re looking for outrageous. This is where the shock jack thing came from.
[00:21:21] Justin: So you’re looking for outrageous things to do. So we were looking quite, quite a bit to do things that would get us on TV or talked about in other ways. And one of the things that I noticed was it had friends in TV and things like that, but that, that they just, you, you all you had to do if you wanted to get on TV was just take something that was happening already in the news and then create an event or something around it that was coverable and a visual a a lot of times.
[00:21:56] Justin: Um, and I got, man, I got press all [00:22:00] over the world. I’m gonna tell you some things that I’m not proud of now at this point. Uh, we did one contest. Do you remember the Jonas Brothers? Oh yeah. Yeah. So the Jonas Brothers, they had a big deal at the time. Um, they had a purity. Ring that they wore and they were saving themselves.
[00:22:17] Justin: And of course, at this point in time, it was completely different person. Uh, uh, uh, you know, thank thankfully, uh, uh, you know, I’m saved. Uh, you got the redemption, you know. But, uh, we did this thing where, um, we called it Jumpa Jonas, and we wanted you to send us proof that you that Well, I was just convinced these kids were lying and this was all a marketing scheme and, you know,
[00:22:44] Dave: oh, that’s what I thought too.
[00:22:45] Dave: Yeah.
[00:22:45] Justin: Send us proof that, uh, that, uh, that they are, so to speak. And, uh, we’ll give you a $10,000 reward. This thing went like worldwide. I mean, it got covered. Remember eNews and all that stuff? I mean, it called c n n, all of [00:23:00] that. Um, when I was doing rock radio at the time, um, there was a, there was a movie or a TV show called, I think it was like fugitive or something about escape.
[00:23:13] Justin: Convicts or something, and they had a prize package that they wanted to send you or listeners to LA to watch a taping of this thing. And it was like, okay, that’s kind of cool, but like, it’s a show. Nobody really cares about this. Let’s do something with it. So we did a contest or we took like three people in the radio station van into the middle of a neighborhood.
[00:23:36] Justin: This is a horrible idea. I
[00:23:37] Dave: mean, this was really, I’m liking where this might be going. Um,
[00:23:41] Justin: so we took, took these people into the middle of a a, a neighborhood, dropped them off wearing orange jumpsuits and they had to make their way back to the radio station. The first one who got back there won, would win the trip.
[00:23:55] Justin: So this happened in Tampa, Florida. And uh,
[00:23:57] Dave: wait, did this go viral? Was this all over [00:24:00] the place?
[00:24:00] Justin: Yeah, CNN worldwide. I remember this. Somebody, a mom driving. To school. The kids at school sees this freaks out, thinks they’re really escaped, convicts running through the, and I just, I feel horrible about this now, but this is what we, this is the kind of thing we used to do.
[00:24:17] Justin: Yeah. And, um, it got, she, she called the police. They scrambled the choppers. I mean, it was big. The sheriff, I mean, we, I, I’m surprised I didn’t get fired for either one of us.
[00:24:28] Dave: I remember that. I,
[00:24:31] Justin: CNN picked it up, covered it. I mean, I went, it, it was, it was, it was huge. Um, but we would, we would have the, this was vi this was going viral before I.
[00:24:40] Justin: Going viral was a thing, but we just learned like all you had to do. We would do that with small things and, and we would do that with, with big things like this too. But, um, all you had to do was do their job for them. That’s literally what we decided. It’s that pe it’s hard enough, you know what it’s like inside.
[00:24:57] Justin: So we, we would do their job [00:25:00] for them and we had relationships with these guys and we say, Hey, this is what’s happening, or this is what’s going on, and you might wanna, so they send the, the cameras out and then we get covered. We get, you know, people are talking about us. Everybody’s win-win. But that’s my background of understanding how those, what you said is how those things work.
[00:25:19] Justin: And Yep. We were making fake news before fake news was a thing we were talking about, but this is a, this is reality. I mean, unfortunately. Mm-hmm. Um, as you talk about, they’re looking for, Their job. It’s just like anybody else. They’re looking for their job to be done and as quickly and easily as possible.
[00:25:39] Justin: And if you could just pass this off to somebody, that’s what you saw, right?
[00:25:43] Dave: Yeah. And they’re making it easy to do. Like I said, I give Governor Whitmer extreme credit also Republicans and Democrats and that’s what they do. The, they, they make it extremely easy. Um, you probably read her news releases before.
[00:25:56] Dave: Mm-hmm. You could go on the air and read them and no one would know that it was a news release. Yeah. It’s [00:26:00] written like a, and, and that’s a credit to her PR staff. But I would be very upset cuz especially during Covid, what a real journalist is supposed to do is take the news release and, you know, dig into every statistic and ask questions.
[00:26:16] Dave: Fact check, but you just didn’t have the time. Um, you know, we would get the Republican side of things, but we would. But a lot of new journalists, they don’t even know the difference. Now it’s, it’s sad because the people are the ones suffering. So you have, you
[00:26:31] Justin: have, don’t have the time, but then you also have the other side of this, which is, I agree with this person and this way of thinking, and I’m for that.
[00:26:42] Justin: How much of that is happening too? Uh,
[00:26:46] Dave: let me see about
[00:26:50] Dave: intent. I, I, I wouldn’t say intentionally, but there’d probably 85% of [00:27:00] the media that I’ve known that would be more favorable to the left. Mm-hmm. And I haven’t seen them intentionally in my time, intentionally lie. But they would be tougher on the right, give the left more of a pass. I would see that. And there would be some cheering for the left.
[00:27:23] Dave: And sometimes behind the scenes you would really hear it and you knew who was who. Mm-hmm.
[00:27:29] Justin: Um, well look, let me ask you, and we can get to this. There are people out there right now, journalists running around with all kinds of things, pronouns and their bios and pictures of flags and certain things that clearly show where they stand on things.
[00:27:46] Justin: And I want to talk about, um, what happened with Channel eight here in, uh, grand Rapids just recently here in a second. But I said the other day when I was talking about this, I said, you know, it’s wild. We’ve got a chief [00:28:00] meteorologist speaking out on this stuff, and your job is as much. I know some of these people like ’em, but like, your job is to tell us the weather and we should never know where you stand.
[00:28:12] Justin: We shouldn’t really know much about you really at all. We should never know where you stand on any of this stuff. How do we get so far
[00:28:18] Dave: off track? That’s where I pride myself. I would have people email the station or email me and be like, you’re a crazy leftist, you’re a crazy, right? And I’m like, good. I would literally, I would, I would have to report stuff I didn’t agree on because that’s what a journalist does.
[00:28:34] Dave: Um, so that was my success. How we got from that. Uh, it started with the network level and then it was just acceptable there, and it, and it’s gone down. Uh, you know, it’s, it’s filtered into the news as well. It started with national and it’s just the transition. Um, I think the network took the lead on that, especially M S N B [00:29:00] C.
