Local writer and journalist Baynard Woods discusses his lengthy story in Rolling Stone on the demise of real “news” in The Baltimore Sun and the Fox 45 journalism agenda moves to print and behind a paywall at the hands of a local billionaire.
Nestor Aparicio and Baynard Woods discuss the decline of traditional journalism and the impact of right-wing media on The Baltimore Sun. Woods highlights the acquisition of the Sun by David Smith, who aims to reinvent the newspaper with a new device that combines Fox 45 and the Sun. They discuss the challenges faced by modern journalism, including the shift towards paywalls and the decline in local news coverage. Woods emphasizes the importance of independent journalism and the need for media to hold power accountable. They also touch on the broader implications of media control and the erosion of trust in news sources.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Baltimore Sun, right-wing media, David Smith, Sinclair Broadcast, local news, media accountability, Justin Tucker scandal, media paywalls, journalism decline, media business model, political influence, media censorship, media landscape, media future, media ethics
SPEAKERS
Nestor Aparicio, Speaker 1, Baynard Woods
Nestor Aparicio 00:01
Welcome home. We are W, N, S T am 1570 Towson, Baltimore. We are Baltimore, positive. We’re taking the show back on the road, the crab cake tour. It’s gonna get back down to fatales. I kind of screwed up on a couple Super Bowl last month. It’s a long story. I’ll tell it again and embarrass myself on March 6, when we return to fade, leads the magic eight ball Maryland lottery. Scratch also be giving these away at fade, Lee’s and Lexington market. We’re inching closer to the beginning of baseball season, which will happen later in March in Toronto. Luke and I will be doing that. We are covering all things. Let’s see a free agency football, Draft Football, Justin Tucker saga, massage saga, and on top of that is this incredible giveaway of democracy to a felon. And in the midst of all of that are media allegations and even the Justin Tucker thing like blame the media. It’s the media’s fault that I’m being alligated and Rolling Stone. Recently ran a piece, and I saw the headline because it kind of came to me not through this guy’s ex or that the fact that he lives here in Southwest Baltimore, but it was a piece about right wing media and my former employer, and like, honest to God, I had John Palumbo on from crack the sky this week, showing my clip from the evening sun that I wrote in 1986 when I was the music critic. I was 17. By the way, Baltimore is fighting the right wing takeover it of its iconic newspaper. That’s just the factual headline, sun don’t shine. I’ve often said the sun is setting. Baiter Woods is a long time author, journalist, and in this case, chronicler and reporter of all things, the Baltimore Sun. Dude. First off, good to have you on, man. You know my time is your time. My people, your people. I saw this piece. First off, congratulations on getting published. We say that in the old days, I always wanted to be a Rolling Stone. Just one headline, a rolling stone or Playboy would have made my life and, you know, they paid me a kill fee once, 750 bucks. So I’m good with that. I still have the check. How are you? My brother? It’s good to have you on. Man,
Baynard Woods 02:14
yeah, I’m doing well. And it’s, yeah, I haven’t been on since I got a monster came out, I think, which is now, shockingly, been like, five years. So, yeah, I’m doing well, good to be thanks for having me back home. Has it been five years?
Nestor Aparicio 02:26
What I
Baynard Woods 02:27
think? So, yeah,
Nestor Aparicio 02:28
yeah. I mean, I feel like a total jerk. We got to get a crab cake together or something. Sometimes,
Baynard Woods 02:32
absolutely, we were just talking before we got on, about rooted rotisserie over here in southwest. I’ll give a shout out to them, the rockfish with okra and crawdads on a perfect Mardi Gras meal coming up this week. So get on over to
Nestor Aparicio 02:48
rooted. Let me give you my background and my love of journalism. I did not do this with Julie sharper this week. I will not do this with Pam Ward next week. But I mean, my whole jam, 40 years doing this, was being trained to 501 North Calvert street where I checked in every night with my badge as a 17 year old, got my car broken into over on Guilford, found the best. You know, I’m gonna give you a tip bro Young’s carry out. Forget the o, y, u N, G on Guilford block up from the DAC, still my go to it’s still the place I anytime I’m in the city, I get Chinese food there. So like, I’m old school Baltimore Sun guy, you know, reared by the great Jack Lemmon and led by the great Jack Gibbons, and taught journalism. And I know right from wrong, and I know fact checking, and I know who, what, where, why, when. And as I wrote recently in my letter to Bucha D, I was trained, or was Lou Rubenstein. Was that letter I was trained by like the David Simons and the, you know, Raphael Alvarez’s and just people that were bullshit detectors. They were just fact checkers of what was and what wasn’t and what was worthy of having my name, the son’s name, the crest. And this is the way I was trained as a 17 year old. So I come at this all sideways, you know, with with it, with a truck when I go down by 501, North Calvert and see the building gone, and just like wondering where it’s going to end and where it’s going to be with my dear friends like Dan Rodricks and so many people that have moved to the banner. But man, you took this on in some sort of national way, to explain to people outside of Baltimore what this is about. But I’ve, I’ve witnessed it for 40 years, and it’s been the damnedest thing. Brother,
Baynard Woods 04:24
yeah, it’s, I mean, it’s so sad to see for everyone also has always loved to complain about the sun to start with, and so, you know, even people who are working there. But this is of a different order. It’s, it’s a real change in what, what the paper is, and what I was hoping by diving into this, and I spent more than six months reporting it, what I was hoping was to figure out what this says about the future of news. And I feel like that’s grim, as we see the news coming out of the Washington Post this week with Bezos getting rid of the op ed. Section or boast of the op eds, other than covering free enterprise and personal liberty, I doubt he would run an op ed about free enterprise. How, you know, Amazon, as a monopoly is, is crushing free enterprise. So it’s, it’s really well
Nestor Aparicio 05:17
and also not paying any taxes. But that’s, you know, that’s a whole other level. Right, right?
