Progressive Media Resources Group

KoKo

(84,711 posts) Thu Apr 9, 2015, 07:50 PM Apr 2015

Watching the Hawks’: New show for millenials who prefer to ask hard questions

‘Watching the Hawks’: New show for millenials who prefer to ask hard questions
Larry King Talks to the Hosts of 'Watching the Hawks."
Published on Mar 26, 2015

The team behind 'Watching the Hawks,' Sean Stone, Tabetha Wallace and Tyrel Ventura chat with Larry King about their new show, challenging traditional news and media and their goals to in reaching a new generation of news junkies.

Millenials are not easily sold with news and ideas fed to people by corporations and the mainstream media, because they prefer hard questions being asked, Tyrel Ventura, a host of RT America’s new show Watching the Hawks, told Larry King’s Politicking.

The show ‒ hosted by Tyrel Ventura, Sean Stone and Tabetha Wallace ‒ will use balanced conversation and honest debate to focus on stories the rest of the media ignores.

"Our take on events will not be your typical bland mainstream cable news coverage because the three of us are not your typical bland mainstream cable news hosts. We want to talk about issues and events that actually have a direct impact on the lives of our viewers,” said Ventura. “There are millions upon millions of Americans who do not feel their voice and the issues that they deem important are represented by Fox, CNN, or MSNBC, " he added.

''Watching the Hawks' is for the person who feels disenfranchised from the political process, distrustful of a media that seems to be pandering to anyone but them, disillusioned by the financial markets - but hopeful for the future," said RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan. "The show is a great addition to our RT America line-up."

The team behind 'Watching the Hawks,' Sean Stone, Tabetha Wallace and Tyrel Ventura chat with Larry King about their new show, challenging traditional news and media and their goals to in reaching a new generation of news junkies.

Read the full transcript

http://rt.com/usa/244965-larry-king-watching-the-hawks/

Larry King: A trio making up a new generation of co-hosts for a current events and news talk show hits the airwaves promising to give viewers a seldom seen perspective to those who fall somewhere between the war hawks and the isolationists. The show is hosted by Tyrel Ventura, Sean Stone and Tabetha Wallace, and we’re here at the beautiful RT studios in Washington DC.

So you are the sons of famous people, your father was Oliver Stone, the famous director.

Sean Stone: Still is!

King: Your father is Jesse Ventura, former governor of Minnesota, who’s half time in Mexico and he also hosts his own show on Ora TV. And do you have a famous father?

Tabetha Wallace: My father was a janitor at a grade school for 30 years.

King: The one successful person on this show. Now all of you are former co-hosts of Buzzsaw. So explain this transition from Buzzsaw to the new show, Watching the Hawks.

Stone: I’ll talk about it a little bit because I’m still hosting Buzzsaw online, which is an online news show that these fair people started with me two years ago. And they were hosting the news segment and I was doing the interview section. So they basically came to work for RT about a year ago and that’s the point that I kept going with the interview side of Buzzsaw, so they can talk about what they’ve been doing here at RT preparing this.

Tyrell Ventura: Buzzsaw kind of came out of what me and Sean were working on Conspiracy Theory…and we got the opportunity to create a show online on the success of that show and bring Tabetha in. And that fantastic trio that we made doing that show, the success of that show got us over here to RT. Me and Tabetha had been news producing and creating content on RT, we co-hosted a segment on the daily news show called Press the Media where we went after the mainstream media and called them out for any kind of wrong statements or if they weren’t talking about a story correctly or things of that nature, and away we went. And in the process of that was when RT looked at the dynamic of three of us together and they said this could really make a great daily show.

King: And why the title Watching the Hawks?

Wallace: Most people know the term war hawks.

King: You don’t watch the doves?

Wallace: No we love them. We don’t need to keep an eye on them. The War Hawks and hawks were kind of a group of generations which had been sold to. We are sold to probably more than any generation before us with all of the media and so someone is always hawking their wares at us, whether its big business or corporations or its war hawks. And even news hawks now – you have this media that is sort of selling to us and selling to us. And no one is really taking a step back and looking at what effect that has on us. We don’t want to be sold into a political party. We don’t want to be sold into something. We want to have a conversation and we are not seeing that anywhere else now. So we’re trying to keep an eye on it.

