 Okay, welcome back to Think Tech. I'm Jay Fidel, and this is Community Matters, and my guest today is Julian Gorbach of the journalism program at the School of Communications, UH Manoa. And we're going to talk about journalism, of course. We're going to talk about whether the press is doing a good job. The title of our show is, was it Gaslighting and whether the press is doing a good job? Whether the press is covering the right issues. Welcome back to the show, Julian. Well, thanks for having me on the show, Julian. It's great to have you here. And I, you know, we get into these conversations before, during and after the show that I really enjoy. And so we never know which, which way we're going on this. But the general proposition is that this administration is gaslighting the press. What does gaslighting mean in that context? Well, so that's a, that's a reference to a 1940s film noir movie. Is that right? Which is about a guy with a new, you know, newlywed couple and the man is trying to drive the wife crazy. And so he turns up the gaslight in the middle of the night in her room so that she thinks that the house is possessed, is haunted. And it's been a while since I saw the movie, but essentially that's the idea is that he's trying to drive her crazy and sort of bully her into just kind of believing whatever he says. It's the ultimate deception. Yeah. And, you know, just to undermine somebody's confidence, because if you, if you convince somebody that they're crazy, then they'll abandon the truth. They'll let go of the truth. So it's a, it's a, it's a way to attack the truth. And so if somebody challenges you on the facts, then gaslighting is to yell at them to do whatever you need to do so that they begin to question their own sanity so that then you can proceed to, to tell them what's real and what's not real. It's, it's, it's pernicious in the sense that you're, you're putting the truth aside. You're undermining the truth in every way you can. Well, you're attacking the truth. And you're attacking the person who tried to decimate it. And you, and you're doing it, if you do it to the journalist, the journalist is a proxy, you're doing it to the audience. I mean, and then this is, you know, when people talk about Russian propaganda and active measures, the, the, the concept is, is that the Russians have been interested in this, you know, it's been part of a playbook there for, uh, I don't know how long decades on Russian propaganda and don't want to claim to be, but, but the idea is that the, that the Russians have this, um, objective of, of getting people, uh, not to kind of believe everything they say, the more immediate objective is to get them to question any everything so that everything is up for grabs, which means you, you, you, you undermine the truth. Yeah. And there is no truth, enough just so that, that people exist in the sphere of uncertainty. And, and, and now you're ready to start coming in with. Isn't this exactly what's happening in the world today in this country? Well, yeah. I mean, we, we saw, and I mean, I think that the, the most, um, sort of conspicuous early example of this, uh, I mean, it's been going on for a while, uh, since Trump campaign, but the most conspicuous early example was the inaugural, um, thing. And, uh, who, I forget his name, the, the, the first press secretary who was lampooned, uh, Sean Spicer, um, who was lampooned for doing this on, uh, you know, if you remember the thumping of the, on Saturday Night Live, the thumping of the podium and all that, that was sort of a parody of the gas lighting that he was doing. Because what people said, well, this wasn't the largest crowd in history. And actually the, the, the turnout was small. He just yelled at them and tried to just scare them into just accepting whatever he said. And it's kind of gone on ever since then of, um, I mean, people do it, you know, what's interesting is you have all these little trumps online and you'll find that, that individual supporters will get on, I find that they get on social media. And we call it trolling, but a lot of times it's also gaslighting. They, they know that what they're arguing is, is not a, um, an honest debate. But they'll, they'll, they'll come into it and they'll try and, you know, they'll try and own the libs, right? They'll try and, um, uh, just through various tactics, just try and knock over the debate and, and own the facts. Why? I mean, there's a reason that fascists attack the truth because it's, it's a will to power. I mean, you know, there, there have been fascism nowadays, a word we're, we're banding around a lot. And that's because, um, you know, when, when the original fascists in, in Mussolini's era rose to power, um, they did not have a specific agenda. There wasn't a specific ideology written down in, in Mussolini's Italy, that of the fascist party that said, here's what we stand for, here's what we don't. Um, and so people have, have ever since tried to kind of fill that vacuum in with fascism is this and fascism is that one of the earliest ideas, and this has been challenged for variety of reasons, was that, that fact, fascism is actually a lack of ideology that what it is, is it's a sheer drive to power using any and all means available. That sounds right, actually. And I think there's a, you know, there's a lot to be said for that. There are problems with it because it doesn't tell you a lot. I mean, I don't really remember all of it, but but there are issues why scholars have challenged it. And anyway, the, but one thing that, that flows from that, the reason I bring it up is that a fascist wants to attack the truth because whatever ideas they may have, they want the power. So if you kind of push people back, the journalist back and the people themselves back and kind of accepting anything, you can then you have total power. You, you, you are the fact information is the truth. Yeah, whatever you say today, it's it's like in 1984, when one minute we're at war with Oceania, and then we're the next with the, or the other country, or