Baynard Woods 05:22
Exactly. So what’s happening here in Baltimore with David Smith last January, January 2024, he bought the Baltimore Sun, for those who don’t know, and has, rather, almost immediately had this just crazy meeting with the staff that was recorded by someone was leaked out to various members of the press, including including me. And, you know, in the immediate rush of the reporting, a lot of things that he said in that meeting weren’t covered, because the big news was, Oh, my God, the Executive Chair of Sinclair broadcast bought the Baltimore Sun. But I mean, one of the things he said there was that he tried to buy every newspaper but one in the state of Maine, and was turned down. Those then went to the main trust for local news, which is was a great development. And he said that when Joan Pratt, when Fox 45 ran this story exposing how Joan Pratt spent little time at the office and was doing other work on the side that they did their reporters didn’t break that news that he hired private detective, the private detectives to follow her 24 hours a day for two weeks, and that that’s how he breaks this which really struck me as what tabloids do rather than what regular newspapers do, and we see the Washington Post by bringing in all these Rupert Murdoch people. And so I started to feel like we’re seeing in the same way that, and no, just a discussion, but in the same way that that am radio when it once FM came around it, a lot of it got bought up by cranks, religious people, you know, all kinds of and I was like, Is that what’s happening?
Nestor Aparicio 07:05
Well, this joint is definitely owned by a crank from Dundalk, just cranky about the right kinds of things and not the right things, the left things that are not the wrong things, but you don’t have the correct things. Thank you. I appreciate that. I would just say for all of this, we’ve witnessed the fox 45 ification of Fox 45 I mean, I remember back, you know, when I had Gary Michael capetto on here two months ago, talking about Championship Wrestling on Channel 45 I remember when they had a news division. I remember when Bruce Cunningham and Max Morgan were hired, you know, to be a news department here. And then I the Rupert Murdoch part of the New York Post. And this is not hard for a 56 year old, semi white, semi Hispanic, not really readily accepted by anybody except the punks and Dundalk, and even they don’t like me so much because they’re voting Republican too. But I would say, watching all of this and being trained as a journalist, I have this innate bullshit detector that was brought to me very early in life, in a lot of different ways, in a mixed culture as well, who’s lying to me, who’s telling me the truth? What’s a fact? You know, how do I verify things? As pretty smart guys, I read a lot of books. Things had to add up. There needed to be, you know, legs on the table for it to have it make sense. For me as a human, we’ve just lost the ball on that, on what is journalism and what is tabloid, and where the National Enquirer always sat at the checkout counter, and now those people apparently make up 52% of the population, as well as people that don’t understand racist don’t understand what billionaires do, don’t understand how international international law works, just don’t understand anything about civics. There’s nowhere for them to teach that if they don’t get that in seventh or eighth grade, and they hook out, because then they get their civics from, you know, Alex, whatever his name is, the freak on the internet. Um, so there’s a whole world of people that have only gotten their news from Fox 45 mainly, a lot of white people in the suburbs under the age of 40 who don’t know from the sun because they never subscribed to it. Then it became an online thing that wasn’t sitting in the in the dentist office, or wasn’t sitting around where people would read my work when I was a 17 year old, everywhere I went. It’s everywhere I went and saw the newspaper. What was on the bus was on the bus stop, whether it was at the, you know, coffee table, it just was a ubiquitous piece lying around. It would lay there for a couple days, and people would still read it over the weekend.
