What CA Dem’s Endorsement Means for the Billionaire Tax, Why Don’t Americans Trust the News?

from KQED. Support for KQED podcast comes from San Francisco Opera. This fall, dive into a world of political intrigue with Simone Bocanegra and Mary Queen of Scots. Discover a life of Parisian luxury in Monon and laugh along with the marriage of Figaro. Learn more at sphopra.com. Minions don't wait, especially for Wi-Fi. Summon's same-day Wi-Fi from Xfinity and get the same price for five years. And seeing minions and monsters only in theaters. Exfinity. Imagine that. Restrictions apply not available in all areas. Learn more at Xfinity.com slash same-day Wi-Fi. This episode is brought to you by Facebook. So you were scrolling on Marketplace, and there it was, the bike you'd been searching for. You sent a message, and it turned out the seller was super chatty, kind of funny, and an avid cyclist. The next thing you know, you're in a cycling crew, well, a community cycling group. The thing about Facebook, you might find more than what you're looking for. From a browse to a bike ride, this summer find more on Facebook. Good evening. From KQED, this is the latest, a podcast that updates throughout the day, bringing you local news when you want it. I'm Dana Cronin. It's Monday, August 3rd. Here's a quick rundown of this hour's headlines. Live from KQED News, I'm Natalia Navarro. San Francisco's cartoon art museum is once again homeless after it closed its Fisherman's Wharf location yesterday. Executive Director Summerlee Kishar says the closure is due to a combination of low attendance and rising operating costs. We just didn't see that it was viable to really continue. It's just, you know, you've got to meet your expenses and that's been the biggest challenge. The museum had moved to the Fisherman's Wharf location in 2016 from a site downtown. Kashar says they're hoping to reopen somewhere else in San Francisco, but all options are open, including a move to another city. The organization is still accepting donations and its online store will continue to operate while they look for a new location. San Francisco's new professional women's baseball team clinched a massive win in their debut game this weekend. The San Francisco Firebells won 11 to 3 against the Boston Hunters at a game in Springfield, Illinois. This weekend marked the beginning of the first women's professional baseball league in 70 years. Longtime sports reporter James Reya was there. Each team only has 15 players. And if someone gets hurt or somebody's... injured in a game or what have you. The players have to play multiple positions sometimes. You don't see that in men's baseball very often.

And really from a spending side, I think you could see spending against Proposition 40 from folks like Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Silicon Valley investor Chris Larson, to really ramp up and potentially increase the opposition to this idea. What other endorsements will you be watching out for that might change the course of the Prop 40 campaign as it plays out? Well, there's a big one tomorrow in Oakland. So the California Federation of Labor Unions is going to be holding a convention where they're expected to make a decision on their stance on Proposition 40. And it comes as really one of the most interesting dynamics in this campaign has developed, which is the division among labor unions on Prop 40, the push initially for this billionaire wealth tax. came from a health care union that wanted to backfill federal health cuts. And it's gotten support from the Teamsters, from hotel workers. But Prop 40 is also opposed by unions representing teachers, construction workers, firefighters, police. They argue their members are not going to get any of the revenue from this tax. And they see it as kind of a risky, you know, way to approach future state finances if it ends up driving away a wealthy residence. Obviously, we've still got some time before the election, but are there any clues as to how Californians are feeling about this billionaire wealth tax? Well, we haven't had any recent... public polling. There was some surveys done in the spring, both by Berkeley and the Public Policy Institute of California, that showed some support for this measure. Berkeley found in March 52% of registered voters supporting PPC in May found 54% of likely voters supporting the idea. Again, though, those were pretty early snapshots. before the measure, even officially was given a number and a title, and definitely before we're about to see this really big fall campaign. All right, we'll have to wait and see how that goes. Thank you so much, Guy. Thanks, Natalia. That was KQED politics correspondent Guy Marzorati, and I'm Natalia Navarro, KQED News. The latest will be back after this quick break. Support for KQED podcasts comes from Star One Credit Union. Give your savings account the love it deserves. When you keep your money with Star 1, you keep more of your money. Star 1 credit union in your best interest. This episode is brought to you by Facebook. So you were scrolling on Marketplace, and there it was, the bike you'd been searching for. You sent a message, and it turned out the seller was super chatty, kind of funny, and an avid cyclist. The next thing you know, you're in a cycling crew, well, a community cycling group. The thing about Facebook, you might find more than what you're looking for. From a browse to a bike ride, this summer find more on Facebook.

