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May 11, 2022 - Doug Collins Podcast
44:45
Is real News Media Dead? A conversation with Newsmax host John Bachman
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You want to listen to a podcast?
By who?
Georgia GOP Congressman Doug Collins.
How is it?
The greatest thing I have ever heard in my whole life.
I could not believe my ears.
This house, wherever the rules are disregarded, chaos and mob rule.
It has been said today, where is bravery?
I'll tell you where bravery is found and courage is found.
It's found in this minority who has lived through the last year of nothing but rules being broken, people being put down, questions not being answered, and this majority say, be damned with anything else.
We're going to impeach and do whatever we want to do.
Why?
Because we won an election.
I guarantee you, one day you'll be back in the minority and it ain't gonna be that fun.
Hey everybody, it's Doug Collins here on the Doug Collins Podcast.
I'm looking forward to today's show.
We've got a great friend coming on.
It's someone I've gotten to know.
We've shared a lot of interview time together.
We've also shared some co-hosting together.
But John Bachman on Newsmax is just somebody that I've grown to like over the years.
Not from the fact that he also has a love of Georgia and University of Georgia and other things, and being from Georgia, But just the reality that comes with being in the news business, but also having a perspective of trying to get a message across and do so in a fair and balanced way, and especially making sure that all viewpoints are taken into account, but especially conservatives, which seem to be left out.
So this is a great conversation.
John Botman, glad to have you with us today on the Doug Collins Podcast.
It's an honor to be with you.
I mean, you know, to have you call my friend, I guess that's what happens when you share your Waffle House menu selections.
You really become tight with somebody.
Well, you know, when we get to be friends, you know, when I tell you what to order at Waffle House, then we've got it down there.
Hey, as we get started, one of the things I love to do in this podcast, and when I do, especially people, politicians, or I do media people, is everybody knows us, and I found this to be true, and I think you probably have as well.
If they see us in the airport or they see us out, they know us from this right here.
They know us from the camera, if you would.
They don't know the background.
So spend just a few minutes telling us, you know, where you're from, how you got here, and just give us a good taste of who you are.
Well, I'm from Marietta, Georgia originally.
Actually, my parents lived in Kennesaw when I was born, and we moved to Tampa pretty quickly thereafter and lived there for eight years, but moved back to Marietta when I was eight years old, and from eight years on all the way through my five years at the University of Georgia.
And thereafter, my first job in television was in Augusta.
Georgia was my home.
I love it.
I love the Braves.
I love the dogs.
Having the Olympics there was fantastic as well.
I lived there in a perfect time when the state, to me, we would learn about the three pillars, wisdom, justice, and moderation.
All three things were readily available to me.
Growing up in Marietta, I went to Davis Elementary, Mabry Middle School, and Lasseter High School, for those folks to know.
But it was such a great community because people were moving to Atlanta from all over the place.
My parents were actually from the Northeast.
My dad settled in Atlanta in the 70s with my mom when we moved back there.
At that time, in the late 80s, early 90s, Atlanta was such a boomtown.
We had people from all over the place.
It was just such a great melting pot of different Americans and all kinds of folks, different races and religions.
I really felt like I had a wonderful public school experience.
When it came time for college, Doug, the only thing I knew is that I wanted to go to an SEC football school.
My dad went to graduate school at the University of Florida and took me to a game when I was four years old.
It was a Florida-Miami game.
And it was one of my earliest memories.
And I just loved the whole thing.
And then, you know, my sister went to Auburn.
And I spent some time with her at Auburn, my older sister.
And I was like, this place is great.
These people are so nice on the plains.
And I was like, it's a little boring, though.
And then finally, I didn't think I was going to get into Georgia, but I did get in.
And I went there and I had a bunch of buddies of mine who were a year older than me in high school that went there and I spent some time with them.
The moment I walked on campus, I knew I was home.
When you spend time on campus, I think that's when you go to the flagship institution at the University of Georgia.
I was so proud of the state.
And then I felt really fortunate after I graduated, I was able to stay in Georgia and work at WRDW in Augusta, Georgia there.
And, you know, really learned a lot about Augusta and the history of that place and covered state politics.
Sonny Perdue was the governor at the time.
You know, so it was just great.
You know, the other thing, too, that really made me love Georgia and politics in particular is when I was in high school, Lassiter, Nick Gingrich was the Speaker of the House and used to come and talk to us.