Baynard Woods 09:34
Well, the tricky thing about, uh, about Sinclair especially, is Fox 45 happens to be Fox, and that’s the flagship station, but he owns almost 200 stations, and there ABC, CBS, NBC, CW, every kind of station you can imagine is a Sinclair station, and they don’t have a big logo like Fox News that lets you know you’re dealing with Rupert Murdoch or whatever. And so I’ve been. Shop here in Southwest Baltimore. How many people of color, how many black people get their news from Fox 45 and don’t have any idea of the right wing content? And that’s, that’s how and why it’s successful. Because you unlike having you know whoever it is on Fox News, Bill O’Reilly or whatever, back in the day, you have your local anchor who tells you about sports and then says, oh, you know some right wing thing like we saw with that dead spin super cut a few years ago that that had anchors in every different one of their markets parroting the exact same words that were sent to them by that
Nestor Aparicio 10:38
was a disturbing piece for me as a journalist, when I saw that, and we’re going back a decade, almost, right?
Baynard Woods 10:45
Yeah, it was at the very beginning of the first Trump term. So, yeah, it was, it was 2017, um,
Nestor Aparicio 10:51
well, I mean, what we’ve just seen here the last 30 to 40 days. I mean, for you know, we can talk about Smith and Sinclair and their business interest here, and even the sun, but we’re seeing what damage can be done here with with really law and having people run the military, or qualified to run the military, and have people run education that are qualified to run education, and there’s really they’re not Going people in this country are not getting trusted information. They’re not getting they’re not getting legitimate information. And that’s kind of at the heart of all of this, I think. And the sun used to be that place that allowed for that in our culture, at least the culture I grew up in, absolutely.
Baynard Woods 11:36
And I mean, it’s been David Smith has been trying this with both national politics and local politics for more than 20 years. He started, you know, he was huge in the Ehrlich campaign, of getting early collected, gave a helicopter for Ehrlich to use during the campaign. It didn’t come out until after he won, that he had without disclosing that he was donating. The helicopter was running anti Kathleen Kennedy towns and stuff, forcing the news people to run it, forcing them to run things that were attacking John Kerry wouldn’t allow anything negative about George Bush. So he’s, he’s been really doing this for a long time, but the auntie got raised with the first Trump term when he told, when he admittedly told, Trump, we’re here to do, to deliver your message, period.
Nestor Aparicio 12:26
That’s dangerous, right? I mean, it just, it’s dangerous all the way around. I mean, and Peter Woods is our guest here. You can find his work out at Rolling Stone. Baltimore is fighting the right wing takeover. It’s of its iconic newspaper. Dude, I’d almost say this isn’t news here, right? Like, I mean, if you’ve been reading the sun, if you’ve seen it, if you’ve seen the reporters, I mean, and it goes right down to the street journalism of where we are, which I’ll turn this in the direction of sports, just momentarily, because of the Justin Tucker scandal, I wrote a letter to Steve Bucha last week, and you know, I’ve had Julie sharp run Justin Tucker wants to come forward. Have him here. I’ll see if we can get the 16 massage ladies to face him up and see what he has to say about that, because that’s really what this is about, about accountability, about power, about money, about wealth, about influence and about abuse of that in whatever way there is. And when Chad Steele took my press credential after 37 years of being a Baltimore media member, he asked me what my job was, I said, to hold power accountable, because it’s incapable of holding itself accountable. And the Baltimore Ravens scandal with this Justin Tucker thing, however deep it digs, or however deep people like me dig it, because people are calling me every day with information about the Baltimore Ravens and how they treated other people. I’ll say this, my friend. Last week I wrote this letter to Steve Bucha. It was the day three days after the number came to 16 on Justin Tucker. I went on to the Four television websites, W, M, A, R, W, BFF, whatever they’re calling it. Fox 45 whatever Fox Baltimore, whatever it is. At Bal TV and radio. I went to five sites, B, A, L, T, V, N, radio, because they’re different. And Jay Z, which is a little bit of a joke with CBS. There’s only one website in all of them that had the Justin Tucker information. And by the way, it was Fox 45 I mean, I and, and by the way, only two of them had an arrest, a DUI arrest of a fifth year ravens player, Ben Cleveland, only two of the five had the information on their website, W, B, A, L has just decided, if anything bad happens to the ravens, we’re not reporting it. So this isn’t just a right wing, left wing. This that money. This is, if you do business with us, you’re going to hide our sins. That’s it, and we’re no longer going to have you be a media company anymore, you’re going to be the media company that reports our good news and ignores our bad news, even if we’re $5 billion company that’s getting $600 million of citizen revenue to build it to throw the media out of the press box the Kevin Byrne. Rest box and move them up to the little kids seat in the corner and throw people like me out of the media so I can’t chase this. I look at the I look at what’s happened to all the media landscape and say, we can’t even decide what a news story is anymore, even when there’s 16 massage therapists and Pulitzer Prize of you know, character journalists writing this kind of work in a place like the Baltimore banner, we can’t even get w, b, a, l, to admit that that could be a news story. It’s insane. Well,
