KUSI

This was a great starter job for an aspiring producer. I was just an AP, and they helped hone my skills. They are very adamant about recruiting from local community colleges in order to give aspiring writers/producers a foot in the door. The pay was not great, and they intentionally choose recently graduated community college students and 4-year students to fill their writing and associate producer positions for the reason they can pay them minimum wage. But the trade off is you get experience and they are more than willing to help you find a job in a different market once you are ready to move up. The staff can sometimes be gossipy. I know that’s the case wherever you go. But since this is an independent station, with no affiliation, and is privately owned, there is very little recourse any employee can take. Moreover, the family that owns the station, the McKinnon’s, are extremely right-wing conservatives. They are huge donors to the Trump
Campaign, and many of their political segments are EXTREMELY biased and one-sided, which is a very rare trait in a local station. An example would be: I helped produce a local weekly 30 min segment which aired on Sundays that discussed topics impacting San Diego. Topics ranged from the Mayoral election to the opioid epidemic. However, in 2016 we were supposed to do a two part episode about the presidential election. Our first episode was about the Republican candidates for statewide office as well as Trump’s campaign. When we were recording the episode the anchor asked me if we were going to be doing the Democrats next week and who were our guests. I asked my assistant News director and she said we aren’t doing another episode. This was our only election episode we were doing. The anchor got really upset and told her that he understood the owner is a Republican but we are a local news station and journalists, we can’t be just blatantly one sided. It will ruin our credibility. So at the end of the segment he decided to tease next weeks episode with the Democrats, much to the ire of the AND. Needless to say we invited the Democratic political analysts to come on the following week, and literally on the day we were going to record the episodes the assistant news director walks into the lobby where tjentieste are waiting and informs that she is canceling this episode, without providing any reason. The political analysts who were there were flabbergasted. That didn’t go over well, especially when the main guest scheduled that day was a local state representative, who ended up getting elected as Mayor of San Diego in 2020. He refused to go on KUSI when they hosted the mayoral debate.

An Overall Toxic Work Environment

No communication whatsoever, biased, close-minded, old fashioned, unwilling to try something new.

An Overall Toxic Work Environment

The station is run and operated by a local family in town. They thrive on the fact that they are an independent with no network affiliation. They FORCE their overly-Republican views on the staff and make them portray this to their viewers. It’s essentially a propaganda station. Cohen does nothing to stop it. It is a toxic work environment and the company doesn’t care for their employees and the executive news staff doesn’t do anything to stop it! In a two week period in March 2019, over 10 staff members left to all find different jobs elsewhere either at other stations in the market or leaving the business in general.

Toxic environment, not worth working under their propaganda.