Chris Dorsey is a familiar face to outdoor TV viewers.

Chris Dorsey is a familiar face to outdoor TV viewers.

To me, Curt Gowdy is the guy that really created the genre. And like many of us in the 50-plus crowd, we grew up watching the American Sportsman on Sundays and ABC’s Wide World of Sports. And what an amazing portal the television set became when that show was on--just seeing the various places around the planet where you could hunt and fish: Cape buffalo in Africa, catching trout with Joe Brooks in Argentina, or shooting sand grouse with Bing Crosby and Phil Harris in Africa. It was an amazing way to introduce the world of sporting adventure to the masses.

I fell in love with that show, and it planted a seed for me--like a lot of other people like me--that blossomed later in life as I was able to go to some of those places. Shortly before he passed away, Curt wrote a foreword for my international wingshooting book and I said Curt, “you were the guy that really got me excited about this whole world of sporting adventure.”

And now just think about the infrastructure that's been built all over the world in some of the most remote locations--fly fishing, big game hunting, bird shooting, whatever it is, chances are there's a great lodge and infrastructure in place for people that want to travel around the globe and enjoy it. That was kind of my baptism, like so many other people and I look at Curt Gowdy as the father of outdoor TV and in many respects.

We did a series with Tom Brokaw for about 10 years. He tells a great story about his early days. He was part of the South Dakota Boys State, which consists of Student Council presidents and leaders from various high schools around South Dakota and around the country. It’s national program, but this was the South Dakota contingent. I think Joe Foss might have been governor at the time. As Brokaw describes it, there was a game show in New York, and this was back when there were only three networks. A staffer from the Governor’s office called Brokaw to ask if he would join the Governor on this game show in New York. It was a quiz show with different people from around the country.

So, Brokaw gets a call from the governor's office saying, “Would you be interested in going on an all-expenses paid trip to New York to join the Governor on this game show?” Brokaw then calls his father who was working in a quarry, and asks his dad, what he should do. Tom said there was a long pause on the other end, and then his dad finally came back and said, “You know, son, you should probably go…you'll never get another chance to go to New York.” Little did he know at the time that he would be the toast of the town and pipe his narratives from that city across the entire country. He was NBC News anchor for more than 20 years—longer than Walter Cronkite at CBS.

Chris Dorsey

It’s interesting how we're separating as a society. Whether its people moving from one state to the next to get away from politics or government regulation, etc. The shifting and the mass exodus that's happening in America really is unprecedented. It’s being driven by blue versus red and political beliefs. And I've written about this in Forbes--this is one of the most historic times in American’s past when it comes to movement of population.

We’ve got this separation happening all over the country. People are in their own enclaves, and we're becoming ever more tribal—whether physically or in information bubbles of our own creation. We try and surround ourselves with like-minded individuals if we can, because we want the assurance that we have people around us who have a similar belief system and world view. Maybe it’s a fear of crime or a desire to be around other Second Amendment supporters or whatever.

For the most part, mainstream television networks don’t seem to want to acknowledge this reality. And the mainstream media is primarily based in New York and Los Angeles--that's where the lion's share of these decisions are made. So it's difficult to have a conversation about programming around this reality as we talk to network executives in New York and LA. In many respects they seem unwilling to program the reality of what’s happening societally in our country.

And when it comes to representing heartland sensibilities on TV, we’re in front of television networks every day as we pitch factual program ideas and talent. I'm always trying to figure out if there’s a way that we can mainstream a positive story about hunting. We produce a series called Building Off the Grid for Discovery Channel. These are people who are moving out into the bush. We also did Building Alaska for, I think, 15 seasons.

Many of these people were building remote cabins and cottages in the middle of nowhere because they wanted to get away and they wanted to be able to hunt and fish--basically they wanted to live a self-reliant lifestyle and to be left alone. It’s an element of the locavore movement that's big in America. But the show gave us a way to talk about the efficacy and value of hunting on a big international media platform.

