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FMC Fast Chat takes you inside the news so you can
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be in the know in 30 minutes. Hosted by Fair Media Council
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CEO and Executive Director Jackie Clement, Fast Chat
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features notables in news, media and business.
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Hey, everyone, thanks for joining me for another episode of FMC
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Fast Chat. I'm Jackie Clement and joining me today is an old friend,
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Alex Silverman. Alex is the news and programming director
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of KNX 97.1 FM,
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Los Angeles. Alex, thanks so much for joining us today.
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Nice to see you, Jackie, and thank you. Thank you for having me. I appreciate
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it. Well, I'm thrilled to talk to you and
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I'm actually honored you made the time to talk to us today because
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we know what you've been doing covering the wildfires out there in California.
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And that's really why I wanted you to join us today is really to give
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our listeners and our viewers some insight into what it's
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like to cover something like the wildfires.
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But I think before we do that, let's step back a little bit.
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Can you give people who don't work in radio an
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idea of, you know, what your typical day was like, what your
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staff is like and where you actually are in California before we get
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into the wildfires? Sure. Well, I'll start by saying
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there's really no typical day, but I can that one.
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We are an all news radio station, one of maybe
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a dozen in the country that does, you know, 24, 7 local
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news, you know, no opinion, no talk, all local news.
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And we're located in, in Los Angeles. Our studios are in
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the Miracle Mile area of Los Angeles on Wilshire Boulevard, which is
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basically, you know, look at the map of Los Angeles almost right in the center.
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And you know, if you want some context around,
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you know, the proximity to the fires, we're about 8 to 10 miles
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from the edge of, you know, where the Palisades fire ended
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up in the Brentwood area. So, you know,
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out of the danger zone, but really not that far when you
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think about it. You know, 15 minutes with no traffic to, to get to
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the, to the edge of the fire zone. We have about total,
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including our, you know, anchors, reporters, producers,
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editors, production assistants, traffic reporters,
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about between 50 and 55 people, depending on how you count it
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all in, which is, you know, fewer, smaller than
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staffing levels used to be at all news stations. But as you know,
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radio news staffs go in America right now,
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a good sized staff. Now before the fires began,
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you kind of had a heads up that something may occur,
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right? We definitely did. And you know,
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I had been Working with the national weather service for 18
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years now. And I thought back, you know, before this happened
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to Hurricane Sandy, when things were a lot different in terms of how they communicated.
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When I was in New York at that time, and there was kind of an
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extraordinary warning coming from a gentleman at the Mount Holly
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office who kind of attached to a very, you know, one of these
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formal briefings, a personal plea to,
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to people saying, please take it seriously. Please evacuate. That was our sense
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before Hurricane Sandy that we needed to get ourselves in view year and amp
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things up. A lot has changed in terms of how the National Weather Service communicates.
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They've gotten more freedom to, you know, to go
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on social media and to be more proactive. And in this case,
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they did something I'd never seen. They, they made these graphics that were this
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big bold text. Extreme fire danger,
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life threatening windstorm. And when I saw that, you know, a lot of
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people were giving them heat for it, I said, the National Weather Service doesn't
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have any incentive to hype things. It's government agency. You don't make money by hyping
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a weather event. If they say that and they're using that kind of language,
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they mean it. And so that was our
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cue to put a plan together and say, we need to staff
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up, we need to have extra anchors on call, we need to have
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extra producers. We need to make sure all the reporters know that, you know,
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should things go bad, it's going to be a 24,
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7 effort. And so we had about two to three days
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warning that this was going to happen. And you know, when there's something like
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that, you know, a windstorm that's going on for a period of days, you don't
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know when something's going to happen. It just so happened this broke out at.
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It was, I'll never forget, 10:34am was the first
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call about the Palisades fire breaking down.
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And I'll never forget that because one of our reporters, when he
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was asked when did you know this was going to be bad?
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His reply was 10:34am because of where it was,
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because of how, you know, bad the initial call seemed
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and because of all the warnings that we'd had leading up to it.
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All right, so how did you handle coverage from that point forward?
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It was basically all hands on deck. And everybody knew that. We called everybody
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in, all of our reporters knew that they were just going to one of these
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locations to try and gather as much information as they possibly could and
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go live. We brought in extra, you know, know, producers and Editors and
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we, we went to. For most of our day, with the exception of morning drive,
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our anchors are, are solo. We basically
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went with two or three anchors at any given time for
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the next 48 hours. So we,
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we knew that there was going to be a constant flow of information and in
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order to, you know, make sure that that is
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processed correctly and people have a second to breathe and think you can't really do
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it by yourself. We needed extra producers to be able to be making phone calls
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and to be able to, you know, sort through everything that was coming in.
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My job in that instance was to figure out
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where I could be best, you know, help. Most helpful.
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Some of that was sitting here listening to the police and fire scanner and
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being able to translate some of the chaos into some sense of what was happening
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out there. One of our reporters unfortunately
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lost her family's home, not the home where she lived, but with her parents
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and her brother and her grandmother who was ill lived.
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And so she had to obviously go deal with that and
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help her family. And so we were down a reporter at that point.
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I, you know, I have a reporting background. I jumped in, went out and did
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some reporting out, you know, at the fires. So my job at
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that point was to figure out where I could, where I could be helped,
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helpful because everybody knew, I think people covered
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fire, nothing this big. Everybody now regards this as the,
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the, the standard by which everything else will be measured.
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But everybody had covered fires for, for years
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and knew what to do, what questions to ask, whom to call.
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And so that wasn't really what I needed to be doing in that, in that
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moment. Okay, well, national media sent
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in lots of folks to start covering things. I'm curious if they got
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in the way. Did they get in your hair? I wouldn't say they
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got in the way. I would say there was definitely an overwhelming amount
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of media. And it presented issues not
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with the other media, but in terms of officials really,
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you know, following the law. The California law
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says when they set up lines blocking public access
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for an emergency like a fire, the media is exempt
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from those lines and they must be let in. There are at certain points where
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so many media that there was perception on the part of first
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responders that, you know, we get in the way. And so we
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kind of had, there were a few struggles of convincing officials to let us into
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places where we needed to be, but that was kind of the main issue.
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And we sorted through a lot of those things. Definitely a
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lot of out of town media who were
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not as familiar with covering fires. And, you know, that makes me nervous
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as somebody whose job it is to think about the safety
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of everybody who is out there. You know, I hear,
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you know, Pete Demetrio has been covering fires for CANX for
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more than 30 years. I hear him driving through
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a situation where he says, the fire's burning on both sides of the highway,
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and I see embers flying over the car.
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Obviously, I'm concerned, but I know that he has had
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training about that. He knows what situations to be, and he's been in those situations
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before, and he knows when he needs to stop and get out. There are
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a lot of people who were coming into these situations who, you know, may not
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have had that. That kind of background. So that. That concerned me.
