Plain Talk With Rob Port

This episode of Plain Talk is a little unusual, because the guest we interviewed for the show is actually our own producer, Matt Fern. Matt, in addition to producing Plain Talk, is also a filmmaker by trade. A couple of years ago he organized a dozens of his colleagues from around the state to object to hundreds of thousands of dollars in film grants being issued by the North Dakota Department of Commerce under former Gov. Doug Burgum by untoward means. The Commerce Department ran an odd, extremely truncated bidding process for a grant that, per evidence from the legislative record, was always intended to go to a specific Bismarck-based company that, two years later, still hasn't released the films the state paid for. And this wasn't the first time something like this had happened, either. "Our group of filmmakers did speak out two years ago because we saw this coming because this already happened twice, with $100,000 in 2021 with nothing to show for it, and very little to show for $40,000 in 2017," Matt t