Steve Dunlop on Cancel Culture, Great Communicators & The Art of Storytelling

FMC Fast Chat takes you inside the news so you can be in the know in 30 minutes. Hosted by Fair Media Council CEO and Executive Director Jaci Clement, Fast Chat features notables in news, media, and business.

Now, when it comes to understanding media shifts, today's guest has seen it all. With a career spanning over 40 years, Steve Dunlop has worked with everyone from Fortune 500 execs to celebrities and professional athletes. He's racked up multiple Emmys, interviewed some of the most famous people in the world, and has been part of some high-profile documentaries on Netflix like Trial by Media and Get Gotti. It's an honor to have Steve with us today. Steve, thank you so much for joining us today.

Jaci, it's an honor to be here. Thank you for having me.

You were around to see the rise of the 24/7 news cycle, then the digital platforms, how those evolved and turned into social media. So in your opinion, what's the biggest game changer in the media landscape and how has that impacted the way we communicate?

Uh, well, the biggest landscape changer obviously in the last 20 years has been the internet and the proliferation of social media, but the roots of what The state of the media is today and, and the changes really go way back. They go back to when I was a kid, you know, back in the Stone Age. I remember when I was growing up on Long Island, as a matter of fact, and I know Fair Media Council is Long Island based. I, I used to think of the big 5 radio stations in New York, and they were all on the AM band because FM hadn't really come into its own yet. Working our way up from the bottom of the dial, you had WNBC. Which today is WFAN. You had WOR, where I would later work, and we can, I'll tell you a story about that in a minute. You had WABC, which was the rock and roll powerhouse. You had WCBS, which became an all-news radio station in 1967. And you had WINS, which was one of the very first all-news radio stations in the country at 1010. So they were the big, they were the big 5. And because they were so big and influential. In a marketplace with a galaxy of different owners, they wielded kind of outsized influence. And later in my career, actually not long after I started in radio, I was at the age of 22, I was hired by WOR, which was one of the oldest and most respected radio stations in New York when I was growing up. And I was there, hired there as an overnight news writer. And I became friends with the morning news anchor there, a fellow by the name of Roger Skibinis. And He and I would occasionally go out for a beer and he would tell me stories about what it was like when he came up in the 1960s. And I remember a story he told me, and this is about— this, this highlights the influence that these big media outlets had back then, because they were essentially standing alone, giants in a, in a, in a sea of pygmies, if you will. He talked about covering a story one day where there was civil disturbance of some kind on the East Side near the United Nations, and WOR at the time was at 1440 Broadway across town. And they had a mobile unit. This is before even telephones were used on a regular basis to cover radio news. They actually had a mobile unit about the size of a Winnebago. So Roger got in the mobile unit, is driving across town. And the thing that astounded him, and he'd only been at WOR for less than a year at this point, he said, when I came out, he says, there was this phalanx of police standing and kind of holding off these demonstrators. And I don't remember what the story was about. It's not important. But what he told me was, he says, when they saw the WOR mobile unit coming, he said it was like the parting of the Red Sea. The police all gave way and allowed the WOR mobile unit to come through. There is no parting of the Red Sea for journalists today anywhere, and there hasn't been for a long time. And today, those big 5 radio stations, Jackie, the ones that I mentioned before, those big 5.

Mm-hmm.

They're owned by 2 companies.

Yeah.

And at one point in our history, that was illegal. Uh, radio stations, not like that. You, one owner could not have more than one radio station in a market. And today you've got the Big 5 with 2 owners. So that kind of sets the stage for where we are with media today, and especially media training. Because when you look at it, I, I see honestly 2 things going on. First, Because of that change in the marketplace, you've actually got fewer options for news. These large owners discovered very quickly that in a medium with increasing competition from the internet and from satellite and from cable and what have you, they discovered very quickly, and this is especially true of AM radio, we got bills to pay and the audience is stagnant or declining. They're being distracted by these other forms of communication.