And my baseball coach and government teacher, Mickey McMurtry, would invite Newt to come speak.
And there were like 10 people, less than 10 people in the room listening to the Speaker of the House talk to us about the Constitution and history.
I was hooked.
And of course, the Lewinsky thing was all playing out and all that stuff was happening as well at that time.
So That's where my love of politics really came into play, and then the rest is history, as they say.
Well, it is.
Last year Trojans, right?
That's right.
That's right.
Played baseball there.
It's getting eerily similar here.
I'm North Hall, North Hall Trojans, so we bring this high school stuff out.
Down here, for those of you watching all the rest of the world, yes, down here in the South, football, high school, college, it does border up there on A higher plane than most on where you come from.
Georgia's also unique.
Let's talk about media for a second.
Georgia's another one of those states that has really four, probably five distinct media markets.
And you got to experience that not in the Atlanta market, which is, frankly, it's a mega media market.
It's a big media market.
It's one of the most expensive ad markets, especially from the political side.
So that lets a lot of folks like myself who ran statewide or was in Congress deal with the media markets up.
Like you said, Augusta, you had Augusta making, you got Columbus, you got Savannah, and then you got some of Thomasville, Albany, that down in the South.
You came out of University of Georgia.
Grady School, I'm sure, of journalism.
Had mentioned a lot from there.
When you went to Augusta, to what we'll call a small market town, how was that with TV especially?
Well, I felt I was really well prepared, honestly.
And my news director, who's still there, her name's Estelle Parsi.
She was a fantastic mentor.
But I had interned at Fox 5 in Atlanta with the I-team there.
And Dana Fallon...
Randy Travis and Dale Russell.
They had mentored me and prepared me for the difference between what you're doing in Atlanta and what you're going to be doing in Augusta.
Of course, I was shooting my own video.
It's funny because I tell young people today that I did not have a cell phone.
I had a pager and I had a MacBook.
You had to bring quarters and look stuff up in a MacBook to find your way.
You didn't have GPS back then.
But it was a great place to work because when I first started working there was obviously after 9-11 and it was 2003 and President Bush was really making the case for the Iraq war.
So he was around Georgia a lot because of all the military installations there.
So I got to cover the president.
You got to go to Atlanta to cover the state legislature, so you got to be part of that.
We also had the Masters in Augusta, which is a big international event, quite frankly, so you got to see that.
I got to cover the G8 Summit back then at Sea Island, which was a fantastic experience.
And also, we had the Charles Walker corruption trial.
I don't know if you remember that.
I mean, Charles Walker, people know, he was supposed to be the first black governor in Georgia, but went down on a 42-count federal indictment And so all the Atlanta stations actually had to come over to Augusta for that.
So that was, you know, the cool thing about Georgia is that, you know, you're focused one place, but it is a state you have to cover.
I don't think it doesn't matter what media market is.
I think it's a lot like being a politician is you got to cover the whole entire state.
And of course, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, they say they like to cover Georgia like to do.
Right.
And then WSB, they are a statewide presence, too.
But it was a great place to learn how to cover news, and I felt like I had my internship at Fox 5 and then working at WRDW, having some great mentors there, too.
It was a perfect place to start my career.
And the funny thing is, too, I remember on election night 2004, when George W. Bush got re-elected, kind of thinking, I was like, I got to get out of Georgia.
I mean, Republicans are going to dominate this state forever.
The midterms were a little rough, but I was like, I'm not going to cover any interesting races.
And no Democratic presidential candidate is ever going to come to Georgia because it's not a competitive state.
Of course, I decided to move to Florida.
I wanted to witness another 2,000 and be a part of it in the coverage.
But Georgia seems to be more interesting than Florida when it comes to that stuff.
It definitely has changed.
And I think that's the interesting part about Georgia.
And everybody, and John, you and I have talked about this a little bit before, everybody, and it bothers me.
And that's why I do a lot of media, and that's why, especially in the election coverage, I try to get on as much as I can.
Because people believe Georgia It has been just this blood-red sort of Republican state for ages.
And here's the interesting thing.
When you first went to Augusta, Sonny Perdue was the first Republican governor since Reconstruction.
2004, which you just mentioned, the night that W was re-elected, was the first time the Georgia governor The House flipped to Republicans since Reconstruction.
They got a few party switchers when Sonny Perdue made it in 02, so that made the Senate Republican.
But the House was still Democrat under Tom Murphy, a famous speaker in Georgia for almost 30-something years.