that, that famous final scene, where they say, how many fingers I have up, I have, I have five fingers up right. And you know, people agree. Yeah. So it's kind of happening to even yesterday in the state of the union, was at the times that went through it and in fact, checked it, there's found where all these inaccuracies and exaggerations even in the state of union, after all the lies we've heard. Well, I mean, and then and then you just get, you know, there's there's all these layers of it. So we've talked about the fact that I teach news literacy at UH. And when I began teaching that in 2006, 17 spring of 2017, we had this idea of fake news, that people were not, they didn't know how to read the digital landscape and just the complex 21st century landscape we have the social media landscape, their phones, everything, the way that we get information now. And so we need to help these people out of the wilderness. But when by the time I returned to teaching this in the fall of 2018, it occurred to a lot of us that there's there's an entirely separate concern, which is what do you do when people are aggressively attacking the truth? That's not the same thing as just people wandering around lost, right? It's, it's, or people not being digitally literate. Yeah. You know, so, so I think like probably a lot of the literature that you're going to see starting to, you know, emerge out of this is what are they, what words do they use, just deception, or disinformation, actually, is the term, and this information is a different, is a different thing. Yeah. But I think like in terms of like, if you were to Google and see are people really studying this or how to educate, it's, I think disinformation will be one of the major words. But, you know, it's something that I've just really begun to, I mean, I don't see a lot of good information about how do you teach students about that? How do you teach the public? How do you teach the journalists to deal with it? And so I've been kind of developing some ideas about it. It's like the Washington Posts thing about democracy dies in darkness. You know, darkness means you don't know what the facts are. Yeah. And, and I think if you take the facts away from us, this is a, this is a great loss for the, for democracy, not to have correct facts that are agreed. And so what's happening here in this administration, maybe it was happening in other ways before, but what's happening as administration is we can't agree on the facts. The facts are being attacked. Fake news and Giuliani alternate facts and incredible that we we can't agree on the facts. How then can we make conclusions and recommendations and actions in government or in the social sphere? But I want to I want to connect that want to connect the gas lighting thing and the disinformation thing. Well, how the press reacts to that. Right. Well, so you know, one thing I've been looking at is, I guess there's there's both there's the two components is one, how does how does the journalist react to it? But also it's like, how does the consumer of information, just the member of the public, the citizen react to it? And I've been working with an undergraduate who's really smart named, I'll give her name, Miko George. And so she's very interested in us trying to do some kind of a paper that we can share with other teachers about how do you how do you educate, whether it's the journalism majors or the professional journalists, etc. And one of the ideas she suggested is maybe we should look at this in terms of the field of psychology and people who this is getting back to the idea of the movie gas, the original movie, which is called gaslight. I don't remember the original. It's a gaslight in the context of the movie is a psychological trick, isn't it? Right. Yeah. So so so she was looking at, okay, or she's beginning to look at like, in the field of psychology, what's the therapy and what do we teach or or or talk about in terms of people who are the victims of abuse in domestic relationships, who become sort of captive to their partners, ideas and their undermining of their self confidence and and their sense of sanity. Right. So that's one road we were looking down. But then another one that came up is I'm looking again at there was a movie about this recently, but the whole case of Deborah Lipstadt, when she's a Holocaust historian. And she had called out a British basically a neo Nazi named David Irving for Holocaust denial. And so David Irving took her to court for libel. And this became a famous case. And now it's been a movie that came out in 2016 called Denial with Rachel Weiss playing Deborah Lipstadt and everything. And I found that was relevant because I watched the movie again and I noticed that the whole defense team, they were on the defense, right? Because they got sued for libel. And in England, David Irving sued them in England where the libel laws are tougher. And so it's actually the burden of the accused to prove their innocence, unlike in America. But the the strategy of the defense or the attitude, I guess, of the defense was Deborah Lipstadt and her team refused to engage David Irving in debate because they felt like he was essentially gas lighting. Like one of the things that and this comes out in the movie is that the defense team, David Deborah Lipstadt wanted Holocaust survivors to go on the stand to say yes, the Holocaust really happened. Yeah, it really happened. And they would the attorney, her attorney, would not allow these Holocaust survivors on the stand because they did not want David Irving to be gaslighting them, to be attacking them on the stand. And you know because these these traumas happened decades earlier. And so to try and trip these people up and humiliate them or undermine them would have been relatively easy to do. They certainly would have been bold. They were elderly anyway. And another aspect was that they the defense attorney, the barrister who actually was in the trial room and you know conducted the trial, refused to meet David Irving's eye because he would not give