Kristi Leigh says she's stepping away from traditional media, cites "national news" as bias

May 29—Three months after Toledo native Kristi Leigh was laid off from the Sinclair Broadcast Group-owned KMPH-TV in Fresno, Calif., she's charting a journalistic path outside of traditional media.

"Leaving television news is incredibly difficult because it's a childhood dream of mine," Leigh said in an interview with The Blade. Yet "thinking about doing something else predated my layoff." Several "underlying concerns" had driven her to reconsider her options.

The first, in light of her third lay-off in 13 years, concerned the long-term financial viability of a career in journalism. The second was more ideological, as she witnessed what she thought were censorial shifts in journalistic practice over the past year.

"This really comes down to a respect for the audience," Leigh said. "The journalism that I learned in school was bringing in information from both sides and letting the audience evaluate." Now, though, a new crop of younger journalists thinks "we get to decide for the audience what they can and cannot hear, what they can and cannot evaluate, and I respect my audience too much to take that position."

Leigh joined the Fox affiliate in March, 2020, and anchored its two weekday evening newscasts at 7 and 10 p.m. She was one of the more than 400 employees laid off by Sinclair on March 3 as it reduced its workforce by roughly 5 percent. She'd left WTOL-TV, Channel 11 and WUPW-TV, Channel 36, where she co-anchored the stations' evening newscasts just a year before.

On Wednesday, Leigh uploaded a photo of herself in a red dress to her Facebook page along with several Bible verses and the caption, "Red is the color of physical energy, passion, courage, power, will, and desire...Time to be courageous." The meaning of the cryptic post became clear later that evening, when she appeared on Alex Jones' InfoWars.

"I'm appropriately wearing red because I know that after I do this I'm going to have a big target on my back, you know, from other journalists just for calling out what I've observed," Leigh said on the show. "It really was over the past year that I came to this realization that journalism changed dramatically."

For example, Leigh said, media coverage repeatedly dismissed as misinformation the idea that hydroxychloroquine could treat the coronavirus, even though her personal doctor said that he'd used it successfully with his own patients. Such one-sided claims, she said, were often legitimized by excessively general attributions such as "doctors say" or "experts say."

Leigh also criticized television journalism's increasing comfort with editorialization. As an example, she gave the following sentence: "President Trump falsely claims without evidence that there was election interference." The more appropriate phrasing would have been to drop qualifiers like "falsely claims" in favor of just "said" so as to avoid commentary on Trump's words, she argued, while adding "Democrats and election officials disagree and say there is none." That formulation, she suggested, would avoid any hints of bias.

"I was feeling complicit in it, and obviously I don't want to feel like that," said Leigh on the show. "I don't want to feel like a propaganda puppet. If you study what propaganda is, it's easy to spot. Now my hope is to empower audiences to spot propaganda."

Throughout the interview, Jones offered his own interpretations of Leigh's experience.

"Maybe you weren't let go just because of COVID," said Jones at one point. "Maybe you were let go because you weren't toeing the line."

"I don't think that that's the case, I honestly don't," responded Leigh.

Speaking with The Blade, Leigh said she'd decided to appear on InfoWars because her story is about censorship, and Alex Jones is "one of the most censored and banned individuals, and he has a major platform in spite of that."

Leigh stressed that she still has a "lot of respect for many of my former co-workers," and that it was some of the younger journalists "who were putting idealism over impartiality." She directed most of her criticisms at national news, whereas "local news is still your best chance at honest reporting with integrity because it's from your local community."

Still, since local news channels under corporate control have to broadcast pre-prepared national blocs, Leigh feels it best that she step away from traditional media altogether. What exactly will happen next, though, remains uncertain.

"I'm pushing the pedal, I'm moving forward, but God's taking the wheel," she said.

Leigh hopes to launch a podcast or show that'll allow her to mix critical analysis of national media coverage with more positive journalism, telling the sort of inspirational stories that "the country really needs." She's already conducted an interview with a professional basketball player that she hopes to release soon.

But that'll likely wait as she packs her bags in California and momentarily returns to Toledo for her wedding. From there, she'll uncover her future as she charts it.

"That's the best way to do things," she said. "You get more direction as you just do."

First Published May 29, 2021, 6:30am