Baynard Woods 15:28
8I mean talking about throwing people out of the press, we’ve seen that in the last couple of weeks too, with the AP being kicked out of the White House press group for refusing to change its guidelines to Gulf of America from Gulf of Mexico for AB style. And then the White House has actually taken over the White House pool and decides who is included in that pool that gets access to the President. So, yeah, we, we see it on all levels. And you know, I was a, I was at City Paper when the sun bought it. So I’ve had my my fair share of critiques of the sun, and the times when I thought the sun was not looking at police misconduct as they should were. It’s not looking at racism as they should. It’s not looking at but there were still
Nestor Aparicio 16:13
things, and in the end, really screwed the city up. I mean, really screwed the city up, yeah. But there was still,
Baynard Woods 16:19
always, still a level of, you know, there was a level at which they were still operating within the bounds within now it’s just really gone well. Let me say first, there are still good reporters there, and some of them are doing better work than they’ve done in a long time, because they’re desperate. I think they get jobs. Everyone wants to get somewhere else. So people immediately, when they got bought, everyone’s hustling for that big story so they can go somewhere else. By the way, that’s
Nestor Aparicio 16:52
never been said to me or out loud. Respect, that’s great point at some
Baynard Woods 16:56
point though, you know, David Zurick told me for the story that, like anyone, especially the editors, who are still there now, zerwick was a media critic for the sun for 30 years, is now on CNN and and said, you know, anyone who’s an editor, there is now an accomplice in this. You, if you stayed on as an editor, you really, you’re really enforcing the Smith agenda, which is not only the national right wing stuff, but a big part of the story. And I guess the good news about the bad news is that by focusing on Sinclair, by pointing out the question H district City Council was a David Smith endeavor that was solely funded by David Smith. Question H was defeated, the first ballot measure to be defeated in Baltimore in 20 years, and the last one defeated was to give 16 year olds the right to vote. And so it was a huge victory against against David Smith, and showed the real lack of popularity of not only Smith Sinclair of Atlas restaurants, which is nephews, owned through and he owns with them, a number of the restaurants. His brother Fred Smith married Venice padarakis, the in the pateracos family. So those two families come together in the whole development of Harbor East. And then he’s also one of the biggest partners in the curio cannabis company. And a lot of people who would never eat Atlas, would never watch Fox, 45 are still token down on some curio. And so I try to make sure that people know that as well, because I think we are at a point in the city where people realize that this billionaire, or punitive billionaire, there’s claims to be proof, really anywhere punitive billionaire, self proclaimed billionaire who lives outside of the City, trying to take over control of the city. Well,
Nestor Aparicio 19:03
I’d see COVID on. And by the way, Banner Woods is our guest here. And, you know, full disclosure, we’ve done curio wellness education pieces here with Wendy Brown, fine and different folks and and certainly know that not everybody’s voting the same way you who are involved in business and intertwined. I mean, that’s one of the things that really worries me about all of this. Because I’ll say this, I know Alex. I know his brother. I did my show one time from one of their places. They want good things. They just believe different things, right? I mean, I don’t think they want the city to burn down there, to invest in the city. So when I sit with any of them, I have that part of respect of saying, What do you think you want this to be, if you are tearing down education policing and not offering solutions and highlighting crime, but not highlighting flowers and good things that are growing in this city, which I Baltimore, positive so i. I’d have them on until such point, they start telling me the lies of Elon Musk or Donald Trump are facts, and that’s where the Baltimore Sun, and that’s where I think all of media right? And this would be my internal meter of having been a kid that’s done nothing, nothing in my life except make media money in Baltimore. It’s the only way I’ve ever made a living other than when I hustled records at sound waves East Point and I delivered the Dundalk Eagle when I was a kid. This is all I’ve ever done since I was 15 years old, is work in media and collect money through sponsors like the Maryland lottery or curio wellness or Jiffy Lube or right wing financial advisors like Leonard Raskin who come on the show and we try to talk reasonably. My accountant is right wing, and we can’t talk reasonably sometimes, so we keep it between the lines. But the world has gotten crazy in that