So you were seeing that turnover.
What I tell them, and I had a group I spoke to last night, and I said, when was the last?
And most of them didn't realize this.
A lot of them have forgotten.
It's a 20-year window of memory here.
This is the 20th year anniversary of Purdue getting elected over Roy Barnes, but it was not until 2010 election That Georgia had a full slate of Republican constitutional officers statewide.
Michael Thurman and Tommy Urban were the last two to go there.
When you saw that out of Augusta, you had a view of seeing that progression from the old Southern Democratic conservative to now saying, sort of like what Zell Miller, you would have seen this.
Zell Miller said, they left me.
Did you see that in Augusta and maybe even some of the I-Team there in Atlanta?
I did.
I did see this.
And of course, you know, this was also emerging where you had the influence of Mexican and South American immigration coming into Georgia, too, which is something, you know, which over that same time period, the early 2000s, it just exploded and it became a whole other topic unto itself.
But, you know, the Augusta-Richmond County consolidated government was very interesting.
And I thought, you know, The way they did it, obviously, they had to have these districts where you had five black commissioners and five white commissioners.
And you had the mayor at the time, a guy named Bob Young, who was a strong mayor and oftentimes just was a tiebreaker.
And to me, it was, you know, I think a big eye opener for someone coming out of college or so idealistic and you think the country's made all this progress, but you still see the, I guess, the legacy of racism and how bad it is because The whole county government was based on trying to balance things out based on race.
But what happened is you just had these kind of, I guess, compromises that nothing ever really got done.
It was like, we've got to make sure that we appease District 6, so we've got to do this in District 4. And it was frustrating.
I remember they were making the James Brown movie, too, around the same time.
And, you know, you just think back how much progress has been made in Georgia, but at the same time, you know, how ingrained the racism is.
And the thing I was also surprised about is it wasn't just, you know, your traditional, what you think of as, you know, old, good old boy, white on black racism.
There was actually a lot of racism, I think, within the African-American community, which I learned about as well.
Where there was this air of superiority for some of the people, like Charles Walker, for example.
I mean, I felt like he actually...
And you would talk to people.
He kind of had his own little serfdom there in Augusta, and he had managed to kind of control the people to believe that he was this answer for them.
But I think it's...
You do see that today in this manifestation of the Black Lives Matter movement and everything.
They want to appeal to the motions as opposed to the more prolonged progress that you would hear about with Dr. King when he would talk about the arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice.
They want results now, and they're willing to push this racial stuff to do so.
And I think it's problematic.
But yeah, I did see it.
But I also think in the South it's a little bit different because of the Jim Crow era and you had so many people.
I remember having conversations with Herman Cain about this, about all the kind of soft racism he had to put up with.
But if he spent all of his time pushing back against every bigot he encountered in corporate America, he told me he never would have advanced in his career.
And he says sometimes if you play your cards right and you don't get bogged down in the emotions of the way it makes you feel, you can use those things and kind of learn how to...
You know, master those people and get around them because they're obviously not of a sound mind if they're pushing that stuff.
Well, and you're seeing it, and I think that's, you know, Georgia's still, in many ways, an evolutionary kind of state in that regard.
It has, you know, of course, the Atlanta area, you have a lot, you know, is one of the highest per capita African-American middle class, upper class.
I mean, it's, you know, frankly, from an alternative lifestyle, it's another.
Georgia's a really mixed, but also one of the more conservative, if you would, traditional Bible belt, if you want to put it in that term.
So it's a real mix.
You could see that coming out of Augusta.
And I truly want our listeners across the country and everywhere else to understand this.
You go outside of Augusta, and I'm speaking from this from an experience.
My parents were from Greene County, Morgan County, which is about an hour outside of Augusta, Thomas, you get all those places down there, Thompson.
And you really did find an interesting cultural difference than the Atlanta, Athens that you had been accustomed to, even downtown ago.
You got outside covering some Washington County, Green County, you saw that racial difference and the real difference in some of the things that people were experiencing at that time.
Absolutely.
Yeah, I think Augusta has, at that time, it's grown a lot, but had really big aspirations to be a bigger city.
They had that famous building that was designed by I.M. Pei, an international architect that came there.
It stood out at the time.
It was a weird thing.
But when you get outside of a major city and when you don't really...
I was always just so amazed to go knock on somebody's door and meet the average person.