[00:29:00] Dave: When C N N made the change, things started to change and it’s been a while. Um,
[00:29:05] Justin: yeah, Rick Grinnell, who was in the Trump administration and um, he’s actually the first openly gay cabinet member in any administration. He’s from West Michigan. He’s from Jenison originally. And uh, there was a big, there was a big thing when, uh, Pete Buttigieg was, was named in, uh, Biden’s cabinet.
[00:29:27] Justin: And, and, and there was a big story about how he was the first openly gay. It was like, no, this Rick and Grinnell guy was, but anyway, Rick had a great tweet the other day. It was really fascinating. Um, and he had a take on this and it, it, it all had to do with just the way things, uh, work now and how. He believed like reporters, I’m to paraphrase this, but reporters are, are like trying to stay [00:30:00] relevant.
[00:30:00] Justin: And so they see, and this might be network level, but they see like anchors who are, a lot of times in these, some of these news networks, they’re, they’re like more opinion based anyway. So they see that as a way to gain followers up their social media profile and everything else. And then by becoming more vocal and sort of activists on that level that, that their, their, they benefit from this.
[00:30:27] Justin: So that’s where he said he, he had seen this and so it’s permeated every level. He said, you know, we, we, we go back to watching this, these reporters who now are no longer just telling us the, the facts, but they’re injecting opinion and activism into things.
[00:30:45] Dave: Yeah. And they should just be giving the information.
[00:30:47] Dave: I know obviously in all the networks and then, you know, Fox, Fox is biased, CNN’s bi, they all have their own and they’re all doing it. Mm-hmm. Um, you know, some others than other Mss n bbc, I watch them all [00:31:00] just because I like to see what they’re all saying. Um, I mean, Tucker Carlson admits he, well, he’s not on the network anymore, but he’s an editorial person.
[00:31:09] Dave: But I give him credit, he still does do journalism, but when, when Tucker goes on camera and says, you know, um, Biden’s a buffoon, that’s not journalism. No. Um, that’s Tucker opinion, right? That’s Tucker opinion. But I do know he does do some of his, like Fox Nation pieces. He does good journalism. He does. Um, but I, the public now doesn’t know the difference between journalism and editorial.
[00:31:37] Dave: Yeah. Now you watch C Nnn and you’re getting opinions thrown in left and right, Jim Acosta, um mm-hmm. Jake Tapper, and it’s just, they’re not, they’re not journalists. How do they
[00:31:48] Justin: do that too? Because it’s very sly, like the wording of certain questions to, Tucker had an episode the other day where he broke down, uh, Biden went to a very safe M S N B C to do an [00:32:00] interview.
[00:32:00] Justin: And the way that the reporter asked a question was worded in such a, a way that really kind of set things up. Uh, how do they do that? Are are, I mean, did you see much of that behind the scenes and, and what’s the secret sauce on that?
[00:32:19] Dave: I saw a lot of that with. Um, with our own Governor Whitmer and where I worked, but also in the market, um, she was treated with little kid gloves.
[00:32:31] Dave: She was not challenged. Yeah. And I challenged Governor Rick Snyder, he’s a Republican. I went after him on the Flint water crisis during a news conference. I asked him in a live news conference, would you want to pay for contaminated water coming out of your tap? Mm-hmm. And then he tried dancing around it.
[00:32:47] Dave: And I said, no, no, no, no. You need to stop. And I, and I, and I kept after him and I give him credit. He took it DeSantis. He’s willing to take those questions. But Whitmer is what I’ve [00:33:00] known, is in a bubble. She won’t even take those questions. She makes sure she puts herself in a good situation with the people.
[00:33:08] Dave: Uh, questions ahead of time, so forth. Um, I would never have been allowed. It was at one point
[00:33:13] Justin: where she, she stopped the, this was back in, I know it was 2020 or 2021, but they stopped doing the in-person press conferences cause she was starting to get some tough questions and then they started doing Zoom and it was like they’re selecting these questions.
[00:33:27] Justin: It was so obvious
[00:33:29] Dave: and selecting the people. Right. I asked, I asked to be on the Zoom and I was never allowed. Wow. Yeah. This interesting. And I was the main, I was the ma I was the main anchor in the Flint market. Yeah. I was the main anchor and, uh,
[00:33:44] Justin: nope. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, um, I appreciate you sharing a lot of this.
[00:33:52] Justin: This is the behind the scenes, how the sausage is made. I think a lot of people don’t get a chance to hear, uh, a lot of these things. Um, [00:34:00] they may suspect it, they may have seen the bias and, and. On these things, but they, they’re just, maybe they’re not necessarily clued into it. All right. So there’s been locally here and it’s gone.
[00:34:13] Justin: It’s, I think it’s gone national at this point. But a big story outta Grand Rapids. There is, uh, a newsroom that is in the, on the verge of Mutiny right now. Um, It’s, uh, channel eight here, wood tv. Uh, they, apparently they’re, it’s pride month and so one of the news directors, and maybe you could explain like who news directors are and, and what, what’s, where this is coming from.
[00:34:39] Justin: Well, one of them, I guess they put out a memo that said, Hey, can you kind of take it easy? Now, here’s my question. Have you seen the full memo? Cuz every story I see about this only has excerpts from the memo. And I’m thinking that to me, suspect in itself because I wanna see the tone of it, I wanna see how it plays out.
[00:34:59] Justin: And when [00:35:00] I’m, when we’re seeing things that are not, you know, they’re left out, I kind of think that’s intentional.
[00:35:05] Dave: I would like to see the entire memo. It’s just like whenever there is a viral video of an officer doing something bad or something happens. Mm-hmm. And you only get 20 seconds. I, I always step back and like, okay, what happened before the video?
[00:35:21] Dave: What happened after? So I would like to see the entire thing and no, I haven’t, I’ve only seen the
[00:35:26] Justin: it’s context. That’s all we’re talking about. Yeah. But that tells me something about why we haven’t, now there are blogs are like industry blogs Oh yeah. Reporting on it. But then those things get picked up by, you know, the paper.
[00:35:38] Justin: And what people don’t realize is that the paper and the TV stations and the radio stations and the blogs and all these media, they’re all fighting for the same dollars. So if the paper has a chance or an opportunity to, uh, write a, write a hit piece or write a story about the TV station, They’re gonna do it.
[00:35:58] Justin: They love that. Oh yeah, [00:36:00] they’re gonna attack. So they, so they’re all fighting. But
[00:36:03] Dave: it’s interesting. And Wood tvb is the number one station in the, in that market. Right? They’re the one of the top stations in the state. So,
[00:36:11] Justin: and you know, that’s interesting because now we’ve got the curtain pulled back. We don’t know what was exactly in the memo.
