In its latest undercover whistleblower investigation, Project Veritas has exposed the attitude and agenda of the newsroom for KENS 5, a CBS affiliate in San Antonio, Texas. In a video released Tuesday night, the station’s former promotions producer, Brett Mauser, can be seen saying — among other things — that the station is no longer interested in objectivity when reporting news.
Mauser stated his reasons for going public with his information: “I hope that KENS 5 will change. I hope that at the very least that … the news team will say, ‘you know what? We do have a problem, we do have an issue here and it needs to be addressed.’”
“I don’t want to destroy the news, I don’t want anybody to get fired. I want people to change and realize that they are supposed to be objective,” Mauser said.
KENS 5 is owned by Tegna, Inc., a media company based out of Virginia that owns 64 local news brands in 51 markets across the United States. The company reaches 39 percent of all markets nationwide. The new Project Veritas video featured a video of Tegna’s Chief Diversity Officer Grady Tripp giving his take on race relations in the United States.
“At this point, if you’re not listening to a podcast or looking at a video or reading any of the information that’s out as far as equality and social justice and race, you don’t care,” Tripp said.
Tripp then laid down the law to the stations he oversees, telling them that “diversity” and “inclusion” were paramount to coverage of the news — not truth.
“We’re gonna be holding stations accountable because we know it’s important to the organization. KPIs [key performance indicators] are gonna change, right?” Tripp threatened. “KPIs are gonna reflect diversity and inclusion from a representation standpoint at various levels, from an inclusion standpoint.”
Asked by O’Keefe what Tripp’s demands had to do with reporting the news, Mauser answered that it had nothing to do with telling the news: “It’s about the narrative. It’s about pushing an agenda.”
The Poynter Institute, a school funded in part by George Soros’ Open Society Foundation, also did training for KENS 5. Donna Lowry, a DEI (diversity, equality, and inclusion) trainer for Poynter, taught the station’s newsroom all about the oppressor vs. oppressed dynamic in news coverage.
“Influence is synonymous with power,” Lowry said. “Power is the ability to influence outcomes and affect others.”
“Cause we want you to think, ‘how can you use your power to create the newsroom you deserve?’”
Mauser explained his take on the Poynter Institute’s three-day training seminar. At first he didn’t see much of a problem with the Poynter training.
“But halfway through, after they started telling us, ‘ok, we need you to take age, race, sexual orientation and put them in order of importance to you, how you see the power dynamic,” Mauser explained.
“It just hit me like a ton of bricks and I thought it’s dividing into oppressor and oppressed,” Mauser said. “Why do we need to put people in boxes like that? The reason is they want to divide us.”
It seems as if the powers that be at KENS 5 want the leftist dogma of intersectionality at the core of their programming. Why else would they ask their newsroom to create their own oppression-ranking systems?
Christina Karaoli Taylor, a Multicultural Competency Trainer at CKT Cultural Strategies, taught the KENS 5 newsroom about her version of diversity and inclusivity.
“During the workshop and throughout your day, I challenge you to stop thinking in terms of objective journalism because,” she told KENS 5, “we’ll discuss why that’s not really feasible anymore.”
Objectivity is not desired anymore? It’s not even “feasible?”
Mauser said it best: “In my mind, if journalism is not objective it’s not journalism, it’s propaganda.”
Trust in the news media is at an all-time low right now. But like in politics, the distrust in media is more about the national media than local. People sometimes see the media as they see Congress. They dislike and distrust the institution as a whole, but they believe in “their guy.”
These days, it’s no longer a secret that national news organizations such as CNN, MSNBC, FOX News, and the traditional broadcast networks all work from their own editorial biases. But in local news, the patina of objectivity in reporting is still thought to be important. This new Project Veritas report shows that, even for local stations, objectivity is less important than whatever narrative they’re trying to manufacture.