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Fortunately, we didn't have any, you know, bad outcomes there.
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Okay, good. And working with the public officials,
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we. It was interesting in this case is we.
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And. And actually, it is something that I've seen in a lot of emergencies,
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particularly here. Public officials just started calling us and
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because they knew that a. There were hundreds of thousands of people who
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had no power. And one of the only ways that they were getting information
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was through us. And so they knew that they could reach huge numbers
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of people by calling the county supervisors who are, you know,
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I think a lot of people have now learned that Altadena
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in particular is not a. It's not a city. It's not. It's an unincorporated area
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of LA County. There's really no government. The county supervisors, who are
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each responsible for two and a half million people in their district, they're the
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ones who are responsible for that area. And so, you know,
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they started calling us. The city
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of LA was a little bit of a different story because the mayor was out
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of town, but we did have her on. And I think it was
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that first day on our air that people
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realized when she said. We asked. We asked, where. Where are you? And she said,
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west Africa. That people realized that that was the situation.
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So, you know, that was a, you know, but. But that said
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all the public officials knew that they, you know, could reach huge numbers of
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people by calling us. And so it wasn't an issue where we couldn't get people
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on the air. It was actually pretty much the opposite.
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So the coverage that you went through, I mean, I imagine
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you start out, of course, covering evacuations.
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Yeah. And is that rather orderly, or does that get
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crazy, too? Well, we hadn't had them on this
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scale. And the ability.
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It wasn't just at first, because the boundaries for the evacuation zones were
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changing, not just by the hour. But they kept changing as the day. Days went
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on. So trying to sort through all of the alerts, we were
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getting about where the evacuations were and getting some conflicting
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information from officials. We had to point that out.
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And at a certain point, we basically had to tell people,
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you know, if you're in one of these warning areas, which may become an order,
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or you're anywhere near it, you should think about getting out,
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because these things are changing so quickly. We had an
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issue with the. The alerts about evacuations,
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the wireless emergency alerts. There was one instance where one went out to the
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entire county, 10 million people. Imagine, you know, everybody in the state
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of Michigan getting an alert, saying that they needed preparing to evacuate.
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That's what la. That's what happened here. And that,
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for a period of time, made the whole system
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less credible. And so that became a story that we had to deal with
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and get answers on. And, you know, that was another
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complication to the whole thing. So it was. It was very interesting trying to
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sort through all that. We had people calling us, and that
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was a through line through this whole thing. We were hearing from so
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many people about everything. Can you tell me whether my
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house burned? Can you tell me whether my particular areas in the
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evacuation zone people felt that level of connection with us?
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You know, I'd love to be able to answer all of those voicemails and deal
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with all those people individually. We obviously don't have the staffing for that.
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We can just do our best by sorting through all of those and trying to
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answer as many questions as we could. And then when it
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came to covering the fire itself, you said your staff is accustomed
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to covering fires. They have experience.
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But do they push it? Do they go too far?
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How do you handle that? Well, one of my roles
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in those kinds of situations, and it really goes for any sort of intense breaking
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news coverage, is to just make sure that the people out in the field I'm
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calling and checking on regularly and making sure that they are,
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you know, doing okay. Because, you know, when you're out covering something,
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and I know from being a reporter that when you're out there, you just do
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it and you go and you give it your all and you're exhausted,
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but you don't care. And you. You know, at a certain point, it can kind
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of hit you. So I was in touch with all our
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reporters at various points, just making sure they were okay.
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And I knew, even though I
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trusted. Excuse me, I trusted that they
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had been trained and knew to follow their training and knew what to do,
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that I still had to say, just remember, you know,
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this is. You're just talking on the radio here. It's important,
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but it's not more important. And at one point, Pete Demetrio
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said something to me like that he had said before, which is, you know,
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I learned years ago that I'm of no value to you if I'm
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injured or dead. So I'm not getting injured or dead. And I said,
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well, good. Thanks for reassuring me of that.
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But, you know, when you hear people talk, talking about driving down Pacific
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coast highway, when all the houses are burning down on one side
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and the fires on the hill on the other side, obviously you get
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concerned. Yeah, okay. And we're talking
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radio, but now, should we actually be talking multimedia?
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Well, I. I would say that in this instance,
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social media was extremely important for getting the message out.
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In particular, we had 17 million views
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in the first couple of days of the videos we were posting on social media.
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That's more impressions than we had on the radio.
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Obviously, the people listening on the radio were the people who were tuning
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in explicitly for that information, but we were reaching a whole new audience
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with information, with. With confirmed and valid information
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amid all of the chaos that was going on on social
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media. You know, you had things out there like the Hollywood sign is on fire,
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which never happened. You know, who knows
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why? People start to come up with things just to try and take advantage
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of the situation. But that was that.
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It was. We expanded our reach. Dramatic.
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I'll put it this way. We expanded our social following by
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roughly five times the amount we expanded
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it by. In the entire year 2024, in one week.
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And I put another way, we gained as many. We gained five times as many
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followers in that week as we did in all of 2024.
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And that was because we were putting out information that people
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needed and wanted to consume and was actually valid.
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And we were putting out. A lot of what we were putting out is the.
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Some of the evacuation maps where people didn't know initially.
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I think after a few days, people started to get accustomed to the resources
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that. Where you could find those things. But we. We were putting them
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out before anybody knew to use the WatchDuty app or any of those types
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of. Types of resources. We were also using
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push alerts that we sent to all of the listeners
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to any station in Southern California on
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the Odyssey app, which, you know, we have our listeners
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who have subscribed to push alerts for our station and want
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to get news. But this is an instance where you
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Know, we saw it as a public safety issue. And so
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we had no, no problem with, you know,
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making sure that we blasted out those things to people beyond
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the audience that had, you know, they'd opted into push alerts, maybe not for news,
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but we didn't think in this instance they would be bothered by the fact that
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they were getting potentially life saving information.
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Right. Okay, now you've got a huge signal, right? You're 50,000,
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50,000 watts on AM. On FM, the signal is slightly,
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you know, it's not as, as widespread coverage in Southern
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California, but it still covers all of LA and Orange counties and a little bit
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further. So it's a, it's a full market signal, you know,
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plus the app, which obviously is, is wherever.
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Yeah. Okay. But now, did you have any issues with the signal
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at all during the course of the fire? Well,
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there was a two hour period.
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I'll, I'll say whether it was, I can't remember what day it was, Wednesday or
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Thursday, where we thought everything on Mount Wilson,
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which is where all of the main transmitters for all of the
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radio and TV stations was going to burn. And in fact, the fire singed
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the edges of the transmitter building before they were
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able to knock it back. Now we have a backup transmitter
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site that we could have switched to. Some of the stations up there did
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not have a backup site. Some of the TV stations may have gone off the
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air. That was a really intense period of time because we thought it was all,
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we thought it was all going to burn. It was very, very close,
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but fortunately it didn't. We were on generator power on our
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transmitter at our transmitter sites for more than a week.
