Maya Gwynn
With KVCR Public Media, I'm Maya Gwynn with Black Perspective IE, a show where we learn about the amazing things members of the Black community are doing in the Inland Empire. My guest today is award-winning journalist Jarrett Hill. So, take me back to the beginning. What first drew you to journalism storytelling? And after more than two decades, what has kept you passionate about telling stories, especially in this trying climate right now.
Jarrett Hill
I would say, like, I was always a kid that loved watching the news. I always joked that, like, I didn't know any other kids that were watching 2020 and the evening news, and so I was always fascinated by the news. I was really just captivated by television, to be quite honest. And so the storytelling of that has always been interesting to me. And then in 10th grade, my English teacher was becoming the newspaper advisor the next year, and he was like, "I think you should be on the newspaper. And I was like, "I think that sounds whack. Like, no." So I said no. And then he eventually kind of convinced me, and I was I was into it. And then I was on the newspaper for the rest of my high school career, and that really began journalism for me. And right before going into that, I had started working at the radio station in the Bay Area where I'm from, and that kind of showed me media and like the way that media could work and how you could be on the air and having interesting conversations or having impact.
Maya Gwynn
When you look at the state of Black media today, how would you describe where we are, and how have you seen Black media evolve over the years since when you first started writing and becoming a journalist?
Jarrett Hill
As a journalist, I was engaging with Black spaces uniquely over the last decade. I would say after breaking the Melania Trump plagiarism story in 2016, I started finding myself getting invited to various different spaces. The first one being NBC BLK, which doesn't exist anymore. But NBC BLK was NBC News' black vertical. They also had a queer vertical, a Latino vertical, etc. And that was like, oh, this is really, really cool to be able to focus in here, right? But also, it's corporate media. It's at NBC News. And so we've seen those spaces go away, right? We've seen them shrink down. We've seen them-they've always been underfunded. They've always been underappreciated. They've never been fully staffed, etc. But now they're like gone. And I think that we also have an instance where we can kind of ask the question of like, how do we want to approach it from an independent perspective? I think that we are seeing plenty of folks that we recognize who are independent journalists who are telling stories in important ways that aren't relying on corporate media, and so I think that the way that our stories are getting told is changing because of the structure of media changing. But I also find that it's more and more important for us to figure out the ways to connect with our audiences, to tell our stories, and to have that that impact that storytelling can have.
Maya Gwynn
Definitely. For people who don't know, you were one of the people, or you were the person that noticed the similarities between Melania's Trump speech and Michelle Obama's 2008 speech, and you were willing to point out stuff that people weren't doing it yet, or maybe they were, but you were the one to say it. So, looking at the landscape today, does that moment feel different to you to you now? And in an era of when journalists, news organizations, and even audiences can face enormous pressure around what they say, what do you feel like would happen differently now?
Jarrett Hill
From a perspective on the moment, I was sitting in Starbucks. I had been laid off for almost a year and a half at that point, and I was watching the convention and just kind of live tweeting it because live tweeting was a big thing for me back then. And I finished the sentence with her out loud, which I thought, that's weird. Why do I know that, right? And I was like, oh, Michelle Obama said that, and like, it kept irking me, and so I like googled and found the speech and like found the words and posted them and tweeted them and that really exploded it for me. I'm always curious about how it would be different if it were now, right? It was during the 2016 election. Trump hadn't been elected yet. Hillary Clinton was running for president. Barack Obama was still president. We were still in a different era, and I think that it was one of the first times for me that I saw like them essentially saying like, "Don't believe your lying eyes", right? They were doing something in your face and saying that didn't happen, and now we've seen them do that 1000 times, right? With every single kind of, in every different kind of way, and so I, I don't even know that it would matter to people if it happened today, right? I don't know that people would care because, like, even Melania Trump has plagiarized Michelle Obama again since then, right? In the first term with her Be Best campaign and all the content within it, et cetera. So I think that a story like that could easily get lost right now. Because of the fire hose that we have of crazy things, so it's hard to know what would happen if it happened right now. I think about that often.
Maya Gwynn
Yeah. How would you tell someone, maybe not even a journalist, but someone like a kid who was maybe in your situation like interested in journalism but kind of seeing things differently? How would you tell them to have courage to speak up when something seems kind of different or seems just odd?
Jarrett Hill
I think that for people who care about truth and storytelling and journalism more broadly, I think it's going to be important for them to figure out the ways to tell their stories. One of the things that's a lot different now than it was back when I was coming up in high school and then college and so on was like, everyone has a platform now, right? Everyone has a space to be able to go online and say something, encourage folks or scare folks or tell their story, etc. And I would say, like, I don't think the jobs look the same way, but I think the job is the same, right? You might not be going to work at ABC or at NBC or TheGrio or wherever, but you have a platform to be able to share, and like I think the Melania Trump plagiarism story is a great example of that because I was on Twitter, I didn't have a job, I wasn't working somewhere, but like that story broke through in the way that it did, and so I think that it's important for folks to still be telling the stories, to be asking the questions, and having the impact that they can in their community, whether that be something local or if it's something global.
Maya Gwynn
Yeah. What would you say about supporting Black media and making sure stories from communities like the Inland Empire are told are not only told but preserved for future generations, like the ones that we were just talking about?
Jarrett Hill
There is no better time to be able to see the way that our history can be changed, erased, eliminated, subverted, etc. than right now, because we can see it happening in real time, right? We can see the ways that this administration is affecting our museums. They're affecting the ways that our stories are getting told in corporate media. They're taking people off the air, etc. And I think it's more and more important for people to get like it is important to have local news. It is important to be able to tell the story of what's happening here, as opposed to always telling the story about what's happening more broadly. I think it's really important for us to recognize the ways that it's important right now for us to be able to communicate with each other, for us to be able to understand each other, for us to be able to connect and have that humanity of just connection. So I think it's vital right now that we're able to tell these stories about the Black folks that are in the IE, the Black folks that are in Inglewood, the Black folks that are in the Bay Area, the Black folks that are in Detroit, because a lot of us are experiencing many of the same things, but a lot of us have really unique, specific issues that we're dealing with right here, and it's so important that we have people telling those stories.
Maya Gwynn
Absolutely, thank you so much for your time. This was such a good conversation.
Jarrett Hill
It's my pleasure. I really, really appreciate it.
Maya Gwynn
Jarrett Hill is an award-winning journalist. Find this segment and others at kvcr.org/bpie. To directly support this segment, visit kvcr.org/bpiedonate. Support for this segment comes from the M.E.C.C.A IE Fund at the Inland Empire Community Foundation, advancing racial equity and supporting long-term investments in Black-led organizations in Riverside and San Bernardino counties. Join us again next week for Black Perspectives IE. For KVCR Public Media, I'm Maya Gwynn. Thank you.