him that respect. So when they took him on the stand and they said like you're not a rotten historian, you're a bent historian. In other words, you're not making these mistakes unintentionally. You're making them deliberately. He did not look at David Irving when he said that. But but the most interesting thing to me about it was was Deborah Lipstadt's point about engaging. She refused to engage David Irving and these people in debate. She refused to go on their territory and basically be vulnerable to this gaslight. So how could she make her case? Well her argument was I am not, this is what I found interesting. And I want to look farther into her insights to say more. But the thing that was most interesting was she said I am not against the First Amendment. To the contrary, I am against people that are coming in to undermine or twist our kind of liberal interest in having debate and in having free debate. So they're free to talk. But I don't have to engage them. I don't have to entertain there because they're only trying to deliberately twist and manipulate the discussion. And I think that's... It's pathological but it happens. Yeah. So I think there's something there in terms of both the professional journalism strategy and also is that we're not, it's not against the First Amendment or against, you know, for that matter a lot of... To be too engaged. Yeah. When we know that the that the effort is a deliberate effort to sabotage honest debate. Yeah. Oh yeah. By the way, this footnote is another, there's another book years ago called QB7. It was the same plot line and it happened in England. QB7 stands for Queen's Bench 7. Interesting. A courtroom. And it was the same kind of thing with the Holocaust survivor having the burden to show the Holocaust existed. It's very interesting how similar they are. Anyway, you know, it strikes me that this kind of gas lighting is what it is that you describe. It's similar to the whole thing about balance. So Trump comes up with a completely irrational and implausible and unsupported statement of some kind and that's on one side of the coin. The other side of the coin is something we all know. We can take it by judicial notice. It's there for sure everyone knows this and yet he's arguing against the fact that everyone knows and he's using this fake news technique. And this is this is kind of gas lighting in public. You talk about psychology, Julian. There's two kinds. One is the clinical psychology involving you and me and just a couple of people in a room and the other is involving 300 million Americans. There's this mass psychology. That's what we're really talking about. So you can advise one person how he deals with his own psychological reaction to this but you really you have to tell 300 million people how they all of them have to deal with their reaction to this. And I think there are a lot of them are caught in it and a lot of them we can never reach. We can never clear it up for them. It's a big practical problem for government. Well there okay so there's a lot there to unpack and what you're talking about. I mean for one thing if you want to focus on the psychological aspect of it for a second I'd say that that if you're dealing with somebody who is let's just say because this has happened that you're dealing with a demagogue or a leader where there's actually malice there's malicious intent like gadoff hitlers or something like that um you you often have two dynamics going on. One is that um like psychopaths may be a very small part of our population but there they tend to be a very powerful influence um far beyond just their just on on the world right. Whether they're gangsters or some psychopath who rises an attorney or whatever they do a lot of them turn out to have for all kinds of reasons this ripple effect on so many of the rest of us and but because there's such a small portion of the population you know a lot of what motivates a psychopath is in all of us a lack of empathy which all everybody has to some degree an inability to kind of feel sorry maybe sometimes at appropriate times to the degree that we need to but the extreme to which a psychopath has it there you know people who study psychopaths almost study them as like a different species because when you study their brains like the the size of their amygdala they actually scan differently than us and so when we you talk about balance when we try to relate or or talk about what someone who's actually a psychopath is doing a lot of us have difficulty understanding what they're really doing because it's so far from the way that we interpret reality well let's assume that for then there's a way then there's another side of it which is that the people that are leaning on the spectrum towards psychopathy you know mass psychologists people who study mass like going back to like eric from of escape from freedom from the hitler era have to have sort of suggest the idea that to those of us that may may fall more towards the psychopathic spectrum that may be more self whatever it's like a tuning fork you know when they hit it for people that are going that direction they respond so we talk about like Trump's base I mean to some extent you know he's he's sending out signals that resonate on some kind of a deep emotional level with certain people because of these reasons because he's he's getting at impulses that they have he's communicating with us he's communicating to some very fundamental aspect of human nature yes and not a good one primitive aspect of human nature yeah and a hatred the call of the wild if you will right so on the question of balance though problem for the press is they see these lies and they know these truths and they are gaslighted because they they come in and they say well you know maybe he has a point let's give him credit for making this statement even though it may be somewhat questionable and and and then you know let's test on whether the truth we know it to be is really the truth but I think a lot of journalists a lot of news organizations get compromised by