To watch he video please click on the link here. Thank you. https://www.karilake.com/news-and-media/prageru-stories-of-us-kari-lake-why-i-quit-my-job-as-a-news-anchor My name is Karie Lake, and this is my story. I was born and raised in Bettendorf, […]
To watch he video please click on the link here. Thank you.
My name is Karie Lake, and this is my story.
I was born and raised in Bettendorf, Iowa, part of the quad cities. So I was watching the Today Show and Tom Brokaw, and that was the first time I thought, “Is this job I could do? This looks really interesting.” And I remember being a little girl in Iowa, laying in the grass and looking up, and seeing a plane because planes never flew low. After all, they were never landing anywhere near us, but they were flying way up there, and I thought, “One day, I’m going to be on a plane. And I think I’m going to fly out of here.” And now I’ve worked for 22 years as the main anchor.
Covered stories in Cambodia, I’ve been to the White House a couple of times, I’ve interviewed sitting presidents. So it was a great career. I really enjoyed it, for the most part. I started behind the scenes at the number one station in my hometown. Then one person said to me one day, “You should be the news anchor. I think I see you as a news anchor someday.” I thought, “Really? Oh, that’s cool.”
I think I felt I had arrived when I made it to Phoenix though, because I was working with such a great group of professionals. These were people who were seasoned journalists. You had all age groups represented. When I started in news, it was really rare to be young in a big market like Phoenix or LA or Dallas. Now, a lot of kids are coming straight out of journalism school. They don’t have a lot of life experience. They haven’t worked in a lot of different markets to understand different communities, how this whole world operates.
These kids have gone K through 12 and then their college education in some ways being brainwashed and indoctrinated into liberal ideology. You might have a 24 year old, 25 year old producer, fresh out of journalism school, and that’s how they think. They’re going to pick the stories that fit what they feel. So then as the anchor, you’re reading this and going, “Wow, woo, anti-second amendment, pro-choice, this is the stuff that’s going in.” A lot of times I would read the script on air and just ad lib a little more balance in here. Sometimes you’d type things in and you might get on the air and you noticed in the prompter, “Where’d that go? That’s not in there anymore. Did somebody take that out?”
There’s just a million ways that you can manipulate a story besides putting your opinion in it. You put the person who’s saying what you really want them to say in great lighting, they look fantastic, you interview the person in the middle of a parking lot at high noon, they look like a demon. You just try to find somebody who you go, “Oh, this person looks ridiculous. We’ll interview them.” I see it as a lot of manipulation. And whether it’s intentional manipulation, accidental manipulation, or just people who are so entrenched in their ideology, they don’t even realize that they’re putting one side of the story. Because they think the other side, maybe the conservative side, is so reprehensible that it can’t even be put in the story.
As an older person who’s lived a little bit, you start to realize, “Wow, these all seem to be geared towards liberal ideology. And maybe you would say something like, “On balance, maybe we should bring this person in and balance that story out,” and once you get the stink-eye a few times, you go, “Hmm, maybe I’ll just sit here and be quiet.” There are independent journalists out there doing work right now. And I think they’re doing good work. The problem is if you mention those, your friends in journalism will go, “They’re right wingers.” No, actually they’re doing a pretty fair job. You just don’t know what fair is anymore. Fair journalism seems like it’s right wing to them because we’ve gone so far from fair journalism.
COVID was really a moment of truth for me. I saw a neighbor who was the most beautiful 90 year old woman I’d ever seen. The other day I saw her, she’s in a walker now, she looks like she’s aged a hundred years in one year. She wasn’t able to do her daily walking and swimming because COVID scared everybody into their homes. I feel there was a narrative of, “Let’s keep this going really hard on COVID. COVID, COVID.” You’d see an hour long show with 45 minutes of COVID coverage. Somebody who’s on a ventilator, a family that got wiped out from COVID, and these are horrible stories. I’m not discounting that.
But there are also thousands of stories of people who got it, maybe didn’t even know they had it or had very mild symptoms, or it felt like a cold or flu and they got over it. How many times did people hear those stories? The more typical COVID story. The country is so divided right now and everyone’s afraid. And I felt like I’m putting out nonstop news that’s making that worse. I felt sometimes ill reading the news. When you’re doing something that it feels unethical or immoral, for me, I don’t feel good inside. It just got really heavy. I felt very… At the end of the day, it was… I just didn’t feel good about it. I didn’t.
There’s too much at stake just to scare people like that. Every night, I just wanted to rip my microphone off and just run and run. And I just, I sat down with my husband and I said, “I can’t do this anymore.” I worked 30 years in broadcasting. And I want to say I had some amazing moments there. I worked with great people. I had a wonderful career, but things have changed so much in the media that it was just was unrecognizable. I really value the truth and honesty and I didn’t feel that media was interested in that anymore.
I didn’t expect the reaction I got when I quit at all. I’d put the video out when I resigned. I wanted to let the viewers know. I’ve been with the people of Arizona since 1994. If I’m making a personal sacrifice to walk away from my career, I want the viewers to know why. I feel that I owe them the honesty. I went to bed and I woke up the next day and my phone was, it was always hot to touch. “Holy… What the heck? What’s going on?” Text messages galore, my inbox was full. It was all positive. All positive. “Thank you for standing up.” “We thought something’s been going on. You kind of confirmed it.” “My relatives thought I was crazy when I was saying the news isn’t always being honest with us. Thank you for confirming that.”
The one thing I heard the most in the comments and the emails coming my way was, “I am going to speak out now. You gave me the courage to just talk to that person at work who’s been a real loud mouth and I’m feeling nervous about sharing my opinion. Dammit, I’m entitled to my own opinion.” If you see somebody speaking out, you need to support them. If you see somebody getting canceled on Twitter, the cesspool called Twitter, step in and have the courage to say, “Hey, I support you.” It makes a big difference if people start to see that.
I do believe that a lot of the media wants us to be afraid and angry. You’re a great consumer of news if you’re sitting at home angry and afraid, you just keep watching it. The minute you walk away from all of that, you start living your life a little more. Put the phone down, turn the TV off, and go out and live a little bit of life. That’s where you’re going to learn.
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