[00:36:17] Justin: We’ve got pieces of the memo to me from what it looks like, and I, this is just what I picked up on it. Um, some of this was probably, some of it was sensationalized, but when I read it, I, it looks like they’re saying, Hey, there’s there, you know, there, this pride month is something that you wanna cover, but uh, you may want to take it easy on some of these things.
[00:36:40] Justin: There’s other news happening. That’s the way I took it. Now, I didn’t get to see the whole memo, so I can’t, you know, honestly I can’t say, but the mutiny occurs when folks in the newsroom get upset. And I think there’s even more to this. Um, but. What’s your, cuz you’ve seen some of this, [00:37:00] what’s your take on it?
[00:37:00] Justin: I don’t even know. Maybe you know, some people there. I
[00:37:03] Dave: don’t, not at that station. And I was more shocked. I shouldn’t have been maybe at the mutiny behind it and I really can’t speak for what, and the, the news director basically is the person in charge of the entire news operation. Yeah. Uh, that is like the president of the company.
[00:37:19] Dave: So
[00:37:19] Justin: who decides do they decide what stories are being done? Is there somebody that makes those decisions?
[00:37:25] Dave: On a, on the big stories, the news director will set the vision for coverage or, um, but on a day-to-day basis, many stations have lower level managers. You’ll have a news meeting at 3:00 PM and everyone pitches story ideas.
[00:37:39] Dave: And Is that like an assignment editor? Yeah, an assignment editor or a managing editor. But on a dis like with this happened that had to come, I believe, from the news director, a policy issue or, or a format. Um mm-hmm. So yeah, I, I, I was, yeah. More surprised at the outr at the. When I saw the, I believe the chief meteorologist at that [00:38:00] station put out there that, you know, we don’t support this behavior.
[00:38:03] Dave: And I’m like, whoa. Yeah, I know If the rule in tv, radio, whatever it is, you don’t speak out against your own employer. If I, I would be fired. I’m, if I would’ve ever done anything like that, I would al if, if I were to do that, I would be ready to get a call from the general manager saying, Dave, pack your bags.
[00:38:22] Dave: You’re gone. Yeah,
[00:38:24] Justin: yeah. Uh, because you’re not supposed to criticize your, your organization or, and, and that’s a, I mean, that’s a big deal, but, um, in this case, it seems like, uh, it, it, I mean we had a lot of people speaking out. We had reporters speaking out, we had anchors speaking out, we had meteorologists speaking out, and they were very vocal about this stuff.
[00:38:45] Justin: Um, and
[00:38:45] Dave: it’s because of the content. Because of the content. I believe the company was in a no win, I mean, situation. They couldn’t discipline them cuz that’s in our contracts. We have contracts as radio. You did too. And you know Yeah. They could file you for any reason. [00:39:00] Right. Any reason. And especially, you know, giving proprietary information or, you know, putting the company in a bad light.
[00:39:07] Dave: But if they would’ve disciplined one of them for tweeting it out, that would’ve made it even worse for the company. So, and, and the staff most likely, you know, knew that and, and, and, and if, and if it did hurt. If, if it hurt them, if it was, you know, fine with them. I’m all for, you know, saying how you feel.
[00:39:23] Dave: But I just know if it would’ve maybe been another situation in the past, for example, you know, I was very emotional during Covid with my mother and the nursing home. And I made a bad tweet about Governor Whitmer and I was almost fired. And honestly I would’ve understand it if I would’ve been fired.
[00:39:42] Dave: Mm-hmm. Um, so. I, I expect, I would’ve expect that, you know? So yeah, the, it, I think it depends on the content, but I’d like to see the, the letter that the news director wrote. Yeah.
[00:39:55] Justin: It, I would too. I, uh, I don’t think we’re gonna get that. I don’t know how much further this [00:40:00] thing is gonna go. I know there’s a lot of good people there.
[00:40:03] Justin: They wanna see it die down, but there’s some people there that also, um, you know, they were very safe. They felt very safe to speak out. But’s, one of the things I, I gotta ask about this, Davis, cuz we got, we live in this upside down world now, so people speaking out on this are, they’re, they’re getting the treatment.
[00:40:19] Justin: Like it was very brave for them to say what they said. But really, as you mentioned, they had cover, and this is kind of like, this is like the. Trendy, fashionable way to, to, to look at things right now. This is the, that ideology, that worldview. Um, and I think maybe part of the, part of the, the, maybe the part of the weight of this newsletter, this new director’s memo was, hey, um, you know, a lot of these things may not be newsworthy.
[00:40:52] Justin: Uh, you know, how do you figure out what is and what isn’t? I mean, every, every pride event [00:41:00] is, is that newsworthy?
[00:41:01] Dave: I, I, I thought about it and I thought about Thanksgiving, the week of Thanksgiving or before. There’s about 30 events of Turkey giveaways and all this stuff. Right. And we would pick maybe two or three to cover.
[00:41:13] Dave: You cannot cover all of them. Yeah. Uh, Christmas time and Christmas pageants, whatever it may be. Um, 4th of July, every community has a parade. How do you pick which one? You just pick a couple. Mm-hmm. You can’t pick them all because if you did, you would be just, everyone would be, it’d be too much. So maybe that’s where she was, she or he was coming from.
[00:41:36] Dave: Yeah. Just and take the con take out of it. It was, you know, L G B T Q or pride, but whatever it may be. Um, I mean, I think people would get sick of us doing a two Turkey giveaways every day on the news. Right, right. So that’s what I was coming from because you wanna have a mix on the, of the news. I don’t know how much they were covering though, either.
[00:41:56] Dave: Mm.
[00:41:57] Justin: Yeah. I don’t know either. And you know, part of it is, and I’ll [00:42:00] tell you, lemme be completely honest, is the amount of local television news, the amount that I consume is very low these days. I mean,
[00:42:09] Dave: same here anymore. I don’t, I. I
[00:42:12] Justin: don’t need it. I can get my new, that’s, I think that’s part of the, part of the struggle that we’re really seeing.
[00:42:18] Justin: And one of the things that, uh, I think they’re gonna have, uh, a real challenge that they’re facing right now is to stay relevant. And they’re constantly, it seems like, pushing people away, but it maybe the polarization of this is pushing some viewers away to bring others closer. And they, maybe they feel like that’s gonna, I don’t know, maybe there’s something there.
[00:42:40] Justin: But my, my question is how do you stay relevant if you’re not delivering what you promised saw? Which is the truth? You’re not giving people unbiased news.
[00:42:53] Dave: Yeah. There’s that. And I, like I said, I, where I worked, everyone I worked with at my last station that when I [00:43:00] was there, I. Yeah. Amazing people. Great people.
[00:43:03] Dave: Mm-hmm. But why watch it if it’s not local news? Like literally, like I said, we had two reporters and that’s different. Grand
[00:43:10] Justin: Rapids come from a different place or something.