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Fortunately, we were able to get fuel deliveries up there so that we
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could replenish it and wouldn't have to go off the air for a period of
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time. But it was not a given. And I don't think listeners
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a lot of times think about those types of things. Had the same situation
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in Hurricane Sandy when, you know, I was working at WCBS and
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we came within six feet of being off the air, 10, 10 winds, was knocked
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off the air for a period of something
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like 18 hours because the transmitter site was flooded.
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And there's an engineering team who is, you know,
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doing everything they can to make sure those things don't happen.
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And they did a great job in this case. But at the end of the
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day, it was, is the, is the fire going to hit the building or not?
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Right. Yeah, yeah. I think most listeners just
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think radio happens by magic. It comes to you magically Right.
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It does seem that way. And, you know, that's, that's one of the reasons I've
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always been fascinated by it and I've always loved it.
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But, you know, that magic is definitely assisted by a lot of technology
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and a lot of experienced people. Yeah.
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So what are we into? Is it, what, week three of covering
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the devastation there? Week four, it'll be exactly
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a month on Friday. So this is week four.
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Okay. So is, is all of the fire out and
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you're now looking at recovery stories. Is that where you are?
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Yeah, the fires are now 100% contained as of yesterday or the
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day before. And we're now well into
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the period of time where we're figuring out
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what the stories are going to be. We know what some of them are people
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dealing with insurance. Insurance was already a crisis in Southern
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California because insurance companies were pulling out, rates were
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going up astronomically, and a lot of people in these areas
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weren't even able to get insurance and had to use the state's insurer
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of last resort, which is now essentially bankrupt. So that's a
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big question going forward, the question of rebuilding, which again, I go
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back to, you know, covering Hurricane Sandy, and we remember how long it
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took for the government to get its, you know, button gear
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and get all of that organized in such a way that people could take advantage
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of the resources that were available. All of the agencies around
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here are vowing that that's not going to be the case. But the fact is
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people don't know. And the first thing people have to do
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is get all of the toxic debris cleared out of there.
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And that even is becoming a challenge because nobody
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want. They need staging areas when they take the debris and they put it somewhere
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before they are able to process and deal with it. There's fights
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now over where those things are going to be located because obviously no one wants
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a, a bunch of, you know, Tesla batteries
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that are burning sitting in their neighborhood.
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So all of those stories, from the,
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the cleanup to the rebuilding to the what
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do we do going forward about what we build and where and,
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and how we ensure it, all of that is coming into focus
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now. Okay, Any idea how many hours you
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plugged? Oh, God, I don't even want to think about.
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I mean, the first few days were basically, you know, 20 hour
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days with a few hours sleep. And, you know, then.
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And I, I started to tell everyone, you know, you can't maintain that covering
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breaking news for six or eight hours is a
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huge challenge. Doing it for basically 12 days straight,
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which is what we Did. We didn't feel like we're out of the,
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you know, emergency period for about 12 days. And I remember that
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moment where it sort of felt like, okay, we're now lifting
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the evacuations, we're now moving into a different phase of this.
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And that's when we did a special because we said, okay, what do we do
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now? We, we're, we've been doing nothing but non
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stop emergency information. We,
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by the way, I don't think I mentioned this. We didn't play commercials for almost
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48 hours at the, in the initial phase
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of it, we got back to that. We were still, you know,
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not doing a lot because we needed to make sure that we got
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all the live briefings on and all of that. But,
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and also the other element of that is the fatigue when people are on the
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air constantly without any breaks.
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That's incredibly fatiguing. You can't sustain that for longer
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than a couple of days. You can't sustain constant breaking
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news coverage without giving people time to rest,
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cover and get back to it. Yeah,
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no, I imagine that's incredibly draining.
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But now, out of all of it
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now, because you have a little bit of time where you can look back and
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see what you did. You can see what you did well,
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obviously where all of your
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management expertise came into play. What kind of stories were
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you surprised to find out of all of this?
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That's a good question. I think
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one thing that was surprising was,
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and not necessarily surprising, but sort of helped me understand the
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way government is set up in Southern California is very different
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than other parts of the country in that it's very decentralized.
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There are 88 cities in LA county and there are unincorporated areas
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like Altadena that burn. So there was no one leader
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who was able to step up and come out of this.
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It wasn't like, you know, even the mayor of Los Angeles is not
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a, the kind of powerful figure that the mayor of New York
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is and has historically been. And so there was
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this coordination of governments and there was a
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period of time where we were having two separate press conferences, one with the city,
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one with the county, and nobody knew who was really in charge.
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And even to this day it's, there's kind of a divide between what's going
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on with the Eaton fire in Altadena and what's going on with the Palisades fire,
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which is in the city's jurisdiction. The city fire department and the county fire
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00:23:00,750 --> 00:23:04,710
department were kind of two separate entities, although they work together in joint command.
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So I think those Stories about the, the sort
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of lack of communication within government were.
384
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Was one thing that, like, maybe we should have thought about this
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a little bit more clearly before, you know, before having
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an actual emergency. Yeah, got it.
387
00:23:22,072 --> 00:23:25,820
Okay. And then the governor came in and then did Trump.
388
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How was covering that, that situation?
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00:23:29,720 --> 00:23:33,712
It. By that time, we were, I think, out of the
390
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kind of real emergency period. And, you know,
391
00:23:38,200 --> 00:23:41,746
covering it was more like covering President Trump's
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00:23:41,778 --> 00:23:45,282
visit was really like covering any presidential visit.
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It was, by that time we kind of knew what the issues were.
394
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And you kind of have to go there and listen to
395
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everybody, gather reaction from all sides and kind of
396
00:23:57,050 --> 00:24:00,770
analyze, you know, why people are saying
397
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what they're saying around it. It's pretty much what we do in any,
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00:24:03,914 --> 00:24:07,008
when any president comes in. But it was,
399
00:24:07,064 --> 00:24:10,380
I think the difference here was that President Trump had just taken office.
400
00:24:10,760 --> 00:24:13,952
And so it was, you know, there was, there were some,
401
00:24:14,056 --> 00:24:17,488
you know, questions about what he would do and,
402
00:24:17,544 --> 00:24:21,472
and things he said regarding disaster aid in particular for
403
00:24:21,496 --> 00:24:25,120
California. I think, you know,
404
00:24:25,240 --> 00:24:28,464
it has yet to be seen what's going to happen with that, with federal aid
405
00:24:28,512 --> 00:24:32,438
going forward. But it wasn't, you know, an overly political
406
00:24:32,624 --> 00:24:36,106
situation where there were fights over that while he was here,
407
00:24:36,178 --> 00:24:39,722
although there, you know, there were some things said. So it was, I mean,
408
00:24:39,746 --> 00:24:42,794
I, I would say that it wasn't really out of the ordinary when, when,
409
00:24:42,882 --> 00:24:46,070
you know, a president comes to visit a disaster site.
