KUSI Social Media Rants Are No More

There's bone saw-class golfing on the horizon

September 1 marks the beginning of new ownership for TV station KUSI. The McKinnon family has been involved with the station since it first went on the air four decades ago as an investment for United States International University. 

kUSI? Get it?

USIU had been floundering financially for years, as President William Rust’s ambitions failed to match up with fiscal realities. His vision was to promote global understanding by creating something that had never been accomplished before — a single university with campuses all over the world. Professors all-too-often had to beg for paychecks, the government’s student loan program demanded the return of hundreds of thousands of dollars, and there were problems with accreditation.

Michael McKinnon, who owned three TV stations in Texas,  was brought into the station shortly after the Federal Communications Commission granted USIU an operating license. He provided capital in exchange for shares, made loans to the company, and leased the station the equipment it needed to go on the air in 1983.

In December, 1989 the school announced its intention to sell the station as a means of raising needed capital. Under the provisions of then-standing agreements, and numerous conditions in the articles of incorporation, they ended up having no choice but to accept an offer from McKinnon, at a price less than Boston-based ABRY Communications offered..

In the years since the sale, the station worked hard to build a San Diego-first profile, with newscasts outside what is considered the “normal” window, along with profiles of local nonprofits and businesses. They developed a solid audience in the over-50 market.

Quirky personalities gave way to reactionary garbage in tandem with the country’s drift into conspiratorial craziness in the years after President Barack Obama was elected. At KUSI, John Coleman was a great fit.

After a respectable career as the weatherdude on ABC’s Good Morning America, which he left to start the Weather Channel (leaving after a year), Coleman became the darling of far right media via a 967 word essay starting out with saying global warming was a scam.:

From the Columbia Journalism Review:

• The Drudge Report picked up Coleman’s essay, and within days its author was a cause célèbre on right-wing talk radio and cable television, beaming into Glenn Beck’s TV show via satellite from the KUSI studios to elaborate on the scientists’ conspiracy. “They all have an agenda,” Coleman told Beck, “an environmental and political agenda that said, ‘Let’s pile on here, we’re all going to make a lot of money, we’re going to get research grants, we’re going to get awards, we’re going to become famous.’”

By the time Coleman retired in 2014, the conspiratorial tone in his editorializing at KUSI became a defining element of the station’s approach to news.

The station found itself in the limelight in 2019, as DC’s The Hill newspaper published a story aimed at tarnishing CNN’s reputation by claiming the network passed up an opportunity for a KUSI reporter to be quoted in a story with a “local view.”

KUSI’s claim quickly made it to the front page of the then-influential Drudge Report, and was repeated endlessly on conservative talk radio programs nationwide. The story was offered as proof of media bias against conservatives.

Via the Rewire News Group:

• Conservatives who yell the loudest to point out supposed manipulation are doing so to hide their own attempts to manipulate public opinion. You see, what was conveniently absent from the Hill’s reporting is that KUSI, the station making these allegations, is owned and operated by Channel 51 of San Diego, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of McKinnon Broadcasting, which is owned by the notoriously conservative McKinnon family. KUSI has been described as nothing but a mouthpiece of the San Diego Republican Party and as San Diego County’s own Fox News.

• Let’s start with president and general manager of the channel, Michael McKinnon. He’s been named one of the most influential business leaders in San Diego by the San Diego Business Journal, which notes that Michael “is a longtime supporter of conservative causes and candidates in the San Diego region.”

• Michael and his family aren’t of the typical “business Republican” variety either.

• The McKinnon family had donated more than $150,000 to Republican candidates and committees through 2011, according to research done by OB Rag, a local progressive blog

In recent months, KUSI has been the platform of choice for right wing activists and politicians to air their victimhood, and has served as an echo chamber for whatever nonsense the scary mythmakers of the Republican Party were dishing. Its social media presence has served as a cornucopia of propaganda for the right.

Here are a sampling of their headlines from their social media feed from the days leading up to the transfer of ownership:

• Chairman of Reform California, @CarlDeMaio blasts Minority Leader @SenBrianJones for his praise of far-left @ToniAtkins. [ KUSI Rino patrol]

• San Diego Unified School District (@SDSchools) is encouraging their students to identify as Transgender or Nonbinary. They are also telling the students they will keep it a secret from their parents. [lacking context]

• @realDonaldTrump blasts Democrats for efforts to bring back COVID-19 mandates ahead of 2024 [untrue]

• The Biden Administration is ready to bring back masks. [untrue]

• El Cajon's @MayorBillWells blasts @SDSchools for their promotion of secrecy over parental rights. SDUSD is encouraging young students to identify as transgender or nonbinary, with the promise of not informing their parents. [inflammatory spin of out-of-context information] 

As of this morning, the headlines being promoted by the station’s social media feed are all actual news stories.

As part of its swan song, KUSI’s old management is finding itself on the short end of legal actions over its personnel policies and practices thanks to a lawsuit by former anchor Sandra Maas.

• Maas was awarded nearly $1.8 million from the company that owns KUSI. The jury awarded her $200,000 for the equal pay claim (which was doubled to $400,000 under the law), plus nearly $1.3 million for past and future lost wages, and $80,000 for emotional distress.