[00:43:12] Dave: Yeah. Wood TV is very well staffed. Yeah. They have a a, a good staff. Um, but yeah, they’re appointment television viewing is, is dead people back in the day, my dad, you know, he’d come home after work, turn on, have to watch channel seven in Detroit and anchor bill bonds and Oh yeah.
[00:43:31] Dave: Now appointment viewing television isn’t, like you said. Yeah. Everything is, I can get it all right here. Um, news,
[00:43:38] Justin: weather, traffic, the only thing, and I’ll tell you this, the only thing that they can’t get. Is the, is the, is the personality. So the relationships and, um, you know, on my phone is telling me the weather, you know, if, if, if I’m gonna, you know, do g p s, it’s gonna give me traffic, avoid this route, or go here, or it’s gonna reroute me.[00:44:00]
[00:44:00] Justin: Um, and then top stories or whatever it is. So there is like this, um, in a lot of ways there’s like this, this sort of, um, dance to stay relevant.
[00:44:16] Dave: I, and they’re losing it. And, because I think people, they’re, they’re coming to people like you. Mm-hmm. People like me. Yeah. Joe, why is Joe Rogan so popular?
[00:44:25] Justin: You’re giving news on TikTok right now.
[00:44:27] Justin: So how many people are watching you on TikTok? Because it’s, you’ve got a big following
[00:44:31] Dave: there. Half a million people. On TikTok and I just do little
[00:44:35] Justin: videos. That’s that’s way more than we’re watching you on, on tv, right?
[00:44:38] Dave: I mean, oh God, yes. But I think with me, I wasn’t afraid to get personal with, with people as you are.
[00:44:45] Dave: Yeah. I think now we are in the state of people want to connect with people, not a brand or not continuing coverage or they want to connect with people. That’s why people love you. They like me, Joe Rogan. And there’s several [00:45:00] independent journalists across the country that are, there’s a woman in Seattle, Brandy Cruz left a $200,000 a year job.
[00:45:07] Dave: She has 3000 or close to paid subscribers on locals. Wow. Um, I think people are connecting to people cuz they don’t trust the corporate media. That’s another thing. They don’t, and people trust you because you, you lay it all out there, you show you, you know, you talk about your faith, your family, when you mess up, you’ll tell people, same with me.
[00:45:28] Dave: And I got criticized a lot for that. But I think people like genuine people. But when you’re at the network or local station, even Tucker found this out, you can’t be who you really are. Yeah. You can’t, I was told not to talk about God by a former boss. Don’t ever mention God. Don’t ever tweet about God.
[00:45:47] Dave: Yeah. And I told her, I told her, I said, take the road lady. You’re not gonna tell me that. I’m not gonna tweet about talk about God. I mean,
[00:45:54] Justin: yeah. Well it’s, it’s hard, especially if it’s like, you know, part of who you are. So let me ask you this. No, [00:46:00] your faith, you probably don’t talk a lot. Uh, I mean, you talk a little bit more about it now, but you haven’t in the past.
[00:46:06] Justin: One of the, and I gotta ask you because one of the threads when I started talking to people, go back and I interviewed, uh, Dr. Peter McCullough and, and it just more people were standing up, speaking out. Um, the one thing I started to see is there was Riley Gaines. There was this thread of faith, like there was something bigger.
[00:46:27] Justin: Like you could take everything away from them, right? Like, you take all the earthly like, Hey, my job. You could, I mean, you know, cause there’s a lot of us, you know, climbing that ladder until it hit a certain point, man, that, that job, that career was everything. Oh yeah. Yeah. But that makes you dangerous too, because there’s something bigger.
[00:46:45] Justin: What about you is, is there, what’s the, is the threat of faith there? What do you, what is it for you
[00:46:52] Dave: that drives it? I was at that, yeah. I was at that point where I just wanted to climb the ladder, wanted to continue to go up. I wanted to be in Detroit one day and then I [00:47:00] wanted to keep going. And literally it’s when I had my first, um, child, Olivia, it, it, it made me realize, you know, it’s not about, Going up the ladder or sacrificing, you know, my beliefs, or it’s about just making the world better for her than I had it.
[00:47:20] Dave: And when I started to do that, especially during covid, when I, I did fight back in the newsroom on my social, like I said, I almost got fired for a comment I made about Governor Whitmer. I started to get a lot, like thousands of more people started following me because it, it was at that point, and it was really during Covid.
[00:47:39] Dave: Cause that’s when my mother really got bad with Alzheimer’s. I realized then what is, I could die tomorrow, you know, be me. Just be me. Yeah. And if I’m fired from the job, I’ll, I’ll get another one. Yeah. You know? Mm-hmm.
[00:47:53] Justin: Mm-hmm. Well, I’m gonna let folks, uh, if you’re watching over on, uh, locals [00:48:00] right now and you want to ask a question, the supporters are, uh, able to jump in and ask questions.
[00:48:05] Justin: It’s free to, to hang out on locals more than welcome to do that, uh, to, to become a member. But if you wanna become a supporter, it’s just seven bucks a month. If you wanna become an annual supporter, I will give you, we get a month free. Plus I’ll give you a copy of my book, good News, hope and Encouragement for Trying Times.
[00:48:22] Justin: I’ll sign it, I’ll send it to you, and, uh, that is a perk for becoming a supporter. But you’ll also be able to jump in the chat, ask questions. So if you wanna ask Dave a question, go ahead, feel free, drop it in right now. We’d love to hear from you. I know Dave would, he’s gonna pull the curtain back. No holds bar.
[00:48:40] Justin: Um, so let me ask you, Dave, we were talking about narrative. What is the narrative? How would you explain that and where, let’s, currently, where is the narrative?
[00:48:55] Dave: Um, yeah, it’s changed. [00:49:00] Like I, when before we went on live, I was talking about how c n n now spent an hour bashing Biden. That would’ve never happened a year ago.
[00:49:07] Dave: Yeah. So, um, it changes daily, right? It, it, it daily. And during c o it was very strict though. Mm. You would not question masks. You would, yeah. Um, I, and I did question things. I went after Michigan because the state of Michigan would not release and still has not released comorbidities. Basically when you die.
[00:49:26] Dave: Yeah. Of Covid or with Covid. Mm-hmm. Michigan’s one of the only few states like North Carolina would. Okay. Patient A died Covid. They were obese. They had leukemia. Yeah. Michigan has never put it out there, but when I did that story was Covid
[00:49:41] Justin: or from Covid,
[00:49:44] Dave: Michigan will not say what those, uh, Conditions are, but I got, I got death threats.
[00:49:50] Dave: I got people saying that I was an, I wanted people to die. I was, cuz that the narrative was, you don’t even go outside that. Wow. You don’t even question [00:50:00] that at all. So that the narrative was, oh, it was strictly it. It wasn’t, you just felt it in the new in in the newsroom. It was like, you know, no one put a memo out from our company saying that, but it was just like, mm-hmm.
[00:50:14] Dave: Don’t question it.