We are always looking to mainstream wrinkles of that lifestyle into the mainstream, whether through a build show or other concept. We also did a series called Kodiak for Discovery, which was created when I went brown bear hunting on Kodiak Island. It was such an amazing world and place that we ended up selling a show about it to Discovery. It was focused on a unique band of bear hunting guides and outfitters on Kodiak Island. It was important to me that we always made sure that we told the story of the reason Kodiak Island has the greatest bear densities in the world. It wasn’t despite hunting; it was because of hunting. As a biologist, I'm looking for those kinds of wrinkles all the time, and ways that we can infuse those messages into our stories.

It's not like you can just tee-up a pro-hunting show on History or Discovery (at least not in prime time when they have a relevant audience). But you can be subtle about working in the virtues of hunting into other concepts. It’s about being subtle and nuanced and working that information in an organic way.

That’s the way it is with most mainstream media. I just had a conversation last night with a board member of a very significant, hunting-centric conservation organization. The question posed was why there wasn’t more pro-hunting coverage in the mainstream. Again, I shared that if you want access to the masses—not just an outdoor audience—you have to be subtle about it because the average American has no understanding that hunters are the original leaders of the conservation movement—they only know what the mainstream news and Hollywood tells them which, as you know, is seldom positive.

Thus, if you want to reach somebody that doesn't already know your story, you must be more sophisticated about how you tell it, or you’ll never get on a mainstream network. Our conversation was focused on Africa and hunting and conservation on that continent. The only way you’ll get significant mainstream coverage of that is if you show and tell the story of how people live among the wildlife in Africa. But you won’t find sympathetic media gatekeepers if you lead with a professional hunter talking about the virtues of hunting—rightly or wrongly they are categorically dismissed by the media in the conservation context. If you want African conservation to succeed, the people who live with those animals will ultimately determine what happens to the them and it’s their voices that will resonate. The West may have influence on it with trophy import bans that take away the incentive to keep the animals around, but it will be the Africans that make the decision of which animals live or die. At the end of the day, it’s a fool’s errand to think we’re going to manage African wildlife without buy-in of African people.

So, if you’re going to tell the story of African wildlife conservation to the mainstream, you’re not going to do it through the eyes of a professional hunter. While that might be a legitimate viewpoint, you're simply not going to get access to the mainstream media outlet in the first place. Instead, you’ll need to understand wild Africa through the words and emotions of Africans. You’ll need to feel their fears and concerns about what it's like, for instance, to live with lions, what it's like to have elephants raid their crops, what it's like to have a kid eaten by a crocodile. That’s how you're going to get mainstream media to engage. When you inspire viewers to say, Oh my God, can you imagine living among these predators? You don’t have to win a direct debate about hunting in a mainstream media outlet, you merely need to give Africans a seat at the conservation table, and they’ll make the case for hunting.

Chris Dorsey

I think it's interesting when you talk to National Geographic, for instance. I was at a meeting with the president of that network a few years ago as we were having a conversation about their new series called Life Below Zero. And I was complimenting them on how authentic I thought it was. It’s a show where they were hunting caribou for food among many other animals. It’s a show about living a subsistence existence in Alaska.

Instantly, he said, “Anytime somebody is hunting for food, we don't have any problem with it, we can show that on our network.”

The takeaway is that few people have an issue with folks trying to feed their families. And this is how they do it in a place like Alaska. It's a cultural thing, in the case of the Inuit or other tribes, and so many networks and outlets have no problem showing that way of life. That feedback gives you a sense of the mindset that most Americans have when it comes to hunting for food and, as we've seen in survey after survey, most don’t have an issue with that.

But when you start getting into other aspects of hunting, you've got to be more nuanced about how you communicate. We did a series called Dangerous Game for more than a decade and this was at a time when very few outlets would show elephant hunts. No one was showing lion or leopard hunts or hunting for many of the other dangerous game animals--maybe buffalo. There just wasn't much of that on TV.

Instead, all the coverage was deer and turkey, deer and turkey, and deer and turkey. I saw that as an opportunity because there was a great story to be told that no one was hearing. Essentially that there’s a real biological justification for this kind of hunting and that we should be telling that story. As long as we tell that story and make it part of the context of the hunt, we could cover this. That was the take of Gavin Harvey, who was president of Outdoor Life Network which later became NBC Sports Network. Gavin’s a great guy and smart and didn't come from the hunting community. But he said “Look, let's do it. If you tell the true conservation story of what's really happening on ground, we can do it.”