this age old need for quote balance and and the agenda goes off the tracks that way I mean isn't it better for the journalists to be able to say is the modern you know mixed opinion in fact kind of an honest an honest broker journalist who who calls us shots the way he sees him so well you know he said that it's not true this is what's true and this is the way I'm going forward on my reporting here I am not going to give him equal time he's wrong and we'll go we'll report this story on the basis of what we know to be true not what these people are saying in order to stake take the oxygen out of the room right well I mean I think you know so like I said before there was a lot to unpack what you're talking about I mean if we're just talking on the psychological level there's like I said the challenge if you're not if you're not someone who really understands that what you're dealing with is malicious intent then you're trying to answer even though you may know as a journalist you may be smart to know there's problems with balance you know Fox News bills themselves is fair and balanced but they're not and and so I don't think that it's you know you have to be very sophisticated as a journalist right now to know there are issues with the concept of balance but you may be introducing balance where you don't even realize you are like if you are analyzing Trump's foreign policy right now which I just was listening on public radio they were doing right and you entertain the idea that he is suggesting to pull out of Afghanistan and out of Syria and at the same time doubling down on Iran and basically on every single point directly giving the diametric opposite is what the intelligence officials gave in their congressional hearings last week and you say well he's naive you may be introducing a kind of balance there without knowing you're introducing balance because you've you've now created two polar opposites either he's right or he's well intentioned but he has it a little bit wrong maybe he's following another agenda you know you like one minute they'll be talking about the latest revelations in you know the secret meetings between Putin and Trump and and uh you know what we don't know about the Russia investigation and and then they'll change topics and they'll start talking about foreign policy and they'll say gee Trump's really naive about foreign policy isn't a journalist justified in not attributing dark you know dark motives to Trump sure these things when there is no specific generally accepted evidence to that effect maybe it's coming soon but so far I guess you'd have to say no I mean there's no significant evidence to suggest that he did this as a as an an active an operator well as a matter of foreign government as a matter of pure critical thinking I think you're right we don't have evidence that that there's anything malicious and trying to also journalists know trying to reach into somebody's intentions is is very especially a politician's intentions is very dangerous territory maybe you're saying that we that the journalist has to has to go beyond just saying oh this is naive he has to raise the issue yes he has to say well it may be naive but it may not be naive too and we have to keep our options open on that because we're awaiting the Mueller investigation and other evidence so it could be this is not naive at all so it'd be wrong to use the term naive without conditioning it yeah I mean just be you know they need to be careful about how they frame things but I think that another reason that this is a challenge for journalists I mean they're just facing a lot of challenges in this environment and is to is to look at it from another direction is that there's these very long-standing professional standards that developed I mean really a lot of this roots back to the 1920s when a lot of this really came to the fore and you first had the American Society newspaper editors and the Society professional journalists coming up with these codes of professional conduct but you know these ideas like of balance or objectivity the idea that you remove bias a lot of these were them reaching for ways to define professional standards of journalism and these are all the more important now because we live in a world of citizen journalism of cell phones and social media and things there for that so you know so what what distinguishes the professional from the unprofessional well the professional knows how to give balance the professional isn't going to introduce bias at the very moment when these things become important or we we need professional standards they become very troubled ideas because of the reasons we're just we're discussing we only have a little time left Julian I do want to cover something you and I spoke about earlier and that is the the agenda the agenda the hierarchy of the importance of certain issues I mean for example we agree that climate change is probably the most important issue affecting everyone on the planet today and we're not talking about it enough we're not doing enough about it and the press is not not keeping it at the top of the stack the way perhaps they should because it is so threatening at the same time is just as an a legislative setting lobbyists come around and seek the attention of the legislators and that's in many ways how the legislative agenda is set so there are people who send press releases who seek as Trump does to you know have attention from the press and in that way establish the agenda of what's on top and what's not on top and you know if he comes in you know makes a big shindig about something or other the press will cover that when in fact they should be covering something else he is setting the agenda and others do the same thing and this is a problem in terms of coverage today it's a problem in terms of educating a democratic community so my question to you is what can we do about that is this are we over the rubicon can we come back from that can we go back to those old rules and old attitudes about representing all the facts fairly fitting