410
00:24:47,170 --> 00:24:49,990
Well, it's good. You have what, about 20 years experience?
411
00:24:51,330 --> 00:24:53,910
Yeah, pretty almost. Yeah. I,
412
00:24:54,370 --> 00:24:58,042
I started in professional radio in
413
00:24:58,226 --> 00:25:01,716
2007, so. Yeah. Okay.
414
00:25:01,748 --> 00:25:06,052
Well, it sounds like they haven't thrown anything at you that you didn't already anticipate.
415
00:25:06,196 --> 00:25:09,396
Did New York train you well for that? Yeah.
416
00:25:09,428 --> 00:25:12,852
And, and I think the biggest disaster that I
417
00:25:12,876 --> 00:25:16,276
covered prior to this, which I keep coming back to, is Hurricane Sandy,
418
00:25:16,308 --> 00:25:19,920
because that was something that was so unwieldy to
419
00:25:20,300 --> 00:25:23,764
wrap your head around at first because of the wide, huge scale.
420
00:25:23,812 --> 00:25:27,078
I mean, in that there were 600,000 homes either damaged or destroyed,
421
00:25:27,244 --> 00:25:30,114
and just the wide geographic scale of it.
422
00:25:30,282 --> 00:25:33,394
Interestingly, the difference here is that, and this occurred to
423
00:25:33,402 --> 00:25:37,122
me a couple days in, it feels
424
00:25:37,186 --> 00:25:40,946
much closer to everyone in the metro area. It feels
425
00:25:40,978 --> 00:25:44,030
here like everybody knows somebody who lost everything.
426
00:25:44,570 --> 00:25:48,626
And there wasn't necessarily. There were a lot of people who lost everything in Hurricane
427
00:25:48,658 --> 00:25:52,466
Sandy. But, you know, when I would go back to Manhattan
428
00:25:52,498 --> 00:25:56,760
at night, I didn't necessarily constantly run into people who were in that situation.
429
00:25:57,900 --> 00:26:01,412
It feels like, and I'm not really sure how to explain why
430
00:26:01,436 --> 00:26:05,076
this is but it feels like everybody here is
431
00:26:05,148 --> 00:26:08,724
one degree away from somebody who lost everything.
432
00:26:08,812 --> 00:26:12,292
And, you know, we're talking about 10,000 people who have.
433
00:26:12,396 --> 00:26:15,764
And fire's a little bit different. There's a lot more that's completely
434
00:26:15,812 --> 00:26:19,204
devastated than, you know, when a fire hits something, it's going
435
00:26:19,212 --> 00:26:22,858
to be destroyed, not, you know, damage. This, you know,
436
00:26:22,914 --> 00:26:26,410
difficult but recoverable. In this case, you have a
437
00:26:26,450 --> 00:26:30,010
lot of people who have thousands and thousands of people who've just completely lost
438
00:26:30,050 --> 00:26:34,730
everything. And it feels very close to everybody in the area right
439
00:26:34,850 --> 00:26:38,522
now. If you guys weren't on the air 24
440
00:26:38,546 --> 00:26:41,990
hours doing news, who would people have turned to?
441
00:26:44,130 --> 00:26:46,870
That's a good question. I don't know. We've seen.
442
00:26:47,220 --> 00:26:50,556
We. For the first Nielsen weekly ever,
443
00:26:50,628 --> 00:26:53,720
KNX was the overall number one in the market.
444
00:26:54,180 --> 00:26:58,604
And, you know, we know people turn to us when there are disasters.
445
00:26:58,652 --> 00:27:02,012
We see big spikes when there's an earthquake, we see big spikes when there is
446
00:27:02,036 --> 00:27:05,240
a fire. But we've never seen a.
447
00:27:06,340 --> 00:27:09,612
We've never seen it to this degree. Our streaming was up between 200 and
448
00:27:09,636 --> 00:27:13,430
400% for a week
449
00:27:13,470 --> 00:27:17,210
straight, basically, that never, it never went below 200% of normal.
450
00:27:19,470 --> 00:27:22,610
Who would people have turned to? I don't know.
451
00:27:22,990 --> 00:27:26,102
They. And a lot of people did turn. A lot of the TV stations in
452
00:27:26,126 --> 00:27:30,614
town did excellent work. And I've heard a lot of people in the national media
453
00:27:30,782 --> 00:27:34,054
and in the entertainment world say things
454
00:27:34,142 --> 00:27:38,112
like, well, we, a lot of people really recognize the value of local media
455
00:27:38,166 --> 00:27:41,612
news. And that certainly goes for what the TV stations did,
456
00:27:41,796 --> 00:27:46,012
and it also goes for what we did, but again,
457
00:27:46,116 --> 00:27:49,420
to the point that a lot of people didn't have power and were not able
458
00:27:49,460 --> 00:27:52,684
to watch TV and there was no cell service in a
459
00:27:52,692 --> 00:27:56,236
lot of these areas. That's another thing we've learned in previous disasters,
460
00:27:56,348 --> 00:28:01,440
that that situation can keep getting worse because initially
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cell towers are destroyed, but then those that aren't,
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that are on generator power, and not all of them are, but the larger sites
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are. After a few days, generator run out,
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runs out of fuel, and then more cell tower sites go down.
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And then connectivity is even worse of a problem than
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it was before. And then more people have to depend on things like
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radio. So I don't really know who they would have depended on.
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It was local broadcast media that was
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depended on like no other in. In this situation.
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All right, so what do you say to people? And I'm sure you
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hear it all the time when people say to you, radio is dead.
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Well, I would say, look at what happened here. I would say when people
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needed it, they knew where to turn. They knew
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that they were going to get accurate, confirmed,
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verified information from people they could trust. And there's really
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no other source of that. And we saw that in huge numbers. We had
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1.4 million people listening to us over the course
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of that week. And I. I don't know that 1.4
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million people would listen to something that they think is dead.
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Anything you want to say before we wrap up? Because believe it or not,
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we're at time. Just that I was in awe
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of the job that the team here did.
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I kind of alluded to this, but I didn't really need
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to give much direction. They knew what to do and they knew,
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you know, how to make sure that people were getting the
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best information possible. And my job was to make sure that they had the
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ability to do that and also, you know, make sure they were getting what
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they needed while doing it. So my hat's off to them.
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The Fair Media Council is a 501c3 nonprofit
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organization advocating for quality news and working to create
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a media savvy society. For more information about the Fair
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00:29:55,314 --> 00:29:58,698
Media council and upcoming fast chat shows, check out
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00:29:58,754 --> 00:30:00,490
fairmediacouncil.org.
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FMC Fast Chat takes you inside the news so you can
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be in the know in 30 minutes. Hosted by Fair Media Council
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CEO and Executive Director Jackie Clement, Fast Chat
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features notables in news, media and business.