In a city like Thompson or Greensboro or go on and on, but they have their own kind of individuality.
I think that's something, especially for African Americans that live through Jim Crow And had lived past Jim Crow and were able to carve out a piece of their life.
They didn't want to dwell on that.
They wanted to focus more.
I mean, and I also feel like, you know, growing up in Atlanta, you know, in the Cobb County public school system, you know, I hear this stuff about critical race theory.
We always talked about Black History Month with George Washington Carver and Jackie Robinson and Clarence Thomas.
And I could go on and on about all these African-American, you know, the Black excellence.
That was always...
Going back to what you're saying about Atlanta, we went to the King Center almost every year on a field trip, and you would see Bull Connor with the fire hoses in Alabama, and you could feel the presence of Dr. King, but that was the civil rights movement that was obviously portrayed in the media and a national thing, but then when you go into those smaller towns, you actually see the results of that.
And, you know, of course, there is obviously racial strife still, but overwhelmingly, people are able to overcome that if they just focus, you know, like their own personal responsibility, their, you know, make a name for themselves and just put the, you know, do the hard work.
I think, you know, there's...
There's that kind of part of the South that I think nowadays, especially, unfortunately, is downplayed.
They just want to make it sound like it's Jim Crow 2.0.
But the music, the food, unless you grew up in...
My parents are from the Northeast, so I really didn't experience that type when I would go home with my friends from UGA to Sylvester, Georgia, or some of those places that people have never heard of.
You really see the reality of the situation, and it's not like Atlanta.
It's true.
It is.
Something in the news is we're taping this and going at it is the fact that Jen Circleback Saki is now leaving the podium.
For those of us who are scared that she'll circle back to it, but MSNBC is where she's headed and there's a change there.
And I only bring that up because of media and the journalism training.
A lot is focused on the media these days.
And it's focused on the different networks, the different styles.
It's...
You know, it's harder and harder for people to look at media in the way that I think maybe you, when you were younger, definitely when I was younger, my generation, looking at the media as, look, I may not agree with them, but I felt a certain level of trust there.
When you were at Grady, which is, by the way, the journalism school at the University of Georgia, how did you feel the preparation was?
Because I offered, when I was in Congress, I offered to take interns or to come to the classes and let them practice actual real interviews because of some things that I had saw from some of the red and black and some of the folks who came and interviewed me when I was in Athens because I had part of Athens in the district.
Did...
Is there a disconnect?
I know like for teachers, other things, there's a disconnect between real world and academia.
Is it so, and I'm not asking you to say bad things, you know, or say about Georgia or any other, but in media training in general, you've been around a long time now.
Is there a disconnect between the quote, ideal and what they find in the world?
Or is it being trained to this more antagonistic style?
You know, it's hard to say.
I do think there is a disconnect for sure between what's probably taught in journalism schools today and what the reality of the business is like.
I mean, it's not a it's not a glamorous business to start out.
You really don't.
I mean, I was always told you don't want to be in a position like in a major market or on a network until you're you know, you've made a few mistakes that not everybody is going to see.
But I do find now, and I was probably the same way, but maybe a little bit more realistic about it, but there's something to be said for cutting your teeth and learning the ropes in a smaller market like I did in Augusta.
Make some mistakes that the whole world's not going to see before you get to that position.
I will say this specifically about the Journalism School, Grady College, and the broadcast program.
I'm still very close with my professor, David Huszynski, He's retired now.
But they changed the whole program since he left.
And he was really the architect of this kind of implementing what they do at the University of Missouri.
And it is a real, we put on a real newscast every single day.
And it was very hard to do because I was double majoring in political science.
I had those classes, then the journalism class, and you have to set up your interviews and record all this stuff and put it together.
But I think they've kind of abandoned that for more of this approach to a digital, multi-platform kind of thing.
I wish they wouldn't have done that because we need to kind of have a back to the basics approach, I think, in journalism.
We need better local media, especially.
I think they're losing sight.
They obviously have to appeal to this new generation.
Digital is where it's at, but I worry we don't spend enough time on the fundamentals and why you do things, why you make sure you cover both sides of the story.
Even if you're like me, where you definitely have a right-of-center perspective, you at least need to be educated on what the other side is doing, where they're coming from.
So that you don't, you know, look completely like, you know, Ari Melber on that clip from MSNBC where he was talking about, you know, we don't want Elon Musk in charge of Twitter because you might turn down the volume on one candidate.