we all want vibrant things, and how we get there in controlling city council and putting money into any part of politics right to get $5 million buys you into the country. This morning’s news, and you’ll be listening to this later, is that we’re letting sex offenders run wild from Eastern Europe to come back to America and, you know, just walk the streets, just like we let January sex insurac Just let me have a felon run in the country. Mean, just it oozes from that. But I’ll say this on the media side, bro, pay walls, subscribers, money, advertising, where the people are. Um, I worry about all of it. I worry about that from Major League Baseball, where the streaming, how we’re going to get it, what we’re going to pay for, how much our next Netflix are. I can’t order on Amazon now because Bezos is a jerk. I mean, I get it, um, but the Baltimore Sun was a shrinking, shrinking, shrinking thing, like every minute of every day, and then this guy buys it to kill it. Um, there’s a pay wall. I can’t read any of it. You know, ain’t the last time I tried to get off the sun and I told Dan Rogers, he almost cried. Took me an hour and a half on the phone with somebody from the Philippines to try to get rid of the $27 a month they were banging me for after I was going to run for mayor back in 2020 when you did the show the last time. So, I mean, I had my own experiences. I mean, I am a proud Baltimore Sun alum. It’s given me the strength and the wisdom and the ability to be able to do this for 40 years freely, and have, at this point, still an FCC license where I’m allowed to say what I believe and believe what I say, and provide proof for that and receipts. Who’s gonna buy this thing? You know? I get the story and roll, and I just keep saying, Well, it kind of kill itself, because the right wing people don’t want a newspaper, and if they did, they’re not going to want this, and it’s going to be a bunch of old white people in the county who probably don’t want it and won’t want to pay for it, and they’re already getting it on Fox 45 so there’s a point for me where I’m like, what’s the business model here, dude,
Baynard Woods 22:51
the business plan is, and I didn’t get to go into this so much, but the business plan is nuts. I mean. So he asked the staff in the first meeting. He’s like, he basically said he was going to reinvent the iPad. He’s like, I’m going to make this device, and you can watch Fox 45 and read the song on it at the same time. And if I have that, what would you have? And one of the staffers was like, a phone, and it was really his,
Nestor Aparicio 23:16
oh, it was that. It was that telling. It was that out of touch. It was that I don’t buy gallons of milk. I don’t really deal with real people. He it
Baynard Woods 23:26
really seemed like a weird business plan to create a new version of the iPad, give it to subscribers, and then they can use that to Yeah, both to see their the paper and to read Fox 40. It’s
Nestor Aparicio 23:39
like the thing they gave you in a bar we played the trivia games, yeah, yes,
Baynard Woods 23:43
something like that. So it’s a bizarre business model, but I think that, like, what is model, probably is, is Rupert Murdoch. A lot of people got him a Rupert Murdoch wannabe, but the New York Post is still a profitable newspaper. New York’s a much, much, much bigger city. The Baltimore has much more national interest in what’s happening there. So there’s a lot of things going on about that that make it where that’s still a strange model for him to have here. And yeah, then putting some stories up on Fox 45 and wanting subscribers, well, you can go read and having this paywall, we can go read it for free, the same story that he put up on his free site. So I really don’t, I don’t think there’s a business model. I think it’s more of a political model than a business model, that it’s a way to you, it’s another way to strengthen control over the city. And I agree with you that a lot of people want what they think are good things for the city, but I think a lot of it amounts to essentially the Donald Trump AI video of Gaza and the Trump Gaza plan. I think there’s a lot of people that would like to basically ethnically cleanse the city. Um. And be able to move in and develop Harbor East, all over the place, without having the pesky residents who have been living here. So I think it’s, it’s not a business model as much as it is a political model. Well,
Nestor Aparicio 25:18
I think it’s very obvious, right? I mean, yeah, I don’t know. I’ve sold business plans before. I did that here 15 years ago, and my plan, as I sat in the meetings, was, we’re going to put the Baltimore Sun out of business because they’re going to have a paywall, and we’re not we’re going to do sports better than they could possibly do sports. That was what wnst.net dream was, I can send you the thing that Brian Billick signed to be a part of 15 years ago, because I saw the changing model of all of this, so did Elon Musk was in squatting on Twitter and destroying it. I was thrown off of Twitter in the first four days because the first word of my profile was journalists. It didn’t take me long to figure out how I got thrown off a Twitter. And that was whatever you know, two years ago, whenever that was that that happened, um, the silencing of critics is that’s the magic trick that that that’s the that’s the Russian magic trick, that’s the Chinese magic trick, that’s the North Korean magic trick, that’s the Philippine man. That’s that. That’s the magic trick.