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Hey, everyone, thanks for joining me for another episode of FMC
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Fast Chat. I'm Jackie Clement and joining me today is an old friend,
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Alex Silverman. Alex is the news and programming director
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of KNX 97.1 FM,
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Los Angeles. Alex, thanks so much for joining us today.
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Nice to see you, Jackie, and thank you. Thank you for having me. I appreciate
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it. Well, I'm thrilled to talk to you and
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I'm actually honored you made the time to talk to us today because
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we know what you've been doing covering the wildfires out there in California.
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And that's really why I wanted you to join us today is really to give
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our listeners and our viewers some insight into what it's
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like to cover something like the wildfires.
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But I think before we do that, let's step back a little bit.
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Can you give people who don't work in radio an
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idea of, you know, what your typical day was like, what your
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staff is like and where you actually are in California before we get
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into the wildfires? Sure. Well, I'll start by saying
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there's really no typical day, but I can that one.
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We are an all news radio station, one of maybe
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a dozen in the country that does, you know, 24, 7 local
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news, you know, no opinion, no talk, all local news.
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And we're located in, in Los Angeles. Our studios are in
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the Miracle Mile area of Los Angeles on Wilshire Boulevard, which is
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basically, you know, look at the map of Los Angeles almost right in the center.
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And you know, if you want some context around,
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you know, the proximity to the fires, we're about 8 to 10 miles
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from the edge of, you know, where the Palisades fire ended
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up in the Brentwood area. So, you know,
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out of the danger zone, but really not that far when you
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think about it. You know, 15 minutes with no traffic to, to get to
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the, to the edge of the fire zone. We have about total,
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including our, you know, anchors, reporters, producers,
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editors, production assistants, traffic reporters,
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about between 50 and 55 people, depending on how you count it
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all in, which is, you know, fewer, smaller than
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staffing levels used to be at all news stations. But as you know,
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radio news staffs go in America right now,
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a good sized staff. Now before the fires began,
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you kind of had a heads up that something may occur,
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right? We definitely did. And you know,
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I had been Working with the national weather service for 18
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years now. And I thought back, you know, before this happened
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to Hurricane Sandy, when things were a lot different in terms of how they communicated.
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When I was in New York at that time, and there was kind of an
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extraordinary warning coming from a gentleman at the Mount Holly
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office who kind of attached to a very, you know, one of these
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formal briefings, a personal plea to,
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to people saying, please take it seriously. Please evacuate. That was our sense
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before Hurricane Sandy that we needed to get ourselves in view year and amp
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things up. A lot has changed in terms of how the National Weather Service communicates.
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They've gotten more freedom to, you know, to go
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on social media and to be more proactive. And in this case,
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they did something I'd never seen. They, they made these graphics that were this
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big bold text. Extreme fire danger,
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life threatening windstorm. And when I saw that, you know, a lot of
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people were giving them heat for it, I said, the National Weather Service doesn't
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have any incentive to hype things. It's government agency. You don't make money by hyping
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a weather event. If they say that and they're using that kind of language,
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they mean it. And so that was our
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cue to put a plan together and say, we need to staff
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up, we need to have extra anchors on call, we need to have
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extra producers. We need to make sure all the reporters know that, you know,
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should things go bad, it's going to be a 24,
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7 effort. And so we had about two to three days
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warning that this was going to happen. And you know, when there's something like
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that, you know, a windstorm that's going on for a period of days, you don't
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know when something's going to happen. It just so happened this broke out at.
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It was, I'll never forget, 10:34am was the first
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call about the Palisades fire breaking down.
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And I'll never forget that because one of our reporters, when he
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was asked when did you know this was going to be bad?
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His reply was 10:34am because of where it was,
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because of how, you know, bad the initial call seemed
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and because of all the warnings that we'd had leading up to it.
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All right, so how did you handle coverage from that point forward?
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It was basically all hands on deck. And everybody knew that. We called everybody
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in, all of our reporters knew that they were just going to one of these
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locations to try and gather as much information as they possibly could and
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go live. We brought in extra, you know, know, producers and Editors and
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we, we went to. For most of our day, with the exception of morning drive,
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our anchors are, are solo. We basically
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went with two or three anchors at any given time for
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the next 48 hours. So we,
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we knew that there was going to be a constant flow of information and in
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order to, you know, make sure that that is
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processed correctly and people have a second to breathe and think you can't really do
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it by yourself. We needed extra producers to be able to be making phone calls
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and to be able to, you know, sort through everything that was coming in.
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My job in that instance was to figure out
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where I could be best, you know, help. Most helpful.
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Some of that was sitting here listening to the police and fire scanner and
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being able to translate some of the chaos into some sense of what was happening
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out there. One of our reporters unfortunately
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lost her family's home, not the home where she lived, but with her parents
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and her brother and her grandmother who was ill lived.
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And so she had to obviously go deal with that and
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help her family. And so we were down a reporter at that point.
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I, you know, I have a reporting background. I jumped in, went out and did
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some reporting out, you know, at the fires. So my job at
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that point was to figure out where I could, where I could be helped,
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helpful because everybody knew, I think people covered
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fire, nothing this big. Everybody now regards this as the,
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the, the standard by which everything else will be measured.
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But everybody had covered fires for, for years
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and knew what to do, what questions to ask, whom to call.
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And so that wasn't really what I needed to be doing in that, in that
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moment. Okay, well, national media sent
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in lots of folks to start covering things. I'm curious if they got
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in the way. Did they get in your hair? I wouldn't say they
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got in the way. I would say there was definitely an overwhelming amount
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of media. And it presented issues not
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with the other media, but in terms of officials really,
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you know, following the law. The California law
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says when they set up lines blocking public access
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for an emergency like a fire, the media is exempt
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from those lines and they must be let in. There are at certain points where
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so many media that there was perception on the part of first
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responders that, you know, we get in the way. And so we
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kind of had, there were a few struggles of convincing officials to let us into
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places where we needed to be, but that was kind of the main issue.
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And we sorted through a lot of those things. Definitely a
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lot of out of town media who were
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not as familiar with covering fires. And, you know, that makes me nervous
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as somebody whose job it is to think about the safety
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of everybody who is out there. You know, I hear,
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you know, Pete Demetrio has been covering fires for CANX for
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more than 30 years. I hear him driving through
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a situation where he says, the fire's burning on both sides of the highway,
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and I see embers flying over the car.
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Obviously, I'm concerned, but I know that he has had
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training about that. He knows what situations to be, and he's been in those situations
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before, and he knows when he needs to stop and get out. There are
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a lot of people who were coming into these situations who, you know, may not
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have had that. That kind of background. So that. That concerned me.
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Fortunately, we didn't have any, you know, bad outcomes there.
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Okay, good. And working with the public officials,
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we. It was interesting in this case is we.