[00:50:17] Justin: So who decides, I know we kind of touched on this earlier, but who decides what that narrative is, where those boundaries are and why does so many people follow that?
[00:50:28] Dave: I believe it starts, like you said, associated Press. They set the standard, um, the networks as well. Washington Post, New York Times.
[00:50:38] Dave: Um, they set what the news of the day is, and I’ll, I’ll give the appeal back an inside look, the Associated Press has an internal website. Cause I, I did our web digital at the station and you would log in and it would give you lead stories for the day. Well, when you logged in on the top would always be a section January 6th.[00:51:00]
[00:51:00] Dave: You couldn’t scroll past it. It would make you, make, you wa look at those stories. Mm-hmm. That’s kind of a narrative, like a, the Associated Press it would always put in, put it in front of you no matter what’s going on that day, a January 6th headline. I even if there was nothing going on, so it was subtly in c n n, they would send down videos about certain things.
[00:51:24] Dave: We would run them. Yeah. Cause we didn’t have a big staff so it, it came from the, the top down. Um, and then the associated press has changed the way they do things. They’ve changed a lot of their, how you can’t say this or you can’t say that. And I’m like, yeah, they
[00:51:42] have
[00:51:42] Justin: a style book. Explain that for people because you know, it’s, it’s even in like the words and definitions, those are constantly up for grabs.
[00:51:51] Justin: How you can say things, what you can say, explain that style book cuz people have no idea. Yeah. A lot
[00:51:57] Dave: of it makes down to that level. Yeah. A [00:52:00] lot of it makes sense. Like, do you capitalize this or you know, how to cer write a sentence for news or what’s certain things that are just basic grammar and Right.
[00:52:10] Dave: That sort of thing. But within the last five years, like they came out with, you must capitalize B in black. Um, when mentioning, you know, black and then you can’t, it changed a lot with illegal immigrants, um, migrants. Mm-hmm. They kept changing how they’re still mixing
[00:52:27] Justin: that. Yeah. Yeah. And why do they do that?
[00:52:30] Justin: Because what it seems to me is, what that does is it hides the truth. It makes it harder to understand the story. Really, what they should be doing is making it as simple and as clear as possible. I.
[00:52:46] Dave: Yes. And it’s, for example, I mean a, a human being who is illegally crossing from Mexico into the United States illegally.
[00:52:54] Dave: Okay. That’s the definition. That’s what it is. Yeah. Um, but I could not write that under AP [00:53:00] style. That would not be acceptable. Hmm. I, I would have to say, I don’t even know what it is now. An undocument, an undocumented migrant UN as entered the United States undocumented. Yeah. And they get pressure from all the groups.
[00:53:14] Dave: Mm-hmm. You know, A C L U, every group you can imagine is pressuring the ap and they don’t wanna, they wanna appease everyone as well. And then it comes down to all of. It’s the local and network, and that’s where the narrative, it, it, it funnels in on things like that. But this is
[00:53:28] Justin: group thing. This is, uh, this is where, this is where everybody who, and you know, not to question this because you’re gonna be one of those evil, you know, uh, I, any one of the ISS they wanna call you today, they always pull that out, bigot or anything.
[00:53:43] Justin: Are you afraid of being called those things because, because of circumstances
[00:53:47] Dave: on things? Oh, I have been many times. I know, I, there was a social media site called Parler. I remember Parler, yeah, remember Parler? I was on it and there’s a gossip website for local TV [00:54:00] news. And if you’re on there, you’re like, oh no.
[00:54:02] Dave: And this guy called me out on this website and called me, you know, uh, Because I’m on there a, a racist or whatever, you know, every name he used. And I got called by the boss and where are you on Parler? Exactly, exactly. And I’m on every platform Of course, later. And then it turned out later. Yeah, it turned out later that a lot, most of the January 6th stuff was planned on Facebook.
[00:54:25] Dave: Not
[00:54:26] Justin: part. Right, right. No, there was, there was that point where they tried to say that that was planned on par. That’s a far right. Extremist.
[00:54:34] Dave: But they got shut down. Parler was, yeah, they shut it. I remember that. They shut it down. Um, so yeah, it was, I had to be very careful anytime I wrote something. But I know one time there was a reporter and she was more conservative and she got a, she got a job at News Nation, which is think a little, maybe more conservative.
[00:54:54] Dave: And I, I wrote, I tweeted at her. I said, Hey, congrats on the job. I ended up in the trade blog saying [00:55:00] I’m supporting a right-wing journalist. So you, you couldn’t do anything. And, and News Nation, would
[00:55:05] Justin: you consider that? Right wing. What, what is that? It seemed like Andrew Cuomo, or not Andrew, but Chris
[00:55:13] Dave: Cuomo works there.
[00:55:13] Dave: I know, but No, they’re, yeah, no, the, the media complex considers them. Yeah. Oh yeah. Right. Wing Cuomo is
[00:55:21] Justin: right wing now. Well,
[00:55:22] Dave: news Nation, not him maybe, but
[00:55:26] Justin: explain that. Ashley Banfield, doesn’t she work there
[00:55:28] Dave: too? Yes, but they’re different. They actually, and I give ’em credit, they do actually go after both sides of, so they’re right
[00:55:35] Justin: wing for trying to present things without a bias.
[00:55:40] Justin: I just wanna understand that. Yes.
[00:55:45] Dave: I, you know, I told people, I interviewed Trump twice. I went to, and I was a racist because I, I interviewed him and I’m like,
[00:55:54] Justin: well, there’s that whole thing too. It’s like, why are you platforming this person that people [00:56:00] don’t deserve to be heard? Uh, like if you make an accusation, Don’t, we need to give that person the opportunity to, and
[00:56:08] Dave: that’s, yeah.
[00:56:09] Dave: That’s not for me to decide, defend themselves. Right. I mean, I remember back in the day, I covered, hell, I covered a clan rally. Uh, it, it was 20 years ago, and I was totally 100% thought those people were completely disgusting scum of the earth. Yeah. But I covered it. I don’t think people realize now that speech doesn’t have to be speech we like.
[00:56:32] Dave: Right. Um, it, it’s, it’s changed and I don’t want to, I covered those people and a way where I brought out and showed people that they are hateful, horrible people. And if you’re an intelligent person, I think you can tell, you know, like I’ve interviewed, you know, child molesters and before and I put ’em out there and.
[00:56:57] Justin: You mean minor attracted persons? That’s [00:57:00] the new word. Oh, geez. Yeah. Maps.
[00:57:02] Dave: Yeah. That’s gonna be the AP next.
[00:57:04] Justin: Yeah. So lots of questions coming in for Dave. Oh, oh, good. And we’re trying to, uh, get to as many as we can here from folks in the supporters on locals. If you wanna drop your question in, make sure you get that in, uh, in the chat.