Baynard Woods 26:19
A lot of people, I think, would like to be the Elon Musk of Baltimore. I think that explains a lot of what happens with money here. They would like to have that kind of influence over whoever is officially in charge. Would would like to have the kind of influence that Musk is showing over the federal government at the moment.
Nestor Aparicio 26:40
Well, money, it’s a money for power, which is really at the root of this story. Bader Woods is here. He is a long time author, writer, journalist, troublemaker and the good best sense of the way writing at the Rolling Stone was fighting the right wing takeover of its iconic newspaper, a story about David Smith and the sun. Listen, I mean the banner people, I like them and all, and they can tell me they have X amount of this and X amount of that, and subscribe this and circulate that and deliver all of that. I’m intimately familiar with my own traffic, which is larger than a lot of people think it is, and I can prove it. I don’t know what they can prove and what they can’t prove and where they are with paywalls. I’m not a paywall believer. As a media mogul. I’ve owned a media company all my life. It’s all I’ve ever done. I think it’s a poor way to do things, because I think you restrict access. And I don’t think it’s a winning model. I think it’s a desperate Band Aid kind of model. As a media model, I don’t know what the sun’s going to be, but I keep thinking its brand is what its brand is, in the same way that what sports illustrateds brand and the shell of that, that once you start eating different and bad food, your audience will change. Your audience will diminish, and you won’t be the place people go for food anymore. I’m thinking the sun wore that out a long time ago. And I thought the weirdest part was chasing the people they still had left as a business model, I or as an even as a political model. I mean, I, I just thought it was strange. And I think the banner has come in and taken the carcass and run with it in the best possible way that it can, in the honor, in the spirit of Ted venezolus, but I don’t even know what that model is about if it’s not run off of fund money and other things that make it very hard. WBA l was never going to do the Justin Tucker story. They just weren’t. And I’ll sit here and tell Dan jarris that in front they won’t even run the banner headline on their website. So we have journalists running scared. And, you know, I didn’t say this to Julie sharper, but I meant to, so say it out loud to you, because it was only said one time on my hair. Hey, Chris Van Hollen, on at Mako last summer, I have a lot of the politicians on hold them accountable, and they give me 30 minutes their time. They sit with me. They try not to Bucha me. You know, I try to shoot it straight. They don’t ask, they don’t hand me the questions. I promise you that. And he said, journalists, that is the most dangerous job in the world. Chris Van Hollen said that to me, and I’m like, I’m sitting next to him. I’m like, secure bill. You know, we’re okay here, right? I mean, you’re a politician, I’m a journalist. You’re saying it’s it that that’s what a senator said that being a journalist is the most dangerous job in the world, and what we’re certainly getting to that point, aren’t we were Julie sharper reports a story about a guy who’s made $70 million kicking field goals, who may or may not have had indiscretions with 16 women. And you know, like she’s got to be afraid because she’s reporting it. People are nuts, and I think that that’s the culture that Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and all the whack jobs on am radio that you talked about that brought people to my side of the dial back in the day. Boy, you know, we’re just in a different political space where I don’t know what the value of the. Son as a brand, or the Baltimore Sun would be 510, 15 years from now, feels diminished already by its very nature. Yeah.
