He started his career running radio stations (his college roommate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was Rick Dees), and by the early 1990s he was running programming at nine local affiliate TV stations for newspaper outfit E.
He mailed 200, 000 letters to constituents, sat down for broadcast interviews with ABC and Sacramento TV station KOVR and gave interviews to People and Newsweek magazines and a localnewspaper, the Merced Sun-Star.