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And. And actually, it is something that I've seen in a lot of emergencies,
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particularly here. Public officials just started calling us and
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because they knew that a. There were hundreds of thousands of people who
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had no power. And one of the only ways that they were getting information
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was through us. And so they knew that they could reach huge numbers
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of people by calling the county supervisors who are, you know,
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I think a lot of people have now learned that Altadena
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in particular is not a. It's not a city. It's not. It's an unincorporated area
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of LA County. There's really no government. The county supervisors, who are
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each responsible for two and a half million people in their district, they're the
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ones who are responsible for that area. And so, you know,
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they started calling us. The city
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of LA was a little bit of a different story because the mayor was out
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of town, but we did have her on. And I think it was
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that first day on our air that people
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realized when she said. We asked. We asked, where. Where are you? And she said,
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west Africa. That people realized that that was the situation.
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So, you know, that was a, you know, but. But that said
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all the public officials knew that they, you know, could reach huge numbers of
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people by calling us. And so it wasn't an issue where we couldn't get people
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on the air. It was actually pretty much the opposite.
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So the coverage that you went through, I mean, I imagine
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you start out, of course, covering evacuations.
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Yeah. And is that rather orderly, or does that get
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crazy, too? Well, we hadn't had them on this
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scale. And the ability.
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It wasn't just at first, because the boundaries for the evacuation zones were
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changing, not just by the hour. But they kept changing as the day. Days went
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on. So trying to sort through all of the alerts, we were
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getting about where the evacuations were and getting some conflicting
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information from officials. We had to point that out.
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And at a certain point, we basically had to tell people,
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you know, if you're in one of these warning areas, which may become an order,
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or you're anywhere near it, you should think about getting out,
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because these things are changing so quickly. We had an
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issue with the. The alerts about evacuations,
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the wireless emergency alerts. There was one instance where one went out to the
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entire county, 10 million people. Imagine, you know, everybody in the state
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of Michigan getting an alert, saying that they needed preparing to evacuate.
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That's what la. That's what happened here. And that,
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for a period of time, made the whole system
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less credible. And so that became a story that we had to deal with
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and get answers on. And, you know, that was another
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complication to the whole thing. So it was. It was very interesting trying to
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sort through all that. We had people calling us, and that
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was a through line through this whole thing. We were hearing from so
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many people about everything. Can you tell me whether my
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house burned? Can you tell me whether my particular areas in the
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evacuation zone people felt that level of connection with us?
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You know, I'd love to be able to answer all of those voicemails and deal
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with all those people individually. We obviously don't have the staffing for that.
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We can just do our best by sorting through all of those and trying to
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answer as many questions as we could. And then when it
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came to covering the fire itself, you said your staff is accustomed
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to covering fires. They have experience.
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But do they push it? Do they go too far?
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How do you handle that? Well, one of my roles
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in those kinds of situations, and it really goes for any sort of intense breaking
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news coverage, is to just make sure that the people out in the field I'm
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calling and checking on regularly and making sure that they are,
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you know, doing okay. Because, you know, when you're out covering something,
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and I know from being a reporter that when you're out there, you just do
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it and you go and you give it your all and you're exhausted,
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but you don't care. And you. You know, at a certain point, it can kind
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of hit you. So I was in touch with all our
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reporters at various points, just making sure they were okay.
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And I knew, even though I
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trusted. Excuse me, I trusted that they
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had been trained and knew to follow their training and knew what to do,
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that I still had to say, just remember, you know,
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this is. You're just talking on the radio here. It's important,
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but it's not more important. And at one point, Pete Demetrio
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said something to me like that he had said before, which is, you know,
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I learned years ago that I'm of no value to you if I'm
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injured or dead. So I'm not getting injured or dead. And I said,
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well, good. Thanks for reassuring me of that.
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But, you know, when you hear people talk, talking about driving down Pacific
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coast highway, when all the houses are burning down on one side
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and the fires on the hill on the other side, obviously you get
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concerned. Yeah, okay. And we're talking
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radio, but now, should we actually be talking multimedia?
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Well, I. I would say that in this instance,
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social media was extremely important for getting the message out.
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In particular, we had 17 million views
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in the first couple of days of the videos we were posting on social media.
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That's more impressions than we had on the radio.
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Obviously, the people listening on the radio were the people who were tuning
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in explicitly for that information, but we were reaching a whole new audience
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with information, with. With confirmed and valid information
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amid all of the chaos that was going on on social
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media. You know, you had things out there like the Hollywood sign is on fire,
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which never happened. You know, who knows
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why? People start to come up with things just to try and take advantage
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of the situation. But that was that.
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It was. We expanded our reach. Dramatic.
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I'll put it this way. We expanded our social following by
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roughly five times the amount we expanded
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it by. In the entire year 2024, in one week.
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And I put another way, we gained as many. We gained five times as many
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followers in that week as we did in all of 2024.
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And that was because we were putting out information that people
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needed and wanted to consume and was actually valid.
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And we were putting out. A lot of what we were putting out is the.
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Some of the evacuation maps where people didn't know initially.
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I think after a few days, people started to get accustomed to the resources
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that. Where you could find those things. But we. We were putting them
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out before anybody knew to use the WatchDuty app or any of those types
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of. Types of resources. We were also using
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push alerts that we sent to all of the listeners
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to any station in Southern California on
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the Odyssey app, which, you know, we have our listeners
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who have subscribed to push alerts for our station and want
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to get news. But this is an instance where you
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Know, we saw it as a public safety issue. And so
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we had no, no problem with, you know,
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making sure that we blasted out those things to people beyond
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the audience that had, you know, they'd opted into push alerts, maybe not for news,
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but we didn't think in this instance they would be bothered by the fact that
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they were getting potentially life saving information.
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Right. Okay, now you've got a huge signal, right? You're 50,000,
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50,000 watts on AM. On FM, the signal is slightly,
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you know, it's not as, as widespread coverage in Southern
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California, but it still covers all of LA and Orange counties and a little bit
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further. So it's a, it's a full market signal, you know,
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plus the app, which obviously is, is wherever.
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Yeah. Okay. But now, did you have any issues with the signal
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at all during the course of the fire? Well,
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there was a two hour period.
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I'll, I'll say whether it was, I can't remember what day it was, Wednesday or
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Thursday, where we thought everything on Mount Wilson,
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which is where all of the main transmitters for all of the
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radio and TV stations was going to burn. And in fact, the fire singed
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the edges of the transmitter building before they were
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able to knock it back. Now we have a backup transmitter
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site that we could have switched to. Some of the stations up there did
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not have a backup site. Some of the TV stations may have gone off the
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air. That was a really intense period of time because we thought it was all,
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we thought it was all going to burn. It was very, very close,
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but fortunately it didn't. We were on generator power on our
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transmitter at our transmitter sites for more than a week.