Baynard Woods 30:07
So it’s such a weird moment of news. I mean, I agree with you about paywalls in some ways. That was City Paper. We were free in 2012 when I started there, we still had the biggest classified section in the country, because Baltimore was still slow to embrace the internet, but once the classifieds, when it was hard to stay hard to stay afloat. And if you think about how many fewer journalists there are working in this city or any other city, than there were 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, that also explains some of the hatred towards journalists, because you’re not living next door to a journalist now. You’re not hanging out at the bar with a journalist. You’re not because there are so few of us. Uh, they’re they’re used. I saw
Nestor Aparicio 30:51
the Ravens games. I mean, they threw me out because there’s nobody there to defend me, and that the public’s like, Don’t you guys all stick together? I’m like, Who that the guy’s trying to feed his family, working for The New York Times. And they call it the athletic and you think he’s local, or the guy used to work for the Baltimore Sun that works for ESPN now they have a pay wall, and he lives here, but he who, who’s gonna defend me, Disney, The New York Times, you can’t get get out of their own way. I mean, the Washington Post used to cover the Ravens. They don’t cover the Ravens. So there’s just, there’s, there’s no spinal cavity left for anyone to stand up independently, other than the people themselves that are the audience to say, we’re not going to allow this. But I don’t know that’s foolish. I you know that’s foolish? Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Baynard Woods 31:38
One of the things that is free. That I’m really excited about, and that I love is the Baltimore beat, which which is nonprofit black controlled print newspaper comes out every other week, and boxes around the city like City Paper, and in the top of the boxes, they also have supplies and warm socks and things that people might need. And so they’re really an interesting new model that is is growing, and it’s still, it’s much smaller than City Paper was. It’s every other week, and it’s about 24 to 30 pages instead of, you know,
Nestor Aparicio 32:14
have you contributed to that? By the way, you’ve Yes, I did
Baynard Woods 32:17
a long investigation with them and with type investigations together about the shooting of Donnell Rochester, there was a big two part story that ran about a year ago. I did that for them, and when, in its first incarnation, which we, I helped found it, when city The week after City Paper closed, we put out our first issue, and then it was a partnership between Real News Network, which is also doing great work and is down right by City Hall, the Washington blade, and the people who founded the beat and the blade was providing all of the printing, and when they backed out, it folded for a couple of years, and It came back as a new nonprofit model that’s really exciting and interesting. And so Lisa Snowden, the editor there is, is doing good work at trying to push find a new model for how we can have reporting without having and that reporters can get paid. I mean, that’s the other thing. Freelance work pays less than it did 10 years ago, less than it did 20 years ago. It’s hard to think of other industries where you’re getting paid so much less now than you were, and that means that only people like the only way I’m able to do it is because my wife is a professor. It’s, I have benefits, it’s, it’s, we’re squeezing out so many people who have interesting and important things to say, because you have to have some kind of other financial backing if you want to try to do journalism and a lot, you know, unless you’re at the New York Times, which has sort of become the Death Star and has sucked up everything else. I mean, they do good work, but they’ve also, whenever there’s a good reporter somewhere. They hire him away. Erica green, one of the top White House reporters there now was the school’s reporter at the Baltimore Sun, and it’s probably the one of the best reporters the sun ever had. Just spectacular. Luke
Nestor Aparicio 34:13
Broadwater as well.
Baynard Woods 34:14
Sure, yeah, Luke as well. Tons of people and so, yeah, it’s, it’s the times. I’m glad that they’re doing well, but the fact that they’re sucking up all that so many people subscribe to them and not their local paper anymore is also a problem matter what
Nestor Aparicio 34:31
share He is a writer, author, advocate for the good fight. I mean, I hate to say that journalism has become this left wing lib tard. Thing that inform me, science has become that education, you know, all of these things that inform people to know what presidential rights are and what checks and balances are, and three branches of government and just basic, basic Jay Leno, Jay walking. Dipshit questions that far on, too few percentage of this country would get right that reading a newspaper every day kept a man or a woman well read, well read to be well read to be educated. And I, you know, I think about this, the Sagan line of celebrating ignorance in and I just wonder how that’s going to come back in. Because I thought, after the first Trump thing, Baynard, I thought, when all this is over with, and Trump’s under a prison someplace, people will really value truth again, there will come a point where truth and facts and laws and American patriots is a meaning. We’re looking out for each other, but we’re checking off on each other that that would come back into vogue. I don’t know. Dude, I’m gravely concerned right now. And I know when we write about it, we talk about it, it feels very alarming. All this should be alarming to people. Dude, it should be really, really alarming that the richest man in the world South African is poking through all of your your financial records and everything you you’ve ever accomplished in this world without any oversight other than his own, which is really poor. If you ask anyone who’s ever met him or ever done business with him, these are, these are bad, bad people, and the Putin thing, and being on Putin’s side, all newspaper side, all just inside this is all the freaking side show to what is happening down in DC. And it’s right out of the compromise playbook of look over there and be upset about transgender something while I’m adjusting $5 trillion of Saudi money that’s going to come into an election, it really is flooding the zone.
Baynard Woods 36:49
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely, you know. And I wrote a book inheritance about in 1871 during Reconstruction, my great grandfather in South Carolina, assassinated a black County Commissioner there in an attempt to overthrow reconstruction. That was the day that the third Enforcement Act was passed, the Ku Klux Klan conspiracy law. He fled the state, he came back, was welcomed as a hero, and then him and a lot of other people, led by Wade Hampton stormed the South Carolina State Capitol, all wearing red shirts. They occupied the Capitol, and they overthrew reconstruction. And then I went to a high school called Wade Hampton High School.