Uh-huh.

Get into the technical side of this. AM radio is a very expensive medium to operate. The, the electric bills for a 50,000-watt radio station, you can imagine, are huge. You've got real estate on, on vast swaths of land you need to propagate an AM signal. You can't just put it on top of a building. It has to be essentially propagated in a swamp. So there's, there are special economic concerns. They said, you know what? Cheapest thing to do is get rid of news. Let's replace it with opinion. Now, the political consequences of that, I think we can probably talk about it on another whole podcast. But when it comes to media training, there are fewer and fewer outlets that are covering news, which means fewer people asking fewer tough questions of newsmakers. And on the PR side of things, which is where media training has tended to begin for a long time, they're looking at this and saying, Fewer journalists, the journalists that are out there have more territory to cover. We can pick and choose now our outlet. We don't have to go to a reporter who's going to bother us with all these tough questions. We can go to a friendly blogger or we can go to a friendly podcaster. So there's been that tremendous change and we at Dunlop Media have had to adapt to that. And one of the things that, and we can talk about this, that we have done Is we're, we're doing actually far less media training than we've done in the past. But the core skill, if you will, that we teach is taking your messages, turning them into a story, and then being able to develop, develop the, the, the skillset to answer tough questions around it. That's a skill that, that is in high demand in business, and it's only gonna be in higher demand as the years go on.

Okay. That, that actually makes sense with the way things are trending. Now, I'm wondering though, listening to you speak, talking about how there are fewer and fewer journalists out there asking the tough questions and really being inquisitive as to what's going on. Take that scenario and marry it up with the cancel culture that we've been living in the past 5 years or so, decade, however you want to slice that. How does that impact the people that are actually willing to go on camera?

I think fewer and fewer of them actually want to get involved in that. And that's created something of a boon for public relations people behind whom you can hide, quite frankly. When it comes to sticking your neck out in this environment, it becomes very difficult. It takes some courage. The flip side of that, I believe, is that people who do master the ability to to tangle, to spar with, with their adversaries in a respectful way can do very, very well. And we've seen, we've seen a lot of those people, but the majority of people I would say who, who used to talk to media on a regular basis, frankly, wanna keep their head down in this environment. You really can't blame them.

Because it doesn't seem like there's a lot of respect going on out there in the public domain right now in the public conversation. So to my mind, what I'm seeing is it's not the true leaders. That are in the seat and taking part of the media interview is I think they're sitting out of the conversation because they don't want to be part of whatever the blowback may be.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. But, and, and the messages that sometimes come out of the people who are, are kind of anodyne, you know, they're, they're, they're mediocre, a little bit in the middle because they're afraid of the blowback on either side. My philosophy when it comes to that is, uh, you know, listen, sticks and stones will break my bones. You know, essentially what, what Twitter, now X, has, has come down to is there, there are some good people on, on that, on that platform. I'm not denigrating everybody, but there's a, there's an awful lot of name-calling. There's an awful lot of, uh, just, just rude rudeness, rude language.

Who would you say is a great communicator?

Long list. Barack Obama. Tremendous communicator. Bill Clinton, excellent communicator. Ronald Reagan, my personal favorite, because he was the individual who understood, I think, that he's called the Great Communicator. I think he earned that nickname because he was probably the first president to really think through a media strategy. If you think back today, and those of us who were alive, and I was reporting during the Reagan administration, We still tend to remember the Reagan administration for a handful of things that they deliberately wanted us to, to stand for. Small government, lower taxes, strong defense. That was the tripod on which his administration was built. And of course, there's long things, a long list of things that followed from that. But I don't think it's a, it's an accident that Michael Deaver, who was one of his senior advisors, later went to work for Edelman, which is one of the top, uh, public relations firms in the world. So there's, there's that kind of interplay there. But in terms of communicators, those are my big 3.

What were the key elements that made them so good?