[00:57:16] Justin: All right, Dave, so let me ask you a couple, somebody asked, first and foremost, why was it that you couldn’t talk about God? Was it you were just told not to?
[00:57:24] Dave: I was told not to because it was very divisive. Um, but my argument was, well, other people can talk about other faiths or even, you know, black Lives Matter at some point was like a religion.
[00:57:40] Dave: Um, I, they just, the boss didn’t want controversy cuz someone could be offended. I think that’s what it was, that it may have caused someone to be offended and. It’s not like I was lying about a story or making up about a story. I am, I’m not a robot. So I don’t think they wanted to face any, [00:58:00] you know, email or message from a viewer saying, why are you having someone who’s promoting religion on the air?
[00:58:05] Dave: Yeah. I think it was more so they didn’t, she, the boss didn’t want to deal with it.
[00:58:10] Justin: So, um, did, I don’t know if you saw this, but on that same note with this story that Channel eight did here, uh, and they did another pride month, uh, coverage over the weekend, they interviewed, cuz there was the whole thing in that, in that memo that said you may wanna try and get both sides of the story or whatever.
[00:58:31] Justin: And I think without seeing it and seeing the context, and I don’t understand, but I, I took that to mean both sides of every story. Right. So you wanna Sure, yeah. You should always, always right it. But, uh, that, uh, that this weekend one of the reporters. Who tweeted the picture with the flag, the pride flag, and the, and the microphone with the microphone flag, the station logo and everything tweeted.
[00:58:53] Justin: That was like, wow. Uh, but she covered this weekend, uh, a member of [00:59:00] the Church of Satan and his take on it. And I just, I saw it and I thought to myself, wow. I mean, if this isn’t obvious, uh, because they wouldn’t, they wouldn’t carry someone saying like, you know, th this, you know, this goes against my, my religious beliefs.
[00:59:21] Justin: And, and, uh, look, I, you know, I can respect you, but this is not my, and here’s why. And, um, you know, I also don’t think that maybe we should be having adult entertainment in front of kids. And, you know, they wouldn’t, they wouldn’t, they wouldn’t do that. But they would, they would interview a member of the Church of Satan.
[00:59:40] Justin: It’s wild. Could you imagine that?
[00:59:44] Dave: Wow. No. No. Um, wow. And there’s a lot of tough calls that, that newsrooms have to do. And you know, our job is to represent everybody. And, and the
[00:59:56] Justin: context of this isn’t that, hey, you shouldn’t interview a member of the [01:00:00] Church of Satan. That’s not what I’m saying. Because I think, I mean, they’ve been doing that for years.
[01:00:04] Justin: They’ve been interviewing some of the most interesting and bizarre people because that makes for good stories. Um, but this was like blatant, uh, sort of in your face here. We’re gonna put anyone we want on TV and we’re gonna share anything we want. Um, But it’s stuff like that that I think turns the audience off because just gimme the news.
[01:00:29] Justin: You know? Just, I don’t need
[01:00:30] Dave: to be, tell me the news. Tell me. I tell people, I make it very simple when I go cover a car crash, I go, I tell people what the police said. I report what the witnesses said. Mm-hmm. And that’s it. I don’t, I just, and, and you know, everyone says, tell me the facts. And I’m like, I don’t know the facts sometimes.
[01:00:48] Dave: Yeah. I don’t know the facts. Facts change. You know, back in the day, my dad used to insulate pipes with asbestos back in the day. The fact was he was told that was healthy. That’s fine. That wasn’t bad. Mm-hmm. Now [01:01:00] it’s deadly. Right? So I sometimes don’t like when people say, tell me the facts, because, and I go back to the fact is OJ Simpson is innocent.
[01:01:08] Justin: Is he really? Yeah. Here’s what we, here’s what we know. Here’s what we know now. Yeah. In fact, I mean, yeah, this could change. Um, yeah. Did you see. And I’m gotta ask you again cause it was the biggest story all, all this week. And I know you don’t have a lot of time left, so I don’t wanna keep you all night.
[01:01:25] Justin: But did you see all this week the submarine or the submersible story? It was just a, I mean, a story that I think so many people were gravitated towards and, uh, just because it’s such, it’s, it’s such a dramatic story, but it is, we find out now, yesterday they discovered the debris filled and then there’s the story behind the story that comes out that they knew the thing imploded since Sunday.
[01:01:53] Justin: Yeah, because the Navy had audio. They have, they are constantly monitoring for other enemy subs and things like that. And [01:02:00]they’ve known since Sunday. But it appears as though the Biden administration let this go. Didn’t tell the family the entire country was hanging by a thread. The entire world really refused to send help.
[01:02:15] Justin: Early on, got in the way and said that we’re not gonna send, uh, help over, um, kind of got in the way of that whole in early on. And, uh, in the meantime, all week in, all week long. This is covered up for the fact that articles of impeachment have been filed against President Biden. Mm-hmm. Hunter Biden was charged, took the plea deal.
[01:02:41] Justin: There’s more and more coming out with audio tapes and messages Now, uh, c n is, uh, is big enough. You just mentioned C N N’s starting to cover it. The somehow, uh, the Pentagon lost 6 billion that they sent to Ukraine and there were [01:03:00] 47 million JP Morgan emails deleted all of these big stories over the, the course of the last week that didn’t get the.
[01:03:10] Justin: Probably the focus that they deserved because we were all so engaged in following that sub-story. How much of that control is happening behind the scenes. I’d
[01:03:22] Dave: made a tweet the day the Hunter Biden, when it was came out that Hunter Biden would be facing charges. I was shocked. I shouldn’t have been. NBC led with the submersible.
[01:03:33] Dave: A sitting President’s son. Yeah. Facing charges. And then I tweeted out. I’m like, okay, if this would’ve been Lester Hol. Yeah. If this would’ve been Trump’s son, if Trump was president, if there was a Subm, same situation, different person, would it have been tr Would they have led with it? Mm-hmm. Yes. They would’ve led with it over the submersible.
[01:03:55] Dave: But a lot of journalists argued with me and said, well, the submersible, it got a lot of clicks. It was very [01:04:00] emotional. But what was more important, a president’s son facing announced that day Facing charges. Yeah. And they didn’t lead the NA network newscast with it. Mm-hmm. Um, Yeah, they, they probably loved that that was happening or the White House was obviously loving and I don’t know the details, but that about the Navy, I mean, I would hope that information made it to the White House, I would hope.
[01:04:26] Justin: Um, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Alright. What’s your, what do you do for fun, Dave? People wanna know in the chat. Do, do you, uh, uh, I mean, I know obviously news I’m sure is fun for you. This is part of why you’re still doing this, but, uh, and you have, you, are we allowed to talk about the other thing that you’re
[01:04:46] Dave: doing too?