I mean, this guy has obviously never watched any conservative media or given any credence to the New York Post reporting on Hunter Biden's laptop.
So you don't want to be that person.
You know, I think, you know, young people inherently are more inclined to be attracted to the left side of things and that.
But I think if there was more attention paid just to the fundamentals, you know, the who, what, when, they're why and how you do that kind of in a more traditional way.
And then applying that to the new platform, because that stuff is always going to change.
There's always going to be some new social media platform or some new video thing you want to do.
But the fundamentals of storytelling, central characters, why this matters to the audience, that I wonder if as much attention is being paid on that as it should be.
Well, and the reason I brought that up is because I had an experience in which I was, you know, at an event and speaking with, in Athens, of course, they sent, and we would always encourage, we'd always send the press releases to Grady, and we'd always, you know, make sure that they wanted to send somebody they could.
And it was an experience in which, let's just say that the reporter who come, and I'll just leave it completely, you know, amorphous here to not know, came in, didn't want to be there.
You could tell, you know, and I get that.
But then when it started the interview, it was from a very one-sided perspective.
And when I didn't answer the way it was expected, it just threw the whole interview.
It got aggressive, and that was a mistake from someone who had really never interviewed or somebody who had been interviewed hundreds of times.
That was not a good way to go.
But we made it through it.
But it said to me that can we give them some more realistic fundamentals?
This is how you do this that would help them.
Because sooner or later, they were going to be...
This person would be in Augusta.
This person may be in Atlanta.
This person may be in Knoxville, wherever it is.
And good reporting is good for everybody.
And I think that's the thing that I want to emphasize here, and I think it's important from what your upbringing was as well, because it's the smaller stories that if you get it right, it leads to the bigger stories.
Yeah, we call it the micro-macro effect.
If you can really effectively tell that story, it might be a major issue, something very complicated, like Obamacare or something like that.
But if you can tell that story effectively through one person, Then you can actually get people to listen to you.
And I think something else too, just one of the differences is when I came out of college, there was no Twitter, Facebook, there was none of that.
And there was no importance or pressure put on me to develop my own personal brand and my own social media platform and how many followers I'm going to get, how many likes I'm going to get.
And I think now there's a lot of pressure on younger people coming into the business to develop their own personal brand.
So they make it more about themselves kind of because they have to.
And I was always told, If the story's about you, John, then you've messed up.
You've done something wrong.
The story should never be about you as a journalist because then it probably means you got something wrong or something like that.
So I think nowadays there's more inward focus on when people come out of journalism, how do I promote my own brand?
How do I develop my own platform?
How can I become...
You know, a big name, where when I was coming up, it was if you do it the right way, you make the stories about the people, you deemphasize yourself in the story, you just become a good storyteller, then that's how you become popular.
But I think it's just a different beast.
It definitely is.
I mean, you come from the Marietta area, the big chicken.
For anybody listening, here's your trivia part of the Doug Collins podcast.
Go look up the big chicken and you'll find Marietta.
And I was in Air Force at Dobbins down there, so that base is rather dear to my heart.
And I bring that up to say that you also had the ability in the Atlanta market to see what I'll call the old storytellers.
The Guy Sharps, the others that came through.
And the ones that you mentioned that you worked with.
I mean, it was interesting.
Dale Russell, Randy Travis, these folks.
Being an elected official in the mid-80s and even later, those were names that if they called you up and said, hey, we want to talk, it was like...
Okay, it was like the old joke from the 80s says, you know, it's going to be a bad morning when you show up on Monday morning, the 60-minute truck's outside, you know.
And it was not bad in the sense that, you know, they were looking for a story, but it became confrontational.
It almost got to be where people didn't want the investigative part of it to be done.
It was being more of the Twitter.
Nowadays, the more of the YouTube Twitter star, how can I draw attention to myself?
But those basics are still prevalent, aren't they?
They are still prevalent.
It's so important because it's like, you know, I tell people it's like dessert.
That stuff, that confrontational stuff, the real housewife style approach to journalism is People love it, and it rates very well.
But afterwards, the audience is always kind of asking themselves, what did I get from that?
And it's like a sugar high you get from eating a dessert before you actually eat the meal.
And so, you know, You need a media.
You need to have your elected officials scared of certain people showing up at their house to hold them accountable.
That's the way the system is supposed to work.
But what we have nowadays is nobody really fears the media like they should.