The first elephant hunt we did on camera just happened to have a bull charge the host and his professional hunter. It did so unprovoked, out of the blue. It was amazing footage and was a stunning moment. And because we extensively covered the story of hunter-supported elephant conservation, the anti-poaching efforts funded by hunters, and the community benefits we received very little blow back from viewers. If you're careful about how you communicate that, you can still take that to a broader audience. Admittedly, that was on an outdoor-centric network.

Even when I've written in Forbes, however, about trophy import bans, for instance, and what happened in the UK, I'm not bashful about that. You can lay out the facts to the mainstream. We own the argument; we have the facts if we articulate them in a way that makes sense to average people. If we do that, we can still take stories mainstream that are very pro-hunting and might be even considered controversial to some. But to me, it's how you cover it, how you define that.

And we have emotion on our side as well and we need to harness that as we tell our stories. We were filming Dangerous Game and as part of that series, we interviewed someone who had been attacked--chomped, stomped, gored, or chewed--by the species being hunted in that show. It wasn't difficult to find them in Africa. I’ll never forget, we pulled into a remote village in Zambia; there were probably 100 people in this little community. And I said through the interpreter, let's ask if anybody has any stories of attacks and surviving such encounters. Every single person in that village either knew somebody who had been killed by an animal or had been attacked themselves—to say nothing of having crops or property destroyed by them. Living in fear of wild animals is not theoretical in Africa, it’s a constant.

When you tell that story, you start showing the emotion of these people: what it's like to lose a child, what it's like to go hungry because your crops were destroyed, I mean, that's real. That's real emotion. They don't have insurance policies that write checks to them because their crops were destroyed. Life is damn tenuous for these folks. And if that emotion is something that we can convey and let people in the West imagine life in the bush as these people are living, if for just a few minutes, then perhaps we can have a serious conversation about sustainable wildlife management that includes all the stakeholders.

Chris Dorsey

It depends on the network. If you're talking about Discovery, you know, Discovery’s in 170 countries in the world distributed in multiple languages, so you know you have a global audience that isn't going to understand some of this stuff. Thus, you must be very basic in how you begin that conversation. It’s like any other form of communication, you just have to know your audience. So, we build shows with certain things that are kind of universal, and then there's some elements that are nuanced and subtle. We focus on who the audience is and try to make sure we can reach them at the end of the day. They must be entertained, they've got to be enticed to watch whatever it is, because it doesn't matter what you're telling them if they're not watching. First and foremost, we've got to engage them in a highly competitive media landscape where everyone is fighting to capture viewer attention.

Chris Dorsey

That’s a great question. There’s a nuance to that as well. You can look at a character or show and go “that's authentic” but does a buyer in New York or Los Angeles have the same sensibilities? That's the question because I look at the talent that are portrayed as a “heartland characters” on many reality shows and I don’t see them as characters as much as I do as caricatures.

I live in this space; I don't hang out at the opera. I don't hang out in Los Angeles or New York; I get in and get out of those places as fast as I can. I live in the heartland, and I hang out with hunters and fishermen, ranchers, cowboys, and people that live in rural America. Because of that, my sensibility of what's authentic and what isn't, is often very different than a buyer in New York or LA.

My job is to convince them that, hey, you know, if you want something authentic here, this is what authentic looks like. It doesn't look like this over here. Network executives, for the most part, are focused on getting great entertainment, however, and they want crazy loud people, they need blah, blah, blah.

And keep in mind, we produced Dog’s Most Wanted (Dog the Bounty Hunter) series, so we know a little about stretching the reality TV genre.

We’re based in Denver while most production companies are on the coast. We're in the heartland and male skewing networks come to us for authentic middle America characters, and they come to us to better understand what is real in this space since so many of their viewers are found between the coasts. They want to know if something is authentic or BS. So, we're kind of in an advisory role in our niche in the factual entertainment space. If you can find somebody who's got a unique voice, an unusual worldview, and that is authentic you might have a reality TV star. But the bar is high, it’s got to be someone who's compelling in how they perceive everything around them, the kind of people that you would watch no matter what they're doing.