[01:04:47] Dave: Yeah. I, um, work for a nonprofit, the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, and their thing is, Not many, not a lot of people might know what they are, but they, uh, support and promote, uh, less [01:05:00] government intervention and free enterprise. Uh, their big, uh, claim to fame recently is they were the organization that won the lawsuit.
[01:05:07] Dave: Uh, went to the Supreme Court in Michigan that struck down witmer’s executive orders, uh, but then she used the health department to put her other orders in. So I’m doing social media and and digital for them, and I am learning so much, uh, there as well. And it, it’s an amazing organization and I do my own journalism on the side and trying to educate people about, you know, what’s going on in the media and the world, but also doing some good things.
[01:05:34] Dave: And you’re asking what I do for a li and having fun, literally playing with the kids, taking ’em to a movie, doing that. I’m a big baseball fan, um, trying to hit up like a new major league park every year. Uh, just really family time. That is my fun and, and my getaway.
[01:05:53] Justin: People are asking about other serious questions.
[01:05:56] Justin: There is, uh, a video of you. Oh, yeah. [01:06:00] You’re not proud of. I know, because I’ve seen you kind of mention this before.
[01:06:03] Dave: Oh. And I’m gonna, yeah. Elon Musk tweeted it out recently. There’s a video that my company, they, they had us do a script. The we, the Sinclair Broadcasting, they own 85 stations across the country.
[01:06:15] Dave: They had us do a say. The an, I didn’t know it at the time, but they had a script. I read a script that says, you know, we do not believe in fake news. We believe in having both sides of the story, blah, blah. How did that
[01:06:27] Justin: come together? We were told to read this. This is for a promo. This is why
[01:06:31] Dave: I was told, I was told it was for a promo.
[01:06:32] Dave: Okay. And if you actually listen to what we said, it, I was okay with it. It, it, it like, we don’t, we believe in, you know, because we don’t believe in, we don’t believe in fake news. We believe in investigations and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I didn’t know it was every other station got the same memo. So, um, and you would go viral for that.
[01:06:54] Dave: Yeah. Dead spin did an amazing editing job where they put all like 85 anchors. [01:07:00] Yeah. Reading the same thing. And the editing was amazing. Yeah. Um, but whoever the genius was at the company who didn’t think that someone would put that all together. And, and it’s, and, and the company I work for, I’ll admit it, they lean to the right.
[01:07:15] Dave: It was just,
[01:07:16] Justin: was that, do you think that was a hit from somebody on the left that wanted to point out Sinclair’s on the right and they’re trying to, but it ends up kind of backfiring on all of tv?
[01:07:25] Dave: Well, it backfired on all of tv and it’s just, and I can admit, I mean, that they, and I didn’t, I would not have, I shouldn’t have done it.
[01:07:34] Dave: It was my second year there. Mm-hmm. And I was, I was, I didn’t wanna lose my job. And I felt as if, if I said, no, you know, lose my job. But it comes out deadspin, I dunno if they’re still around. They did the editing on it. Yeah. And then John Oliver and Elon Musk just tweeted it out a couple months. About a two weeks ago.
[01:07:52] Dave: Yeah. And I commented, and Elon, I said, oh, and I explained what happened in a long tweet thread. Mm-hmm. And Elon, he said, he [01:08:00] replied to me. That’s why I gained like 4,000 Twitter followers overnight. Wow. And then I got a lot of support though, because I told people the truth. I said, yeah, I was given the script.
[01:08:07] Dave: I read it. I didn’t wanna lose my job. I actually, uh, you know, the words that we were reading weren’t crazy. We, we believe in true journalism, blah, blah, blah. Mm-hmm. But the way they did it is, yeah, it, it made me, made look bad. But I’m gonna do a video, um, on my locals and YouTube just explaining that whole thing, because I would never have done it if I would’ve known every anchor in the company was reading it.
[01:08:32] Dave: Yeah. And I would’ve, I would’ve rather made up my, read my own, wrote my own promo. Mm-hmm. You know, told people what I’m about. Yeah. Not just, yeah. That was not a good, what are the
[01:08:44] Justin: other stories that you’re watching right now or that maybe that you’re more passionate about? There’s a story that, uh, uh, one of the folks in the, in the chat’s asking about kids, and particularly in schools and investigating what’s happening there.
[01:08:56] Justin: There’s, uh, Couple of stories floating around about kids [01:09:00] being, uh, identifying as cats and, uh, things like that. Are you following stuff like that? Yeah.
[01:09:05] Dave: There was a situation in Midland, Michigan. It turned out not to be true, a litter box in a school. It turned out not to be true. Okay. But I am doing, uh, in Carroll Michigan, which is in the thumb area.
[01:09:15] Dave: Uh, there is a public library that a parent, uh, claims, and I’ve seen the book that she said is pornography mm-hmm. In the public library, in the children’s section. And she’s been going back and forth and I did the first interview with her, and now the local media is picking up on it. Um, and it’s, she, her thing is she doesn’t want the books banned.
[01:09:38] Dave: She wants them put in an adult section. Um, sure. But that,
[01:09:44] Justin: that talk about common sense, you know, to me. Yeah. And,
[01:09:49] Dave: but now she’s got, she, uh, had a, she’s had a successful recall language approved. I also did the story about 300 absentee ballots were found in a storage locker in Genesee County right after the 2020 [01:10:00] election.
[01:10:00] Dave: We just found out about it now. Um, and it turns out that they were ballots that people never voted with, but they were ballots that were never mailed out to people. So the state police are investigating and I interview with Thetford township clerk and that just makes me think how many of those incidents happened across the country that we may not know about this.
[01:10:22] Dave: Probably this did not change in election in Michigan. It may have locally
[01:10:26] Justin: though. Yeah. That local election that was, uh, won by just a few people. Right. Handful of
[01:10:31] Dave: people. There was a woman that lost by 19 votes in that election, and it probably did affect the election, but the only reason it got public is because the township supervisor had a freedom of information request.
[01:10:41] Dave: So yeah, I’m, those are the type of things I’m doing. I like uncovering things like that, but it’s tough in Michigan because. Michigan, the freedom of information. Michigan is the absolute worst state. When it, and you ask any reporter, even reporters on the left, they will tell you, getting information in the state’s [01:11:00] impossible.
[01:11:00] Dave: We are only one of two. Or Austin, Massachusetts. You cannot FOIA the governor’s office or the legislature legally. You cannot ask for any documents from the governor’s office. It, she’s protected. Yeah.
[01:11:13] Justin: It’s, uh, that’s probably what made Covid so bad here. It was one of the, it was just so easy to hide so much.
[01:11:21] Justin: Yeah.
[01:11:22] Dave: Yeah. It was, and you Yeah, it was, it was bad.
[01:11:26] Justin: Dave is telling it like it is. He’s keeping it real. Where can folks follow you? Obviously, I know you, your locals channel is big for, for a lot of your independent reporting.
[01:11:37] Dave: Yeah. It’s just literally Dave Bondy, Dave, b o n d y. On locals or on every other platform.
