Interview with Ron Longinotti

My partner Bill Keenan and I interviewed Ron Longinotti for our social justice project. Ron Longinotti is the General Manager of KPIX San Francisco, the local affiliate of CBS news. We chose him as our interview subject because he has spent his professional life working as a member of the news media and he gave us a very good perspective on the nature of bias in the media.
Going into the interview, Bill and I did not really know how we would be received. Specifically, we were curious about what attitude Mr. Longinotti would have towards us and our questions. After the interview we could not have been happier with how we were received. Mr. Longinotti took a very open minded approach into our interview and provided us with excellent information and a good perspective about media bias. He answered all of our questions very thoroughly and was very interested and engaged with us and our topic. In general it was a very productive interview because all of us were very engaged in the conversation and Mr. Longinotti provided us with his expert, and inside knowledge of the news media.
Our project is mainly focused on media bias produced by the four major news broadcast corporations: ABC, NBC, CBS, and FOX news. For the most part, the biased media comes from these company’s national news broadcasts. Even though Mr. Longinotti is in the business, his company, KPIX is a smaller, local news company. One thing that we learned that we expected to learn was that the nature of bias on the national level, and the nature of bias on the local news level are very different. Mr. Longinotti made it a point to emphasize the difference between local news and national news. He said that national news is aimed at portraying the political and personal agendas of those who create the broadcast, but local news is more objective due to the fact that it only focuses on a small area. But he also stated that this does not mean that local news is not biased. For example, he said that since the bay area is a very liberal area, KPIX’s broadcasts are more slanted towards the liberal side.
One thing that we learned that we did not expect to learn dealt with how media bias comes into being. This idea came out of our conversation in regard to FOX news. We believed that FOX news was like the pied piper that created the conservative bias. But Mr. Longinotti changed our belief about that. He said that there were a large number of people who had that ideology prior to the conception of FOX news, but there was just a void in the news business. So FOX news realized this, and decided to slant its programming towards that group of people, thus making it a very popular station because it is the only national news station with an inherent conservative bias.
My impression of the interview as a whole was that it was very productive. We were received very well by Mr. Longinotti, so he answered all of our questions very thoroughly and thoughtfully. His expert opinion also helped us develop our stance on media bias, and changed our opinion on how we believed media bias was created. So in general, the interview was very helpful for our project because after it we were more knowledgeable about media bias than we were before it.