First of all, they all understood the art of working with the camera. If you go back to the 1950s, Walter Cronkite was probably the first person to nail this. And this is actually not a story that's, that's, that's well known. But I believe it was in his, the biography that, if I'm not mistaken, Brinkley wrote, Douglas Brinkley wrote on Cronkite.

Doug's been a podcast of ours several times.

He's an old friend. Okay. So, so he may be able to tell you the story, and I think I'm getting this right, that when the television medium first started broadcasting political conventions in 1948, it was kind of a hodgepodge. There was a lot of mix-up going on. No one had ever attempted this before. And Cronkite came in in 1952, and he realized very quickly that television was all about the eyes. And that is, he actually, again, I'll defer to Brinkley on this, but as I recall his book, he talked about Cronkite actually getting some politicians together who were going to be giving these speeches at the convention, not for any purpose of bending their message, far from it, but he wanted to remind them of what was now in the room. This camera was now in the room, and it was watching your every move. And the, and the television was all about the eyes. So Obama, great eye contact with the camera. Clinton, great eye contact with the camera. But there's a difference between that and staring the camera down. So they were also very at ease with kind of splitting their time between looking at the camera and looking around the room. So they're engaging their audience as well as looking into the camera. Reagan, of course, it was a, it was a natural thing for him because he was an actor. Originally.

How about in terms of business leaders? Anyone come to mind as a great communicator?

And it's not going to be a surprise to anybody who's been through some of our workshops that I'm a big fan of the late Steve Jobs. And not just because he was a good physical presenter, which he was, but he was also so adept at, at telling stories. Steve Jobs once said that the greatest The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. And there are reasons for that that I'm not even sure Jobs understood at a granular level in his lifetime. But the reason that storytelling is so powerful in media is because storytelling is far older than messages. And this is something we talk about all the time with our clients. Your public relations people may prepare you with a set of messages, right? And the set of messages are usually quite self-serving. Here's who we are, here's what we do, here's why we're important, here's the competitive landscape, and here's how we fit. And all those things are okay, you know, as far as they go, but they don't reach to the deeper level that people feel the need to satisfy in this day and age because messages alone do not tell stories. Stories Go back further than messages. Think about, you know, think about advertising, for instance. Advertising is messages. How old is the advertising field? Maybe a few hundred years old, depending on how you're counting. Stories, on the other hand, reach a far more primitive part of the brain because they go back thousands of years, maybe tens of thousands of years. There's, there's, there's widespread evidence that, that the ability to, to tell stories goes back even further than the development of written language, because things were handed down from generation to generation by our ancient ancestors long before they were written down. So there are DNA receptors, if you will. Maybe they've been discovered, maybe they haven't. We are storytelling animals. And so the more you can adjust or refine what you want to say in public into the form of a story, the better off you're going to be.

Okay. I know lots of people who go on news programs and are interviewed and they come back and they keep telling me the same thing, which is the show's host, whether it's a journalist or a talk show host, and there's a difference between those two, they wouldn't let 'em talk. They keep interrupting to drive home their own point. How do you feel about this?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's, well, those people aren't journalists. They're performers. They're performers. They're grandstanders. In fact, I was actually asked about, it's during COVID I forget exactly when it was, sometime in 2020. I got a call from one of our clients who says, uh, one of our clients, because this was a PR firm, is really exercised about something that this talk show host said about him. And it's a, one of these talk shows, I won't name which one and I won't name the personality. One of the talk show hosts who masquerades as journalists, but is really just a performer. And they said, you know, he, he was, he was criticizing me and I, and I, I wanna go on and I wanna, I wanna take him apart and I want you to help me do it. And we turned the client down because we said that there's no way to win that game going live with this individual. They won't let you talk.

Right.

So one of the prerequisites for, one of the things we advise the PR firms we work with is find organizations that are willing to work with you that will let your Uh, spokesperson, your client, get a few words in, you know, whether edgewise or otherwise. But, uh, if you're just basically gonna be on there to be a punching bag, what's the point of that?