Speaker 1 37:31
Way full circle, brother Wow, and I wrote for
Baynard Woods 37:35
The Washington Post. And the day after January 7, on January 7, day after January 6, that it would be going to high school like that would be like going to a Steve Bannon High School 30 years from now. And that’s exactly the kind of thing that they’re they’re really pushing for right now. And this, they called it redemption then, when they just made up complete fabrications about what the reality of reconstruction was, which is the first democracy to actually happen in the US South, and turn it into something that they cast as demonic. And it’s so strange to watch that exact same thing happen right now, trying to overturn everything that just happened since 1964 since Civil Rights Act, you know, and having seen it play out exactly like this in history, it’s, it’s terrifying and infuriating well,
Nestor Aparicio 38:27
and to have a slogan like making America great, while the people who look like me, I’m from Venezuela, all get carted out, and food’s going to rot in fields, And just, I would say all of the unintended consequences, but I’m not so sure they’re unintended. Boehner, but I hope we get together for a crab cake. I hope democracy rules. I hope some sanity comes back. I hope the Orioles win some games. I hope I get my media pass back. Hoping a lot of things, but I really do hope we get in a room together and get a crab kicks. I think we have a lot to talk about in the future. Tell me where to find you and your work, aside from the Rolling Stone piece on Sinclair and the sun and David Smith and what else you’re working on right now, brother.
Baynard Woods 39:08
So I just finished a piece for Oxford American magazine, which is a great magazine, print magazine about the South, and I’ve been reading it for 20 years, and just finished a piece about the crazy revolution of Delta eight. THC, down there, how places where weed is illegal. You can buy it at the gas station and stuff because of this loophole in the Farm Bill and all of this wild chemistry that’s going on.
Nestor Aparicio 39:32
Where is it? Where’s that happening? It’s gonna
Baynard Woods 39:34
all over the south. All over the South, okay, yeah, yeah. And actually,
Nestor Aparicio 39:38
anywhere Mississippi is where the study was, right, yeah. So almost anywhere where
Baynard Woods 39:42
there’s not recreational weed, because we we strictly regulate it, because people pay so much for their licenses, they don’t want this delta eight stuff at the convenience store. But you can go in South Carolina and get delta eight at the bar at the convenience store, and it gets you hot. So I just read about that. It’ll. Be it won’t be out till the summer, though it’s a long magazine print time. I am writing a story for the beat. They’re going to have a 10th anniversary of the uprising in April. And so I’ve been working on some talking to some people. I covered that a lot back then. I’ve really been off of social media because of Elon Musk, because of Zuckerberg, because of but I’ve had to get out back on a little bit more to put these stories out. So I do have a website at Maynard woods.net, and, yeah, been, been trying to put keep it updated. And then whenever I have something come out, I’ll use social media to put a story out. But I try not to be honest. I feel like, you know, we’re talking about the business of media. I feel like I’m scabbing against myself. If I’m writing for free for Mark Zuckerberg or for Elon Musk, then I’m cutting all our pay down at some level, and so now that they control it, it’s hard to know, and I just haven’t had the heart to go and start all over again on blue sky or whatever. So I’ve for my own mind. I’ve been trying to stay off the social media as much
Nestor Aparicio 41:08
dude. I Hey man, and I don’t watch television. I admitted I’ve done all this streaming stuff with the Orioles of them. Like, you know, my wife gets cable TV. She’s a Verizon employee, and we haven’t like but I don’t, I can’t tell you who’s what. Where I watch sports, when necessary, I watch informational things, and I’m really focused on trying to protect democracy here, because we got a real problem on our hands. Man, we
Baynard Woods 41:31
do absolutely, absolutely. I covered the first two years of the Trump administration. I had a column that was in 20 alternative weekly papers, until I was down every week, covering either protests or what was happening in Congress or things like Charlottesville. And that was so bad, and this is so much worse.
Nestor Aparicio 41:53
Alright, we’ll pick up the pace around here. Talk more about Justin Tucker and the money the Ravens aren’t going to be spending a free agency, amongst other things, but we are in the spring. We will have crab cakes ahead. We will have positive conversations. I promise. There’s plenty of them around here. Lots of good things going on as well. Some musicians joining us here this week. John Palumbo from crack the sky stopped by. Lawrence Lanahan stopped by to talk about some music this week. One of your partners in crime as well. So I’ve had a I’ve had some journalists on this week, and a little bit of football and a little bit of this, a little bit of this, a little bit of that. And, as always, America first. I don’t know what that means, but like, like, we’re all in this together. So, you know, have a little kumbaya moment. Try to be nice to somebody today, if nothing else, especially if you listen to this, I am Nestor. We are wnst. Am 1570 Towson, Baltimore. My thanks to painter woods for coming by. We never stopped talking Baltimore positive you.