As dangerous as they are, there is not that mutual respect, especially in local news, that can keep the car dealers accountable and Make sure they're not running scams on folks.
And that was one of the things that really why I wanted to do this was investigative journalism, consumer advocacy, those types of things.
And that whole part of the business has just fallen by the wayside.
Car accidents and murders.
I don't live in Atlanta.
I don't follow the local news as much as I used to, but ever since WSB sold, it's not the same.
It doesn't seem like it's the same, honestly, to me.
You see the erosion.
Even in major markets, they just do the easier thing.
It's a lot of national news.
It's not localized or specific to what's going on.
And it's challenging.
I know these businesses are challenging business local news.
But it's such an important function.
And so when, you know, nowadays when you see these meetings, like, you know, to take it out of Georgia specifically, but in Loudoun County, Virginia, you have, you know, kind of citizen journalists now spreading the video from the meeting where traditionally I should be there on a camera interviewing the parents who are there to be upset.
But what happens is the meeting gets posted on YouTube because they're required to by Open Records Law.
Then you have folks like Christopher Rufo who's digging into it and these other citizen journalists kind of And then it becomes a national story and then it backs back into a local story because the local media finally gets focused on it now because the national media is covering it and it's kind of a backwards system.
It shouldn't be like that.
But it does show you the importance of that grassroots local advocacy, being involved in your community.
That is what really changes communities.
You know, there was a reporter named Wayne Friedman.
I think he's retired now.
He's won more Emmys than anybody else.
He was in San Francisco for a long time and worked for the network.
And he was friends with my journalism professor.
And I remember we were out in Athens.
I think I graduated.
We went and had a couple of beers downtown.
And, you know, he said, John, I spent my whole entire career in small markets trying to get to the network.
And then once I got to the network, all I wanted to do was go back to those little towns and tell the stories of those folks.
Because that's real life.
That's what real life is.
It's those little moments that are not, you know, once things get to your national network newscast, they are so refined and Through this lens and that lens and shortened up, the sound bites are so tight.
It didn't really reflect to me what Real America was.
And when I came here to Newsmax, I got to do this great documentary.
We just toured the country from California to South Carolina, interviewing people who had saved people's lives and done these little acts of bravery, like this guy who walked with a sandwich board trying to find a kidney for his wife.
And there was just three strangers out in San Jose, California.
California, they saw a car go into a lake and all three of them had never met before, but they jumped in together collectively and saved a family that was in the car that was drowning.
And when I talked to these people, I was just reminded of how great this country is and how there is still like that American fabric of doing the right thing more often than not, and how suppressed that stuff is, because it's not like sexy or exciting, but how often that type of stuff gets suppressed in the media.
And I, you know, I don't want to be completely negative because there are guys like Steve Hartman at CBS, you know, he does those stories and you, Unless you watch CBS Sunday morning, you'll probably never see them, but they're so good at just individual people living their average lives doing extraordinary things that would never get coverage otherwise.
Charles, I mean, I remember growing up, you know, in the 80s, 90s, Charles Corral, Sunday Morning.
I can still hear those, and they still do.
They still use the same music.
I can hear those, and it's like, wow, that takes me back to a different time.
You know, I want to see these stories.
And I watch CBS Sunday Morning Today because my grandparents watched it, just like everybody else's.
And I remember, you know, Charles Corral to Charles Osgood, now to Jane Polly.
It's just one of those things, like...
It's like Wheel of Fortune, too.
I tell people that all the time.
It's like Pat Sajak and Vanna White.
It's like all I have left from my childhood.
That's why I watch the Wheel of Fortune.
Exactly.
Exactly.
I had a couple of areas I wanted to go here, but I think you brought up something.
When I was in Congress, I sponsored a bill.
Again, everybody said, oh, you've got to work.
Look, if you're going to get things done in D.C., you've got to work across the aisle.
David Cicilline, who is a person, we disagree almost 90% of everything.
But we both come together and realize that what you've talked about, and I love your heart here, and that is that local journalism.
I'll use an example, and I'm going to get back to the bill that Cicilline and I offered, and it's still sort of making its way through as sort of a check on the big tech, the Googles, the Twitters, that are becoming news feeds, that are stealing basically local news and not paying for it.
My hometown newspaper, the Gainesville Times, when you were in the University of Georgia, they were a seven-day-a-week paper every day.