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Fortunately, we were able to get fuel deliveries up there so that we
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could replenish it and wouldn't have to go off the air for a period of
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time. But it was not a given. And I don't think listeners
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a lot of times think about those types of things. Had the same situation
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in Hurricane Sandy when, you know, I was working at WCBS and
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we came within six feet of being off the air, 10, 10 winds, was knocked
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off the air for a period of something
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like 18 hours because the transmitter site was flooded.
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And there's an engineering team who is, you know,
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doing everything they can to make sure those things don't happen.
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And they did a great job in this case. But at the end of the
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day, it was, is the, is the fire going to hit the building or not?
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Right. Yeah, yeah. I think most listeners just
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think radio happens by magic. It comes to you magically Right.
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It does seem that way. And, you know, that's, that's one of the reasons I've
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always been fascinated by it and I've always loved it.
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But, you know, that magic is definitely assisted by a lot of technology
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and a lot of experienced people. Yeah.
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So what are we into? Is it, what, week three of covering
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the devastation there? Week four, it'll be exactly
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a month on Friday. So this is week four.
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Okay. So is, is all of the fire out and
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you're now looking at recovery stories. Is that where you are?
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Yeah, the fires are now 100% contained as of yesterday or the
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day before. And we're now well into
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the period of time where we're figuring out
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what the stories are going to be. We know what some of them are people
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dealing with insurance. Insurance was already a crisis in Southern
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California because insurance companies were pulling out, rates were
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going up astronomically, and a lot of people in these areas
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weren't even able to get insurance and had to use the state's insurer
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of last resort, which is now essentially bankrupt. So that's a
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big question going forward, the question of rebuilding, which again, I go
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back to, you know, covering Hurricane Sandy, and we remember how long it
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took for the government to get its, you know, button gear
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and get all of that organized in such a way that people could take advantage
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of the resources that were available. All of the agencies around
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here are vowing that that's not going to be the case. But the fact is
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people don't know. And the first thing people have to do
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is get all of the toxic debris cleared out of there.
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And that even is becoming a challenge because nobody
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want. They need staging areas when they take the debris and they put it somewhere
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before they are able to process and deal with it. There's fights
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now over where those things are going to be located because obviously no one wants
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a, a bunch of, you know, Tesla batteries
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that are burning sitting in their neighborhood.
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So all of those stories, from the,
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the cleanup to the rebuilding to the what
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do we do going forward about what we build and where and,
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and how we ensure it, all of that is coming into focus
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now. Okay, Any idea how many hours you
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plugged? Oh, God, I don't even want to think about.
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I mean, the first few days were basically, you know, 20 hour
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days with a few hours sleep. And, you know, then.
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And I, I started to tell everyone, you know, you can't maintain that covering
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breaking news for six or eight hours is a
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huge challenge. Doing it for basically 12 days straight,
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which is what we Did. We didn't feel like we're out of the,
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you know, emergency period for about 12 days. And I remember that
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moment where it sort of felt like, okay, we're now lifting
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the evacuations, we're now moving into a different phase of this.
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And that's when we did a special because we said, okay, what do we do
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now? We, we're, we've been doing nothing but non
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stop emergency information. We,
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by the way, I don't think I mentioned this. We didn't play commercials for almost
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48 hours at the, in the initial phase
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of it, we got back to that. We were still, you know,
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not doing a lot because we needed to make sure that we got
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all the live briefings on and all of that. But,
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and also the other element of that is the fatigue when people are on the
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air constantly without any breaks.
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That's incredibly fatiguing. You can't sustain that for longer
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than a couple of days. You can't sustain constant breaking
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news coverage without giving people time to rest,
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cover and get back to it. Yeah,
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no, I imagine that's incredibly draining.
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But now, out of all of it
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now, because you have a little bit of time where you can look back and
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see what you did. You can see what you did well,
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obviously where all of your
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management expertise came into play. What kind of stories were
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you surprised to find out of all of this?
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That's a good question. I think
365
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one thing that was surprising was,
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and not necessarily surprising, but sort of helped me understand the
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way government is set up in Southern California is very different
368
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than other parts of the country in that it's very decentralized.
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There are 88 cities in LA county and there are unincorporated areas
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like Altadena that burn. So there was no one leader
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who was able to step up and come out of this.
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It wasn't like, you know, even the mayor of Los Angeles is not
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a, the kind of powerful figure that the mayor of New York
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is and has historically been. And so there was
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this coordination of governments and there was a
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period of time where we were having two separate press conferences, one with the city,
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one with the county, and nobody knew who was really in charge.
378
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And even to this day it's, there's kind of a divide between what's going
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on with the Eaton fire in Altadena and what's going on with the Palisades fire,
380
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which is in the city's jurisdiction. The city fire department and the county fire
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department were kind of two separate entities, although they work together in joint command.
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So I think those Stories about the, the sort
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of lack of communication within government were.
384
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Was one thing that, like, maybe we should have thought about this
385
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a little bit more clearly before, you know, before having
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an actual emergency. Yeah, got it.
387
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Okay. And then the governor came in and then did Trump.
388
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How was covering that, that situation?
389
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It. By that time, we were, I think, out of the
390
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kind of real emergency period. And, you know,
391
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covering it was more like covering President Trump's
392
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visit was really like covering any presidential visit.
393
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It was, by that time we kind of knew what the issues were.
394
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And you kind of have to go there and listen to
395
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everybody, gather reaction from all sides and kind of
396
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analyze, you know, why people are saying
397
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what they're saying around it. It's pretty much what we do in any,
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when any president comes in. But it was,
399
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I think the difference here was that President Trump had just taken office.
400
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And so it was, you know, there was, there were some,
401
00:24:14,056 --> 00:24:17,488
you know, questions about what he would do and,
402
00:24:17,544 --> 00:24:21,472
and things he said regarding disaster aid in particular for
403
00:24:21,496 --> 00:24:25,120
California. I think, you know,
404
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it has yet to be seen what's going to happen with that, with federal aid
405
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going forward. But it wasn't, you know, an overly political
406
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situation where there were fights over that while he was here,
407
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although there, you know, there were some things said. So it was, I mean,
408
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I, I would say that it wasn't really out of the ordinary when, when,
409
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you know, a president comes to visit a disaster site.
410
00:24:47,170 --> 00:24:49,990
Well, it's good. You have what, about 20 years experience?
411
00:24:51,330 --> 00:24:53,910
Yeah, pretty almost. Yeah. I,
412
00:24:54,370 --> 00:24:58,042
I started in professional radio in
413
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2007, so. Yeah. Okay.
414
00:25:01,748 --> 00:25:06,052
Well, it sounds like they haven't thrown anything at you that you didn't already anticipate.
415
00:25:06,196 --> 00:25:09,396
Did New York train you well for that? Yeah.
416
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And, and I think the biggest disaster that I
417
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covered prior to this, which I keep coming back to, is Hurricane Sandy,
418
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because that was something that was so unwieldy to
419
00:25:20,300 --> 00:25:23,764
wrap your head around at first because of the wide, huge scale.