[01:11:43] Dave: Like I said, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. Uh, the TikTok, I, I, the TikTok could go away any day. I always, I never count on that, but, um, it, it, it blew up. But yeah, locals and that helps support independent. I do a show on Thursday and Sunday night, and [01:12:00] I’d like to, uh, ramp that up a little bit, but it’s, um, well anywhere.
[01:12:05] Dave: Just Google my name and you’ll find me. You might find some negative stuff too, but that’s okay.
[01:12:09] Justin: Dave. I wanna stay in touch and have you back on. I think more often too, if it’s not podcast or radio or something, just so that people can, uh, still hear from you because, uh, you know, this independent thing. I think the truth is gonna, I don’t know about you, but is is what it looks like.
[01:12:26] Justin: Is Twitter going to continue to, to, is it gonna be TikTok? Is it gonna be locals? What that looks like? Um, but I think more and more people are getting their news and they’re getting their context. At least I think from Independence,
[01:12:43] Dave: I feel a change. And CBS News yesterday had a half hour on their frustration that they are losing the messaging CBS Network news on, on their 24 hour, on their 24 hour, uh, streaming service.
[01:12:57] Dave: They had their media analyst [01:13:00] very concerned about democracy because the legacy media, they’re, they’re losing their ability to influence. They said that. Yeah. So I’m seeing, I am seeing a shift. I think Tucker Carlson, I know a lot of people may not like him, but when that happened, I, I, you know, and little jour journalists across the, myself, a woman in Seattle Ivory Hecker over in Texas, The Joe Rogan type.
[01:13:25] Dave: I mean, he’s, you know, you’re right. I think we’re seeing a shift and I hope my goal is to be, you know, if a a Republican does something bad, I’m gonna call him out on it. You know, I still have the journalism in my heart, you know, dur, um, follow the money. If a Republican messes up a Democrat messes up, I don’t care.
[01:13:43] Dave: I’m gonna call him out on it. Um, but you’re right. I think we’re seeing a shift and I hope, I hope that’s true.
[01:13:50] Justin: Yeah. Well, keep up the good work, man. I appreciate you and I know others. Lots of others do too. Dave Bondi, you can follow him all over. And, [01:14:00] uh, and I know that people will, we’ll continue to, uh, to talk about the things that, that really, that matter most and.
[01:14:06] Justin: I dunno about you, Dave, but I just feel like not only do people deserve to hear, but really in order for everything to work like this country in order for the, the freedom, the, the independence that we have, in order for it to function like the republic that it is, people have to be informed. It’s a duty, it’s an obligation.
[01:14:25] Justin: We have to be well-informed. We shouldn’t be misinformed and we certainly shouldn’t be propagandized against, although that’s, that’s legal now after the Smith Mon Mon Modernization Act, that they’re allowed to legally propagandized against us. Yeah. And, and the,
[01:14:40] Dave: the, the politicians should be scared that they’re going to be held accountable by the media that’s not happening right
[01:14:46] Justin: now.
[01:14:47] Justin: Yeah, absolutely. Uh, right now they’re working hand in hand. Dave Bond, appreciate you, my friend. Thank you sir. Have a great night folks. Appreciate you being here with us. God bless.
[01:14:58] [01:15:00]
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[01:18:23] Well, at least on the networks, we’re not hearing or seeing most of the news that we’re supposed to see. The stories that you really need to know about, well, the things you won’t hear anywhere else, that’s for sure. We’re hearing about some of these major networks, how they’re being controlled and. On a daily basis, uh, not only do we learn more about what they want us to know about by the things they tell us, but also the things that they just leave out.
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[01:19:37] Slash locals, that’s justin barclay.com/locals and help support plus dig deeper. Today, I need new conspiracy theories. All of mine have come true, whether it’s the original T-shirt that launched and started it all, or any of the new Gear T-shirts, hoodie, hoodies, all of the cool stuff we have in the store@justinbarclay.com slash store.
[01:19:57] Anything you buy not only helps [01:20:00] support what we’re doing here, getting the word out, sharing the truth and the stories that matter most. But also helps spark some much needed conversation when you’re out and about talking to people. My new favorite, yeah, obviously the Justin, uh, quarter zip. Yeah, that, that’s great.
[01:20:15] But I love the brand new One Nation Under God hoodie and t-shirt that’s available and multiple sizes and colors. You can grab ’em right now@justinbarclay.com slash store and get geared up. Today, thank you for your support. We’re talking about shortages now on children’s medications, but we’ve seen shortages on everything, folks from toilet paper, children’s medications, food shortages.
[01:20:41] Eventually, we’re going to be faced with food shortages. It’s coming, and sooner rather than later, get prepared. Now, I never wanna make you feel afraid. I never want to invoke a spirit of fear here. I I, I want you to be empowered. Think about what may be coming down the road so that you can get prepared for your family.
[01:20:58] For, for your friends, for your loved [01:21:00] ones, go to prepare with justin.com and take a look at my Patriots supply. They’ve got food and gear for nearly every need. You know, neither it’s natural disaster or manmade, or in this case, Biden Made World Economic Forum, uh, made national disaster, whatever it might be.
[01:21:17] These. These things are coming. Disaster will strike at some point and we can get ready. My favorite motto is prepare like it all depends on me and pray like it all depends on God. Get ready with my Patriot supply when you go to prepare with justin.com, that’s prepare with justin.com. Go today and save some money.
[01:21:37] Plus get ready no matter what’s coming. And the Bible tells us that we will face trials of all kinds. Folks, they’re coming. How can you face them? With a little hope, with a little joy, with, well, a peace beyond understanding. My wife and I know this, we’ve been through it with a ringer with our little girl.
[01:21:56] Our first was born 27 weeks. She’s born a little early. [01:22:00] God had a different plan. We felt a peace through it all. Talk about her story and I share what sustained us through it all and gives me the perspective, the hope to fight and continue no matter what we face in the coming days. We’ve seen the worst from the World Economic Forum.
[01:22:17] We’ve seen our very own government turn on us in a lot of ways. We’ve seen economically what can happen in this country, and even more on the horizon. You don’t wanna think about those things. They aren’t coming, but how can you get prepared to fight against it? Now, I’ve talked about ways you can physically do that, but how do you prepare your mind?
[01:22:34] How do you prepare your soul? How do you get your family ready? That’s why I wrote my book. Good News, open Encouragement for Trying Times. I wanna share the good news. I want to show you how to spot it, create it, and share it with others in your life. Well, of course, if you want to grab a signed copy of the book, you can get it right now.
[01:22:51] I’d love to send it to you. Go to justin barklay.com/store to get your copy, justin barklay.com/store. I’ll cite it, send it to you [01:23:00] and get it in your hands. We just got a new shipment in. And I’d love to give you a copy of my book so that you can get the good news today. Make it a great day. God bless.