Is there any advice to someone who unwittingly finds themselves in that position? You mean other than just— yeah, well, other than just walking off, because we see that happening every now and then.

Yeah. Well, first of all, you gotta do your research and realize what you may be walking into and then make a decision as to whether you want that or not. When you're talking about, on the other hand, an ambush situation where let's say someone's been following you for a little while and, and, and they can't get ahold of you and, and, and, you know, you're trying to avoid them and then they finally corner you in the parking lot when you're on your way to, to, to, to open your car to drive off. And now, now you're stuck. You shouldn't let it get to that situation. And, uh, good PR counselors will tell you. That when you realize that a major media organization wants to do a story on you and wants to do a story, you're best off controlling the situation, engaging with that reporter, inviting the reporter in, talking to that reporter on your own turf. The reporter doesn't like doing the ambush. Well, there's a few who do, quite honestly, because it's great television. But they're going to get better answers from you, and you're going to have more of an opportunity to state your case. Speaking to them one-on-one in a controlled setting than you would ever have in a parking lot. By the time it gets to the parking lot, it's almost too late.

Yeah. And how does social media play into this?

Oh boy. Well, I think the biggest impact that social media has had, and I, I think we would have been hard-pressed to see this coming 20 years ago or 30 years ago, is the inability of an increasing section of the public, and not just the American public, uh, to distinguish between claims and evidence, between opinion and fact.

Yeah.

And this is where the decline of the news industry kind of dovetails in, Jaci, because if you have fewer and fewer sources that are unimpeachable in terms of their integrity, in terms of their authority, in terms of their accuracy, and a track record of, of doing all those things, that vacuum— nature abhors a vacuum, right? That vacuum is going to be filled by stuff that is easy to fill with. And it's far easier for someone to pontificate on subject A, B, or C than it is to go and do the research and find out exactly what the real deal is with A, B, and C. So that vacuum has been filled by people who are loaded with opinions but very few facts to back them up. And you probably remember the old saying that the late senator from New York, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, was famous for coining, everyone's entitled to their own opinion, but you're not entitled to your own facts.

We actually, we bring this up a lot at the workshops we do at the Fair Media Council because research shows, and I was stunned by this, that basically 70% of the American people can't distinguish between a fact and an opinion. And newer research is showing College graduates, one out of every 2 can't distinguish between fact and opinion.

I'm glad you brought up college graduates. It's, it's so true. The educational system is at the very least partly to blame for this sorry state of affairs. I'm a very proud graduate of Fordham University, Jesuit trained. And one of the things I learned from the Jesuits was logic. Okay. The principles of non-contradiction, how to distinguish A claim from a fact, identifying fallacies in arguments. These are all things that used to be building blocks of higher education, Jaci. And I don't know why that disappeared, but we've all suffered for it.

And we also don't teach the ramifications of the First Amendment. Everyone thinks we're free to say whatever we want to say whenever we want to say it, but we know that's not true.

You and I are both old enough to remember the old saying that Free speech doesn't mean you have the right to yell fire in a crowded theater. And so much of what's going on today essentially amounts to that.

Correct me if you see this differently, but it just seems like everything is pushing for either something is good or something is bad, and there's no nuance or gray area.

We don't have time for gray area.

How does that help?