420
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I mean, in that there were 600,000 homes either damaged or destroyed,
421
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and just the wide geographic scale of it.
422
00:25:30,282 --> 00:25:33,394
Interestingly, the difference here is that, and this occurred to
423
00:25:33,402 --> 00:25:37,122
me a couple days in, it feels
424
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much closer to everyone in the metro area. It feels
425
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here like everybody knows somebody who lost everything.
426
00:25:44,570 --> 00:25:48,626
And there wasn't necessarily. There were a lot of people who lost everything in Hurricane
427
00:25:48,658 --> 00:25:52,466
Sandy. But, you know, when I would go back to Manhattan
428
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at night, I didn't necessarily constantly run into people who were in that situation.
429
00:25:57,900 --> 00:26:01,412
It feels like, and I'm not really sure how to explain why
430
00:26:01,436 --> 00:26:05,076
this is but it feels like everybody here is
431
00:26:05,148 --> 00:26:08,724
one degree away from somebody who lost everything.
432
00:26:08,812 --> 00:26:12,292
And, you know, we're talking about 10,000 people who have.
433
00:26:12,396 --> 00:26:15,764
And fire's a little bit different. There's a lot more that's completely
434
00:26:15,812 --> 00:26:19,204
devastated than, you know, when a fire hits something, it's going
435
00:26:19,212 --> 00:26:22,858
to be destroyed, not, you know, damage. This, you know,
436
00:26:22,914 --> 00:26:26,410
difficult but recoverable. In this case, you have a
437
00:26:26,450 --> 00:26:30,010
lot of people who have thousands and thousands of people who've just completely lost
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00:26:30,050 --> 00:26:34,730
everything. And it feels very close to everybody in the area right
439
00:26:34,850 --> 00:26:38,522
now. If you guys weren't on the air 24
440
00:26:38,546 --> 00:26:41,990
hours doing news, who would people have turned to?
441
00:26:44,130 --> 00:26:46,870
That's a good question. I don't know. We've seen.
442
00:26:47,220 --> 00:26:50,556
We. For the first Nielsen weekly ever,
443
00:26:50,628 --> 00:26:53,720
KNX was the overall number one in the market.
444
00:26:54,180 --> 00:26:58,604
And, you know, we know people turn to us when there are disasters.
445
00:26:58,652 --> 00:27:02,012
We see big spikes when there's an earthquake, we see big spikes when there is
446
00:27:02,036 --> 00:27:05,240
a fire. But we've never seen a.
447
00:27:06,340 --> 00:27:09,612
We've never seen it to this degree. Our streaming was up between 200 and
448
00:27:09,636 --> 00:27:13,430
400% for a week
449
00:27:13,470 --> 00:27:17,210
straight, basically, that never, it never went below 200% of normal.
450
00:27:19,470 --> 00:27:22,610
Who would people have turned to? I don't know.
451
00:27:22,990 --> 00:27:26,102
They. And a lot of people did turn. A lot of the TV stations in
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00:27:26,126 --> 00:27:30,614
town did excellent work. And I've heard a lot of people in the national media
453
00:27:30,782 --> 00:27:34,054
and in the entertainment world say things
454
00:27:34,142 --> 00:27:38,112
like, well, we, a lot of people really recognize the value of local media
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00:27:38,166 --> 00:27:41,612
news. And that certainly goes for what the TV stations did,
456
00:27:41,796 --> 00:27:46,012
and it also goes for what we did, but again,
457
00:27:46,116 --> 00:27:49,420
to the point that a lot of people didn't have power and were not able
458
00:27:49,460 --> 00:27:52,684
to watch TV and there was no cell service in a
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00:27:52,692 --> 00:27:56,236
lot of these areas. That's another thing we've learned in previous disasters,
460
00:27:56,348 --> 00:28:01,440
that that situation can keep getting worse because initially
461
00:28:01,780 --> 00:28:05,078
cell towers are destroyed, but then those that aren't,
462
00:28:05,254 --> 00:28:08,966
that are on generator power, and not all of them are, but the larger sites
463
00:28:08,998 --> 00:28:11,990
are. After a few days, generator run out,
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00:28:12,030 --> 00:28:15,542
runs out of fuel, and then more cell tower sites go down.
465
00:28:15,726 --> 00:28:19,142
And then connectivity is even worse of a problem than
466
00:28:19,166 --> 00:28:22,630
it was before. And then more people have to depend on things like
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00:28:22,750 --> 00:28:26,470
radio. So I don't really know who they would have depended on.
468
00:28:26,590 --> 00:28:30,460
It was local broadcast media that was
469
00:28:31,080 --> 00:28:34,980
depended on like no other in. In this situation.
470
00:28:35,640 --> 00:28:38,912
All right, so what do you say to people? And I'm sure you
471
00:28:38,936 --> 00:28:42,580
hear it all the time when people say to you, radio is dead.
472
00:28:43,880 --> 00:28:47,616
Well, I would say, look at what happened here. I would say when people
473
00:28:47,688 --> 00:28:50,848
needed it, they knew where to turn. They knew
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00:28:50,944 --> 00:28:53,760
that they were going to get accurate, confirmed,
475
00:28:53,840 --> 00:28:57,890
verified information from people they could trust. And there's really
476
00:28:57,930 --> 00:29:01,170
no other source of that. And we saw that in huge numbers. We had
477
00:29:01,210 --> 00:29:04,450
1.4 million people listening to us over the course
478
00:29:04,490 --> 00:29:08,978
of that week. And I. I don't know that 1.4
479
00:29:09,034 --> 00:29:11,910
million people would listen to something that they think is dead.
480
00:29:14,090 --> 00:29:17,282
Anything you want to say before we wrap up? Because believe it or not,
481
00:29:17,306 --> 00:29:20,514
we're at time. Just that I was in awe
482
00:29:20,562 --> 00:29:23,262
of the job that the team here did.
483
00:29:23,366 --> 00:29:26,798
I kind of alluded to this, but I didn't really need
484
00:29:26,854 --> 00:29:30,238
to give much direction. They knew what to do and they knew,
485
00:29:30,334 --> 00:29:33,742
you know, how to make sure that people were getting the
486
00:29:33,766 --> 00:29:37,326
best information possible. And my job was to make sure that they had the
487
00:29:37,398 --> 00:29:41,342
ability to do that and also, you know, make sure they were getting what
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00:29:41,366 --> 00:29:44,090
they needed while doing it. So my hat's off to them.
489
00:29:44,710 --> 00:29:48,046
The Fair Media Council is a 501c3 nonprofit
490
00:29:48,078 --> 00:29:51,626
organization advocating for quality news and working to create
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00:29:51,698 --> 00:29:55,258
a media savvy society. For more information about the Fair
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00:29:55,314 --> 00:29:58,698
Media council and upcoming fast chat shows, check out
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00:29:58,754 --> 00:30:00,490
fairmediacouncil.org.