Chris Dorsey

For sure. I remember when I had a producer friend ask me, “Do you know this guy [Turtle Man]? Have you seen him?” I had never heard of him and then I watched his show--I think it was on Animal Planet at the time. I’m sure when the network execs saw tape on him for the first time, they were all in. I’d bet their reaction was something like, We don't really know what he does, but we’ll take 13 episodes!

Chris Dorsey

I don't know if I see that as much as I do a more sinister side to animal rights groups. I think most Americans go, “Yeah, an animal died for my steak that's at Kroger.”

I don't see that as big an issue as animal rights groups using hunting and the images of hunting and trapping simply to raise money. I think it's very clear now--we've got plenty of evidence to suggest--that animal rights organizations really don't care about animals. They’re mostly a fundraising scam, and they've been playing this scam for a long time and have been aided and abetted by a sympathetic media that latches on to emotion instead of researching the facts. There’s a great website out there called www.humanewatch.org that really details the charade of animal rights groups—it’s worth checking out.

Chris Dorsey

They are good at it. And we as a category, you know, have not been very good at pushing back. We play Whack A Mole all the time as we fight anti-hunting and trapping bills. One bad bill after another gets introduced. So, we whack it down. You know, get everybody excited about fighting it, “write your congressman,” all that kind of stuff. My question to the industry, however, is where is our offense? Where is our asymmetric attack on these corrupt animal rights organizations that are duping the masses to raise money? And in the case of HSUS (the Humane Society of the United States), they have been convicted of federal racketeering charges. Where is our pushback? Where's our communication to the mainstream? We've got to be much more proactive if we hope to win the cultural war.

At the end of the day, I want to ask the industry, how do we win?

How do we win? Are we winning now? I mean, hunters are 3% of the American population. If we're not a hell of a lot more aggressive--not to say that we don't have the funding--we have the funding. We have the economic wherewithal to push back in the mainstream. We can be sophisticated, clever.

I don't know that the 3-R program is going to be the solution. I think maybe it's a piece of the solution, but we’re going to need bigger thinking and a more comprehensive media and educational reach to the masses—not just our own community or those adjacent to it. And we better do it soon. I think we're on the clock. I think when you see what's happening with trophy import bans that are now, by the way, coming to the United States, and the withering number of bills that are being introduced all over the country, there's a strategy at play here. We must counter with a sophisticated, large scale, comprehensive, and sustained campaign of our own.

Our opponents have a long-term strategy--that's to bleed us dry, to weaken and compromise us by engaging the mainstream media and Hollywood that, for the most part, is aiding and abetting their cause.

Because we haven't answered back in a significant way, we are losing the cultural war and politics are downstream of culture. Without a massive media presence to give politicians the cover needed to vote for science-based wildlife management, we will begin to lose the legislative fights—and we already are. How long will politicians continue to care about 3% of the electorate if they don’t understand that our value to society is far more substantial than merely the number of participants? If they don’t feel society in general understands that, why would they be compelled to support us?

Why don't we have our own speaker’s bureau of articulate camera-ready individuals that understand the facts and can tell the country about the importance of hunting and conservation.

We have the narrative; we just have to articulate it. We must build those channels as pipelines to the mainstream.

I'm taking a guy who ran the biggest media company in the world to Africa next month. He's never been to Africa, and he's going to go hunting. I try and get to gatekeepers all the time. I'm not talking about a writer in a magazine I'm talking about the guys who run big media and who, oh by the way--in many cases--hunt. Many of these gatekeepers are not against us, but we seldom engage them. They're not versed in what the arguments are, but maybe we can build some relationships with these gatekeepers as part of this process to take back the narrative on hunting.

I feel like we're finally seeing many leaders in the industry getting it. Many people really do understand that we've got to be much more aggressive. We've got to be much more mainstreamed in our communication efforts. We can tell ourselves what great conservationists we are, that's fine, that's great. At the end of the day, however, if we don't get the mainstream engaged in a way that they can understand what we've done, what we're doing, what we envision for the future of conservation, and not just the United States, but around the world, then we're in trouble.