We don't have time for gray area. And this is something else that's happened. We've had this sort This, what it's been called, I think, the great sort in America, urban versus rural and all the rest. You know, we seem to have split into red and blue. Media has not just followed that, that, that divide, but in many cases, I believe, kind of precipitated it. And why is that? There are economic imperatives to what's happened to media. You know, back again, going back to the days of the big 5 AM. radio stations in New York, they were all aiming for that large audience, right? Because the economics were driving them to aim for the largest possible audience. But when technology came along and said, you know what, you don't necessarily need a 50,000-watt clear channel AM radio station to, to get your message out and attract a large audience. You can bifurcate, you can trifurcate, if that's a word. You can split this out. You can find niches because technology now allows you to do that. You and I, you know, Think of the technology that would've been required 50 years ago for you and I to be sitting in these little makeshift TV studios we have. Didn't exist. But today, anybody can do this. So as a result, you have smaller organizations that are catering to people based on their political preferences, based on their income, based on not even geography, but based on their interests, their hobbies. This wasn't possible technologically 50 years ago, but, but in some respects, this, what you're describing has been, has been helped along by media, even though the societal changes have probably helped as well.

So do you think the breakdown of mass media into these niche areas, do you think that has contributed to the polarization of what's happening?

Without a doubt. Without a doubt. As I, as I said earlier, When AM radio stations were looking at the electric bill and saying, you know, we're losing all our audience to FM, we're losing it to cable, we're losing it to satellite. And I'm not even putting television into the equation, but something similar has happened there. You know, how are we going to pay the bills? You know, the big 5 radio stations that I mentioned all had formidable news departments. WOR, when I joined in 1978, was at the, almost the peak of its popularity, but it was being severely challenged by WCDS and WINS, which came along later with news, strong emphasis on news in the 1960s. WOR has a history going all the way back prior to World War II doing serious comprehensive news. News operations are expensive by definition. It's far less expensive to put on some person bloviating about the current state of affairs. And that, that to me is, is, is where the, the disconnect came in between People being able to say, hey, you know what? I heard that on the news and they said such and such versus, you know what? I heard Rush Limbaugh today and he was saying something and he's right. You know, so this inability to distinguish between opinion and fact, I believe, has its roots in the economics that drove the change in AM radio. Because as we all know, talk radio, you know, as we know it today, kind of started in the 1990s during this period of crisis for AM radio.

And let's go inside the news ecosystem for a second, because I don't think the public really understands how it's important that you have strong local radio news and what and how that plays out into the larger picture. Is it the, the, the whole career ladder, if you will, has been taken away because of the economics of news. So it used to be, to be a good reporter, you had to start local. And that was where you learned how to confirm facts and find sources and, you know, discover experts versus just the guy who wants to be in the news and that sort of thing. And then those were the people that moved up the ladder to become the national correspondents. We don't have that anymore.

No, we don't. Radio was a tremendous, indispensable training ground for me personally. And in fact, uh, the very first radio station where I, uh, drew a paycheck is on Long Island, WGSN. I don't, they, I know they're not doing, uh, the format that they did when I was, when I was there.

Yeah.

I think it may be a, uh, an international language station now if it, if it's still on the air at all. But, but there were signs even back then, you know, the, the, the landscape was changing. We were doing news and we, and one of the great selling points of WGSN when I worked there as a 5,000-watt daytime radio station was its ability to cover the local community. And we had a small reporting staff of, I think, 4 full-time reporters. And, and I started there part-time when I was still in college at the age of 18. And eventually when I graduated college, I got a full-time job at WGSN. But it taught me, A, how to track down a story, B, how to distinguish fact from opinion, C, how to think on my feet, think on the fly. Because radio is just that kind of medium. And that, that training ground is now absent for so many people. I was very fortunate in that I never had to leave New York to continue that training ground. I became the news director of another radio station on Long Island, and then from there became an overnight news writer at WOR. That was the big career change in my life that led to me working on television and eventually at CBS News, where I stayed for, for 14 years. So it's, uh, but those training grounds don't exist anymore. But just even looking at CBS, for instance, Frank Setapani, Bill Whitney, I'm sure others whose names I'm forgetting right now, but they went on to work at the network level at CBS News. They all started on Long Island at these little radio stations.

Right. Yeah. Now, when you were at CBS News, you did something called Up to the Minute? Yes. Interesting.

Well, Go ahead.

In today, in today's media landscape, wouldn't that seem like an hour-long broadcast?