Back when I was in high school, which was a few years before you, I mean, if you got your name in the Gainesville paper, it was a big deal in the community.
And they did exposés, and it went back and forth.
They're down to...
Basically two days a week now.
I saw one of the reporters, I was in an event this morning, a guy named Jeff Gill.
And I'll be happy to say Jeff Gill's name anywhere.
Jeff's a reporter out there.
Couldn't pay me to do what they make him do now because he has to cover everything.
He's hourly.
They don't even, you know, sometimes he doesn't get to work because they're, you know, trying to save money.
This is what journalism is unfortunately coming to because the ad dollars are drying up.
People are going online.
So we sponsored this bill as an antitrust to let collectively small newspapers and even some media outlets band together for media rates with what they get from Google and others.
It was interesting.
We had support for that from even the New York Times on down.
Of course, tech didn't like it because, I mean, who would like not paying for what you're turning around and making a profit on?
But do you see this?
It was some staggering statistics.
Like how many counties have no local media of record?
In Georgia, the number is growing.
Across the country, it's growing even more.
Well, you're having a third of a state, a third of areas who have no local media coverage.
Why is that bad?
Well, it's bad.
I mean, just think about how much Gainesville has grown since that time period you were talking about.
I mean, when I was flying in for a layover in Atlanta from Raleigh, from the rally in North Carolina, I went to the Trump rally.
You know, we're coming in from the Northeast side.
We flew over Gainesville, and I was just blown away from the sky to see how big it is.
I'm like, is that really Lake Lanier?
I mean, that's Lake Lanier.
I know that's Lake Lanier, but what is all this development stuff that's happening?
So you see this town of Gainesville growing, but the newspaper and the coverage is small.
The budget's getting bigger for the city of Gainesville.
That means there needs to be more oversight of the local government.
You know, the planning and zoning stuff.
There's things that get snuck into these little variances all the time that have a major impact on people down the road.
And this stuff is not being covered.
And the reporter you talked about, I have this visualization in my head.
I don't know what he looks like or whatever, but I can picture, you know, 10 other reporters I've seen doing the same thing who are really, you know, they're committed to this mission, even though their corporate ownership just, you know, We're good to go.
The way that he treated that officer, Garrett Rolfe, you know, he, I mean, he's a shady guy anyway, Paul Howard is, and then you saw the overt politics in the whole process.
I think if there had been, you know, if they had bigger budgets and there was more emphasis on that, like, you know, he's the type of person that would never have been district attorney in Fulton County if the local news was really where it should be.
Or wanted to.
Because you're right under the nose of the AJC there.
And I think that's an interesting...
And Paul Howard and I went to war after that, during that time, because it was just wrong.
Yeah, and Jeff Gill, look, is a constant professional.
He does his job.
But again...
You know, he writes well.
I mean, he could probably be at other places, but he chooses to stick here in Gainesville.
You brought up something that I want people to understand.
I've been advocating.
I hear all these times people wanting to run.
Well, I'm going to run for Congress.
I'm going to run for that.
No, run for your county commission.
Run for your school board.
You want to make a difference.
That's where to do it.
I'll show you an example.
25 years ago, if this would have happened, it would have been front page and called for what it was.
Hall County School Board had a meeting about a month ago.
The state legislature had gave bonuses to school, to teachers.
This gentleman who is running, and again, I'm not saying good or bad, I'm just saying to be honest, this is what happened.
He's in an election year.
He's up for re-election.
He is one of the school board members.
He makes the motion to take the money out of the reserve fund to go ahead and give it to the teachers that month, the month of April, before the election.
The school board approves it.
So what they did, in other words, was go take out of their reserves, pay their teachers, and wait for the state money to come back in.
It didn't even cause a ripple.
Because, you know, it goes back truly to as if a tree falls in the forest by itself.
Does anybody hear?
That's why your local media matters.
And I get it that you've had politicians from, you know, from President Trump to President Biden, everywhere in between.
You know, have their day and problems with the media, but there's a difference here.
The difference that they're talking about is at a level way up here, and your life is affected by what goes on in your local area, your media market, that these people would never know you existed.
You know, the Nancy Cordes of the world, the Jake Shermans, all these, they don't know who you are, don't care.
No, and I think a lot of that reporting that originates from Washington is not designed for actual news consumers.
It's designed for the press corps, the Washington press corps, to impress themselves.
And did you see my article?
Did you see who I interviewed?