We're back with the latest. Now for a deeper look behind the headlines with KQED's forum team. Welcome to Forum. I'm Leslie McClurek. I'm in today for Mina Kim. And it is a very strange moment to be a journalist. Apparently reporting gigs are declining faster than jobs in coal mining. And those of us in public radio have spent the last year grappling with really deep loss of funding, federal funding, really painful layoffs. Trust in the media is at an all time low. People tell me all the time they can't listen anymore because the news is simply just too depressing. Many Americans have more faith in podcasters than reporters because at least they offer some kind of entertainment. So what does that all mean? What has journalism gotten wrong? And where do we go from here? We are joined by John Bewin. He has host of Seen on Radio. It's a podcast out of the Keenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University that recently investigated America's news and information crisis. We're also joined by Madeline Baer. She's founder and co-executive and director of El Dimpano. That's a publication for the Bay Area's Latino and Mayan immigrant communities. Welcome to you both. Thank you. Good to be here. Thank you. Good to be here. How do you, John, how do you define the news and information crisis? I have my own ideas of what that is, but how do you define it? Well, I think there are a few key aspects to it. It's multifaceted. One is you mentioned journalism jobs going away. Well, I think that's a crisis that I think the news media itself has not done a very good job of covering. Sure, you can find news articles about local news in particular. struggling and newspapers going out of business and the loss of journalism jobs. But I don't think most people have really grasped. And when my co-host, Jen Goumeneke and I, launched this latest season of Seen on radio, which we just call simply the news, I wasn't aware of the depth and the extent of that crisis, that we've lost three quarters of the working journalists at the local level in this country in 25 years or so. It's absolutely extraordinary. And there are a lot of ramifications for communities and for... democracy that we could talk more about. So that's one facet. The other certainly is trust, you mentioned, Gallup in 2025, found that less than 30% of Americans have even some trust that the news media will report the facts fairly and accurately. That's way down from a few decades ago. And there are many reasons for that, I think, and facets to that that we could discuss. So, you know, and this general sense that there's a gazillion sources all saying very different things. So we don't have a shared narrative in this country. And when you're trying to run a democracy, that's another kind of crisis.

For your podcast, you talk to people who definitely don't have a lot of confidence in the media. You went to the border belt. This is a rural part of North Carolina. Can you kind of paint us a picture of this community? Yeah, so this is a section of southeastern North Carolina along the South Carolina border, several counties that I spent time in talking to a range of people. And these are counties that are, it's historically and still relatively low income, very, very diverse, large white, black, and indigenous populations in this area. It's a place that has lost a whole bunch of manufacturing jobs, like many rural places in the U.S. over the last two, three decades. It's a place that has gone from mostly Democratic in presidential elections, for example, quite recently to very solid red, really just in the age of Trump. which is really interesting and kind of surprising. So, yeah, so we found a lot of people who have a lot of mistrust of the media. Oh, the other really, really important thing to say about the border belt is that most of these counties are news deserts, meaning there is very little in the way of local news sources about what's going on in their communities. Most of these counties had relatively strong independent newspapers that might have a handful of reporters covering the city council and the school board and things like that, local business, up until, you know, 10, 20 years ago. And now they've been bought by chains. And the newspapers typically have one full-time person who is kind of overseeing the reporting on. high school sports and a couple of features, but they no longer have anybody to send even to cover the basics of what's going on in local government. So there's a sense of just not being able to get information about what's going on in the community. And what are people in that community saying about the news? What do they think of the press and the local media, or the news media in general? What's the relationship now, given that there aren't local reporters on the ground? What do they think of at the New York Times, etc.? Yeah, I mean, I think if you ask, this won't surprise you. You know, we talk to people who mostly get their news from Fox News and Newsmax and, you know, right-wing sources who think that the rest of the news media, the mainstream media, the TV networks, the national papers and so on are biased, particularly they would say they were very anti-Trump. And so that that. impression just causes folks to sort of tune it out. And one of the effects is if you don't have a local news source that is telling you even what's going on in your community, that you probably are getting more, you may be filling that the time that you might have spent reading your local newspaper or listening to a local radio station that was reporting local news. Instead, you're going to fill that hole by paying more attention to