King: So looking at you’re DNA, you come from a rebellious household, you do Shaun. You father is not in the middle...

Stone: I’ve been a revolutionary since 1984, the year I was born. That’s kind of my lineage for sure as you mentioned. Going back to films like The Doors about Jim Morrison, JFK, even his films about the Vietnam War. He is considered a political filmmaker.

King: Did he steer you this way?

Stone: I don’t think he directly steered me to this course but he definitely opened my eyes in many ways since I would say being a high school teenager, reading history with him. I would show him my textbooks and he would say: “Ah, you know that’s hogwash, read this book.” And a lot of that conversation ended up as part of his Untold History of the United States series, which he did for Showtime.

King: Your father raised you to be independent?

Ventura: Yes he raised me to be independent, and he raised me to never be afraid to ask questions. That there is no such thing as a stupid question and to always question authority or question history in much the same way. The funny connection there, is that when I was probably 11 or 12, and when the movie came out, he took me to go and see JFK in a similar fashion like, “Look, they’re teaching you this one element of it at high school, the killing of Kennedy. I want you to see another aspect of it.” It opened my mind up to the fact that in our history books we’re generally not told the full story.

King: So you were raised to think conspiratorial?

Ventura: I wouldn’t say conspiratorial, because first of all the word conspiratorial, that kind of conspiracy theorists…

King: I looked it up in the dictionary and got a picture of your father.

Ventura: The idea of conspiracy theorist and all that to me is always a little bit wacky, because when you look at power structures – people get together throughout history to break the laws or meet their own needs, whether it be through money or influence, to push their own agenda, and that’s first politics, that’s just regular government. And so the idea of “conspiracy theorist” and that kind of thing I think has been turned into this ugly term when in truth its simply just asking questions, searching for the truth. And there’s nothing wrong my dad inspired the hell a lot of that.

King: Were you born in a revolutionary household?

Wallace: No, not really. Very blue-collar, typical working-class family.

King: So what drew you to broadcasting?

Wallace: I’ve always been a writer. I worked at Newsweek in 2002 and it definitely left an impact on me. I went into media and worked at Miramax for a couple of years in the movie industry and then in movie marketing, which teaches you how to sell things to everybody. And then eventually as things happened in 2008 it became something that was far more important than making movies.

King: Is this show, Sean, aimed at millennials?

Stone: I think that’s part of the attraction of having young news commentators, because you look around at most of the networks and there is this realization of “wait a minute, we’re losing the young audience, so how do we appeal to them?” Maybe we need to find some young voices who have a different perspective on everything from the political process to world geopolitics.

King: Do millenials watch the news?

Ventura: I think they would if they thought the news would ask the hard questions. And I think there are very few programs out there that millennials can [watch]. When you look at it, they weren’t born where they lost a certain blindness or patriotism or whatever you might call it. They were born with the cynicism, they were born knowing, after Watergate and after all these events, when they could very easily see that the government doesn’t tell them the whole truth at times or corporations, like Tabetha said, are constantly marketing to them and telling them you’re ugly or whatever just to get them to buy a product. So they’re born with a certain amount of questioning and you don’t see that as much. CNN to me just feels like the official mouth of the State Department, no matter who is in power. And then Fox plays to its right-wing base... I think the millennials as a whole don’t want to fall in and don’t want to be categorized to certain specific groups, they want to do their own independent thinking.

King: Give me the format of watching the Hawks, what do I see when I watch it?

Wallace: Well, the format is that we sit down and we really go through stories – instead of that sort of break-neck pace…

King: The three of you sitting here, you are all on camera together?

Wallace: And we will go through a news story and give as much of the facts and context... I think context is a really important thing educating people about what the broader picture is and then looking at a specific news item. And then we see it from all of our perspectives. We don’t always agree on things, we have always naturally been people who can disagree and still have a conversation and walk out learning more about each other and about the world, and we’re trying to bring a little bit of that what we have naturally to the air instead of everybody yelling at each other.

King: The show is at 6 o’clock Eastern Time, is an hour or half an hour?