Up to the Minute is a historic name at CBS News. It, uh, long preceded me there. And, uh, it was an overnight news program. And the, the, uh, when I, when I anchored that program on a substitute basis, I was working at CBS at something called the Bulletin Center, which was essentially a creature of the cutbacks in in television news that were inevitable in the late 1990s and into the, and into the 2000s. There's a story that, that I heard, and in fact, I kind of owe my career to CBS to, to this, to this story. But when Princess Diana was, was killed in that awful car crash in 1997, it was a Saturday night. It was Labor Day weekend.

Mm-hmm.

This was before cell phones became ubiquitous. So a lot of the news people were still on pagers. And they'd sent everybody home because the initial word was that she was going to be okay. And then they realized, oh my gosh, the princess, Princess Diana's dead, and we have nobody in the building who could go on the air and, and, and, and, and present the story on television. They actually had one fellow from radio who shall go nameless because he had a ponytail. They wouldn't put him on the network news with a ponytail. It's like, okay, what are we gonna do? Well, this, they plugged in the BBC. This is my understanding, uh, for until they could basically get, get their act together, get everybody back from the Hamptons or wherever they were.

Right.

And CBS had to go to the affiliates with their hat in their hand essentially and say, listen, we'll never let this happen again. We are going to establish a separate unit within CBS News. It'll be a rolling responsibility across all the shows. You are responsible— CBS This Morning, CBS Evening News, Overnight, the show called Up to the Minute— all responsible for, uh, for this, this, this this entity, this floating entity called the Bulletin Center. We know where to go now if there's going to be a bulletin on the air. So there was always somebody in the building. Then they realized there are shifts they couldn't cover. And that's when they turned to, to, to a couple of us. And I was, I was one of 2 people who was asked to cover the Bulletin Center for, for primetime, essentially, when, before the up-to-the-minute anchor would come in and, and after the evening news anchor had left for the evening.

Okay. All right. So now let's take all of this.

You cannot be a good media trainer without having worked in the news business. I'll just, I'll just come out and say that. I'll just, there are many media trainers who have no background in journalism. Many graduated college and went directly into public relations or marketing. And you never really learn the instincts of a reporter if you haven't worked as a reporter. Um, I learned the most about journalism. And reporting, and by extension, about how to train people to handle themselves in media by working as a journalist under the tutelage and supervision of people who knew better than I. Some of the most important lessons I learned, I learned right at WGSM, and before that at my college radio station, WFUV. But learning by doing is really the only way to do it in this business. And I know that there are people who've been to journalism school and so forth, and I have great respect for them. But journalism school is not the be-all and end-all of learning how to be a journalist. It's, it requires a serious investment of time and having been in situations, multiple situations where people are pushing back against you and holding, holding their hand up to, to, to cover the camera lens and, and knowing how to kind of work around situations like that. Those are the people you want preparing you for the, for the really tough encounters. But the corollary to that is that even people who would never think about needing to appear in any kind of news media whatsoever derive tremendous benefit from learning how to, A, think on their feet, B, turn their messages into a story, and C, learn how to handle tough questions. It's not just the reporter who asks tough questions, Jaci. It could be your investors. It could be your peers on a panel discussion. That's the majority of what we do now is preparing people for that.

Okay. And I would think the ability for them to go directly on social media.

Yes.

To, to answer the hard questions or to tell the story or to give an explanation of, you know, the crisis that just happened and here's how we're clearing it up.

Yep. Yep. Yep. Although the tendency is to avoid the kinds of one-on-one discussions like, like you and I are having. When, when a crisis hits, still, unfortunately, the, the, the knee-jerk reaction of many companies is, uh, okay, let's circle the wagons. Let's issue a statement. And, uh, that doesn't really get you anywhere because it, it's, it's not going to address a lot of the lingering questions. And if you're not providing someone out there to actually go live and have a discussion like you and I are having right now, It leaves kind of the bad taste in the audience's mouth. Why are they hiding behind this statement? Why aren't we seeing someone?