The station is appealing that finding as well as a judge’s determination on legal fees owed to the plaintiff’s attorneys.

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NextStar Media is the new owner of KUSI. They also own KWSB-TV (FOX) in San Diego.

Those of you expecting to see a Rachel Maddow clone in the station’s newsroom will be disappointed. 

A review of the company’s political donations shows support of incumbents in areas where the company has affiliates. Contributions for the 2022 election broke down to $175,000 for Democrats and $202,500 for Republicans.

For NextStar, this acquisition was a business decision, not a political one. They are the Pacman of TV broadcasters- buying, trading, and selling media properties coast to coast. They currently own nearly 200 TV stations, along with operating stations owned by affiliated companies, such as Mission Broadcasting and Vaughan Media.

NextStar operates (via a 75% stake) the TV network The CW, through a 75% majority stake, two  networks airing classic shows, Antenna TV and Rewind TV, with full or partial ownership of three pay TV networks (cable news and entertainment network NewsNation and food and cooking networks Food Network and Cooking Channel).

It’s the NewsNation and CW parts of their empire that will affect KUSI. The news system grew out of Chicago's WGN SuperStation, and utilizes content from NextStar newsrooms around the country. 

My understanding is that the local plan includes merging the KUSI Newsroom with the local Fox outlet (whose San Diego based reports are mostly not the kind of stuff you see on FoxNews.) KWSB’s news crew is largely a generation (or more) younger than KUSI’s, so expect some changes on both ends.

The CW network has moved away from in-house produced TV series, and is now buying content from foreign providers.

The decision to sign an agreement with LIV golf, the Saudi owned company, has prompted controversy with some affiliates due to that nation’s lack of human rights. (Some people are still upset about the bone saw murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, go figure.)

The CW also has agreements to broadcast Atlantic Coast Conference college football and basketball games, along with NASCAR’s Xfinity Series. Affiliates are offered 17 hours of regularly scheduled network programming each week, over the course of seven days, usually in 8 to 10 pm time slots.

So there it is. KUSI, the clown station, is gone. I am saddened by the fact that I’ll no longer feel obligated to post witty fact checks in response to their crackpot social media posts.

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Friday’s Snippets to Savor

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Vivek Ramaswamy's "cold, cultural civil war" - His embrace of right-wing extremism is transparently phony. But it's working Via Public Notice

• The GOP has a crowded field of habitual liars. But Ramaswamy is perhaps the current master of what Kate McKinnon’s SNL version of Laura Ingraham described as “feel facts, which aren’t technically true but just feel true.”

• Ramaswamy’s favorite rhetorical tactic is to label a transparent falsehood as a “truth,” and to then declare that a corresponding fact is a “hoax.” For example, during the debate, as the other candidates bobbed and weaved when asked whether they accept the overwhelming scientific evidence that man-made climate change is real, Ramaswamy evinced no hesitation in denying the relevance of the facts and science entirely, and simply declared climate change to be a “hoax” — an evidence-free (and conspiratorial) assertion he got more press for repeating.

• Ramaswamy’s failure to back up his purported “truths” with an iota of evidence is, for him, a feature and not a bug.

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Caught in a ‘Hard Place,’ La Mesa Police Chief, Organizers Cancel Oversight Forum Via Ken Stone at Times of San Diego.(Eds Note: I am personally upset that the local Antifa chapter failed to invite me. I mean, what am I paying dues for?)

• Thursday morning, Times of San Diego visited Journey Church to see if anyone hadn’t heard that the policing forum was a no-go. Two older men showed up. A church official explained the cancellation.

• That official’s wife had been the “Republican contact,” and she confirmed the sequence of events, but asked not to be identified. She said Chief Sweeney felt he was put in a partisan “hard place.”

• She also feared that black-clad Antifa types would stage a counterprotest. So she called off the event to be held in the Plaza Room of the multibuilding tan church off La Mesa’s Center Drive.

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Highways are the next antiabortion target. One Texas town is resisting. Via the Washington Post   (Are they planning pregnancy checkpoints along the highways?)

• More than a year after Roe v. Wade was overturned, many conservatives have grown frustrated by the number of people able to circumvent antiabortion laws — with some advocates grasping for even stricter measures they hope will fully eradicate abortion nationwide.

• That frustration is driving a new strategy in heavily conservative cities and counties across Texas. Designed by the architects of the state’s “heartbeat” ban that took effect months before Roe fell, ordinances like the one proposed in Llano — where some 80 percent of voters in the county backed President Donald Trump in 2020 — make it illegal to transport anyone to get an abortion on roads within the city or county limits. The laws allow any private citizen to sue a person or organization they suspect of violating the ordinance.

• Antiabortion advocates behind the measure are targeting regions along interstates and in areas with airports, with the goal of blocking off the main arteries out of Texas and keeping pregnant women hemmed within the confines of their antiabortion state. These provisions have already passed in two counties and two cities, creating legal risk for those traveling on major highways including Interstate 20 and Route 84, which head toward New Mexico, where abortion remains legal and new clinics have opened to accommodate Texas women. Several more jurisdictions are expected to vote on the measure in the coming weeks.