My birthday is in Politico Playbook today, you know, like all this type of stuff.
I'm not going to pretend like I'm above that.
Everybody likes attention.
Where goes your birthday in Politico, John?
I don't know.
I don't publish my birthday.
I'm not going to pretend like I'm above that type of stuff, but I do feel like I have an advantage because I live in Florida and not in Washington, D.C. or New York, and I don't go to cocktail parties very often.
I go home and play with my kids, and I talk to the same guy at the deli at the Publix I've been going to for a long time.
Ever since I worked in local news down here in Florida, we have the same conversations.
Did you hear about this?
Did you hear about that?
And so, you know, my conversations, and a lot of the people still recognize, even though it's been 10 years since I worked in local news, that, hey, weren't you on Channel 12 a year?
You know, and we still talk about the local issues.
So my kind of, you know, my weather vane of news judgment is really more affected by the local issues down here.
Some of my longtime sources I've had in, like, the law enforcement community down here, Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office, I know tons of sheriff's deputies, and they Those guys can tell some stories, man.
Law enforcement guys, they have the best stories, so I still keep in touch with some of them.
But, you know, I really try to remember that kind of fly-over-state heartland mentality when I'm presenting my newscast.
Like, it's a national newscast, but most of our audience is not in Washington and New York.
York.
Most of our audiences in cities and places that don't get a lot of media coverage.
So I try to keep that in mind.
Growing up as a trooper's kid, I sat in that kitchen and listened to those, I call them the war stories and you heard them all the time.
Hey, John, as we finish up here, I want to get you back later.
We're going to talk more in-depth politics and really the state of the world right now.
But I wanted this to really be exactly what this is, the importance of media, the importance of what you do as a host and others.
If you had one thing in a short summajur, what do you fear most about the news business in, say, the next five to 10 years?
I really fear that we're losing sight of what free speech actually means.
That's my biggest fear.
It's not about the speech you like or the speech you agree with.
It's about the importance of the flow of free speech and what is a public square.
We're having this debate right now about Twitter.
Is that the public square?
We also see this, and I was talking about this today with Matt Gates, who was on my show, about Are you okay with people going to the Supreme Court Justice's house to protest?
It's the same thing like when they were showing up at Mitch McConnell's house.
Mitch McConnell is a public figure, and he's at the Capitol.
You want to go to the Ellipse, you want to go down to the National Mall and protest?
That's a public square on the streets of Washington.
There's obviously room for peaceful dissent.
But we see this erosion of...
I think it comes from a lack of a true understanding of what our free speech rights actually are.
My plea to everyone is read the Bill of Rights and never lose.
Again, going back to this whole thing with this argument with Roe v.
Wade, if you read the draft decision by Alito, you don't need to be a lawyer to understand what he's saying.
Abortion is not in the Constitution.
So therefore, the federal government doesn't have, especially the Supreme Court, without Congress doing so, doesn't have the ability.
Our government isn't set up in this way to have the judicial branch determining what happens on the issue of abortion.
So it goes back to the states.
This is their system of federalism.
I don't know if it's because I have that great Georgia public school education that it seems so simple to me.
But I think what we can't do as a society is get lost in the forest for the trees.
And when you read the Constitution regularly, like I do, and you read the Bill of Rights, you really understand as an American what your rights are.
What protections you have from government.
And that's, you know, we the people, a government of the people, by the people, for the people, is the best defense of anything that they feel like is happening to them from the government.
That goes for left, right, or whatever.
I think a lot of these arguments we have today are...
You know, cast as right versus left when it's really just David versus Goliath, big versus small.
It is.
Folks, you've been listening to John Bachman.
You can see him every day, I think 12 to 2 on Newsmax.
Just a great guy.
And as I said, when we started this, become a good friend.
And I've enjoyed our conversation on and off air.
Looking forward to it more.
John, I do want to have you back in a couple months and we'll talk more.
The primaries will be over.
We're going to be looking into the fall.
Let's get into some meat and potatoes.
But you've laid a great foundation for the Doug Collins Podcast listener to know who you are, see your heart, and I do appreciate it.
Thanks for being on today.
My pleasure.
And again, thank you for that recommendation, the pecan pie with the butter on top at a Waffle House.
If you get a chance, get him to warm it up for you.
This is what Doug taught me.
It's a life changer.
It's an amazing thing.
Amazing.
All right, folks.
We'll see you next time on the Doug Collins Podcast.
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