Why?

You know, there's something fishy here if we're not actually seeing someone go out and defend this live. So that's what I would encourage people to do, is stop thinking about issuing the statement. The statement is a good place to start, maybe, but you got to get somebody out there to answer the tough questions. And that's where we specialize in preparing people. One of a good friend and a colleague I respect tremendously, a fellow by the name of Ray Kerens, who's a longtime PR exec, said, used to say to his, to his direct reports, he says, I never want to hear somebody say that we were unavailable for comment. In other words, you can always find me. You know, here's my, here's my cell phone. Back in the day when there were pagers, here's my pager number. We will always respond. Because unavailable for a response automatically, it, it not only looks bad, but to good reporters, the few of us who are left, it's, it's a little bit like waving a red flag in front of a bull. It's gonna make me wanna push harder to find you if I get the sense that you're hiding.

Okay. Any other media tips that people sh— you can give easily to people?

Look at the camera. And this is, this is something that, that's become of tremendous importance since the advent of, uh, of Zoom and similar technologies. So often we will see people being interviewed on camera and people on the other end are giving no advice on how that person should set up their Zoom camera. If you'll notice, for instance, of course we do this every day of the week when we're working with clients remotely, the camera that we work with here, it's embedded in my laptop, which is like anybody else's laptop, but we raise it up so that I'm at eye level with you. So many times people will just open up their laptop and they'll be positioned so they're almost like they're looking down at you. Right. And, and it's, it's a very disconcerting and unprofessional look for, for the vast majority of people that do that. The other thing I would strongly suggest is that people think about what they want to say before they, before they get into an encounter. Not so much have an agenda. I mean, it would, yes, have an agenda, but make sure that that agenda is, is adapted into Story form. Stories have, have defined parts, and people forget this all the time. They equate telling a story with like telling a joke. It's not. It's, it's more of, um, it's, it's more like following this ancient principles that every good story contains.

Um, so Steve, how did you ever end up getting interested in media to begin with?

Well, I was kind of a born interviewer, my mom says. Uh, I was one of these kids who walked around Before, you know, I think I got my first tape recorder when I was like 8 years old. But even before that, at like 2 or 3, when I would, when company would come over to the house, I would actually grab a spoon out of the kitchen and I would go up to people and say, what's your name? What's your occupation? So I became kind of famous for that. And—

Right. Okay. So tell me this. What's the best part about being Steve Dunlop?

Good question. I would say just off the top of my head, That, that, that, that what we started back in 1991 has enabled us to kind of run our own show. We, anyone who's worked in the news business for a long time knows the stories of people who toil in the trenches for years and years and decades. And they're, and they're working for a lot, for what maybe what started out as one size company and now it turns into a larger company. And, and it's, it's even, even 30 years and a gold watch anymore. It may be 30 years and then a layoff.

Yeah.

Or, and again, I can't name names, but I, there's one fellow in particular that I knew who was a tech at one of the networks I worked at. Every day I'd see him and he'd say, Steve, he says, I can't wait. He says, I'm counting the days till I retire, counting the days till I retire. And he was a wonderful fellow, just a, just a, just a sweet guy, but you could tell he was kind of beaten down by the system. And a couple of weeks after he retired, he dropped dead. And, you know, so What we have done, or what Steve Dunlop has been blessed to be able to do, is enjoy a career where I've continued to work my journalistic chops, help people tell good stories, help people become better communicators, and at the same time have a great relationship with my wife of 26 years and raise a son. So there's a lot to be said for the independence that this is— that this has afforded me personally. And I'm very, very, very grateful for it. The Fair Media Council is a 501 nonprofit organization advocating for quality news and working to create a media-savvy society. For more information about the Fair Media Council and upcoming Fast Chat shows, check out fairmediacouncil.org.