Mina Wahab has made a name for herself in local journalism circles in just a few years.
The former TMZ personality has worked at KEYT since 2022 and occasionally fills in as weekend anchor.
As an Arab-American journalist, she approaches stories with a different lens.
“When I interview people, I don’t interview the same people,” Wahab said. “I always make sure to interview a diverse group of people. I am not going to go to an event and just grab the same type of person, copy, paste, and I think sometimes we see that because people will interview who they feel comfortable interviewing.”
Wahab appears in the latest episode of Santa Barbara Talks with Josh Molina. Click on the YouTube link below to watch.
Wahab, who also speaks Spanish, learned to speak Arabic after her grandmother came from Iraq to live with the family in California.
“My grandmother used to watch Al-Jazeera, and she would want to know what was happening at home during the Iraq war, during the Bush administration,” Wahab said.
At the time, she was about 10 years old, and on Al-Jazeera TV she saw a focus on the people and the children of Iraq, while on CNN and mainstream news the focus was on the soldiers and the war on terror, she said.
“This is two totally different stories,” she said. “It was like unrecognizable. How are these two different news outlets reporting the thing, but with two completely different lenses? And subconsciously I remember thinking, ‘What is the truth?'”
Wahab scored some key interviews a year ago with presidential candidate Jill Stein and vice presidential candidate Butch Ware, a professor at UC Santa Barbara.
In this episode, Wahab also talks about her time working for TMZ, interning at The Young Turks, and her time in entertainment media and interviews with celebrities.
Joshua Molina is a journalist and college instructor who interviews a wide variety of people on the issues of education, housing, politics, culture and business. Molina is a former reporter at the San Jose Mercury News. He also teaches at a community college. Visit SantaBarbaraTalks.com to sign up for his newsletter and make a contribution to this individually owned podcast.