the national news sources that you pay attention to or, or frankly, probably more likely to social media and stuff like that, which is even more kind of polarized and feeding you the stuff that you already think is true. And there have been studies that show that this actually exacerbates this kind of polarization. And did you get a sense or an understanding of why people swung? from Democratic to more Trumpian. What sort of led or pushed them towards the right? Yeah, I think you have to be really careful about, you know, attributing to a single thing. I think there's a combination of things. There were economic changes that took place. I alluded to the loss of manufacturing jobs. There were people who, you know, after the great recession of 2008 and 9, people lost faith in what either of the major parties were doing, but since the Democrats were sort of in charge at that time. the frustration came in. There were lots of things, but to the extent that we could tie it to changes in the media, it was some of the things I was just talking about and the sense of we've had a 60-year drumbeat in this country, going back at least to Spiro Agnew in the Nixon administration, of conservative people on the right. endlessly shouting that you shouldn't trust the news media, the mainstream news media, because they are left wing and left leaning. And that has taken on even a more kind of sharp and incessant and insistent tone. under Trump, where you have, I mean, we have a president now in office for much of the last 10 years and in sort of dominating the discourse over the last 10 years who just casually calls the news the fake news. So, you know, there's this, I think that has given people a kind of license to just simply write off stuff that's in the news that they would rather not hear. Well, Madeline, your reporting has focuses on Latino and Mayan immigrant communities here in the Bay Area. What are you hearing from them about their relationship to the press, to the news media? Yeah. So before really starting El Timpano, we spent nearly a year simply listening, sitting down and talking with hundreds of immigrants and community leaders in East Oakland. to ask them, what do you want to see in local media? What do you want to see change in local media? And the biggest, the greatest comment that we heard was simply mass information. People wanted more information, which is why when I was listening to John's podcast and the conversations he was having with rural voters in North Carolina, it wasn't that different. People had seen their local news decline.

for Spanish speakers here in the Bay Area, despite the fact that there are nearly 2 million Bay Area residents who speak Spanish at home. are such few sources of news and information serving that community. So immigrants were primarily referring to the big broadcast networks of Univision and Telemundo, and there are great reporters there, but if that is your only source of news and information, those are outlets that are covering a nine-plus county metropolitan area in maybe less than a half an hour each day. And so there's only so much. local reporting they can do that's relevant to people's lives in different corners of the Bay Area. So people told us they want more information, more local information, more information that's relevant to their daily lives. They also said... I want actionable information. One of the other biggest kind of feedback points that we heard about existing Spanish language news was that it only covers attacks on my community without giving me information I can use to take action. We led this listening process during the first Trump administration, and so many people told us, I just avoid the news because it leaves me in a panic. So the news was, you know, in some ways, harmful to their own mental health. And how do they feel like their communities are profiled or presented to the world through the media? Yeah, essentially as victims. Very much so. I'll recall one conversation that I had with a community organizer who was a leader in an organization of immigrant women in the East Bay. And she told me that previous to that job, she had worked as a lawyer. And she would oftentimes get calls from reporters asking to interview her for her expertise. And yet in this role, working as a community organizer for an organization made up of immigrant women, reporters called her looking for profiles of people who were victims. And so I think that's how she personally experienced the media. And I think it's how a lot of community members see themselves reflected in the media. There's a lot more forum for you to hear. Just look for the show wherever you listen to this podcast.

That's the latest from KQED, but remember we're updating throughout the day, so come back anytime. The latest is powered by the newsroom at member-supported KQED in San Francisco and is made by me, Dana Kronin, Srishti Prabha, and Bianca Taylor, with support from Jen Chien, Ted Goldberg, Keith Miziguchi, and Katie Springer. Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and radio artists, San Francisco, Northern California Local. Thanks for listening. Support for KQED podcasts comes from Star One Credit Union. Give your savings account the love it deserves. When you keep your money with Star One, you keep more of your money. Star One credit union in your best interest. Ready to transform your career in real time from where you are? Brown University's flexible online master's programs will help expand your business influence and your network in just 16 months. Choose from management, business analytics, or organizational leadership programs that will prepare you for today's most pressing business challenges without putting your life on hold. Scholarships available. Tap to learn more. Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here for MintMobil. Now, I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of Unlimited Premium Wireless for $15 a month is back. So I thought it would be fun if we made $15 bills. But it turns out... That's very illegal. So there goes my big idea for the commercial. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. Up front payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for 12-month plan required. $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy. See terms.