you know all the news that's fit to print and not letting democracy die in darkness or in distraction that's mine what do we do I mean I just see you know you and I have been debating a lot of this could start to what's the problem what's the fault of it like you mentioned lobbyists people talk a lot about the money interference and I wouldn't understand any of that but the thing that I go back to over and over is our conventional wisdom you know the fact that we have a lot of frames because a lot of these people there's maybe they're not looking at it in different ways maybe this has to do with the that we talked about the elite media in some ways that they're removed they're not getting different ways of looking at this stuff enough by the way this idea of setting the agenda this is a term we use agenda settings so the idea originally was the media may not tell you what to think but they tell you what to think about and then that has been updated in terms of like the media tells you how to think about what to think about they call that agenda setting 2.0 or you know and then the other term that's used that for this is framing right but like so you say well we don't talk about climate change enough well you know the way also I look at it is and we've talked about this the we don't talk about the complete collapse of the global ecosystem enough we don't talk about you know they now on CNN you can see them talking about climate change it's become part of the news cycle at least to a degree so that's good hopefully it'll actually make it in to the presidential debates next time but like for the first time but like we don't talk about the mountain of plastic in the ocean or you know the complete collapse of or the sixth extinction the mass extinction of species you know the fact that when you had the heat in Australia I just heard today that bats were you know so while we had the polar vortex you had this scalding heat and in Australia the last release bats were like literally frying to death and falling out of the trees and I heard that story and but there are all kinds of reasons why species are going extinct it's not just climate change climate change is you know there's nutrient pollution from our sewage systems and from everything that we all of our agriculture that we dump into the oceans there's the there's the infrastructure that we build that wipes out habitat there's all kinds of assaults so that you know my journalism students who are 20, 21 years old the biggest story of their lifetimes I think is going to be not just climate change but this whole web of life that's falling apart and you know that's going to be third, fourth, fifth, sixth on the Democrats the liberal platform if we're lucky for the for the you know they're already saying okay what's it going to be is it going to be Elizabeth is it going to be healthcare is it going to be this huge tax cut that they're going to give to working families well what happened to the Green New Deal so that's now third or fourth and then they say okay you only have so much political capital you pretty much only get it your first year as a president in office so they're going to go for a 32 trillion dollar Medicare thing or they're going to go for a massive tax cut for working families where does the Green New Deal fit into that and do we really have a 19 a 20 30 deadline as the scientists say on that so if they spend all their play if we are lucky enough to get the liberal and they spend all their political capital on on economic equality are they going to be able to save the planet but you know at any time soon well the the idea of the journalist is to serve the public to serve the common good to inform people so they'll make good decisions politically and I mean frankly on that issue I don't think it's happening and so you know we're in we're in desperate straights on that imagine with all this new technology you have virtually hundreds of news items and issues and events that you are exposed to every day maybe thousands and more if you want and then you have all we need to talk about the wall right that's the one that we have to spend all this time talking right right right and then you have virtually hundreds of right thousands of platforms that you can get it from and some are tailored tailored for you yeah all would you know not Fox News but the other one and so forth so you watch what what you like to hear and the problem with that is that we never come together on a major a major decision a major agenda point like climate change now you know this is biblical because at the end of the day 2030 2040 2050 we're all going to turn around assuming we remember that long and we're going to say gee we we missed out now we're at tremendous risk as a planet yeah and it's too late to do anything about it so you know right now I think we're in crisis this way yeah and something in the news gathering and this you know dissemination system not only in the U.S. but everywhere has to be changed if we are going to survive the degradation in the environment yeah I mean I you know we are very rightly and the press will cover it and the politicians will talk about electability versus integrity or you know purity how important it is to just you know tell it like it is but you know bound up in that is is that discussion about electability or ideology going to be also about reality like if if we have a hard deadline because of the way the sun goes up and the you know and goes down every day because of science and because of the laws of physics of 2030 and we are having a debate about electability or non-electability because of healthcare for all is is reality entering into that anywhere and saying you know we don't have a 2030 we you know this is terrible that we don't have healthcare for the people who need it but do we have a 2030 deadline on that like I think that I worry that that in all this discussion of oh does it need to be about electability does it need to be about you know our purity and our true ideals that we forget what's actually objectively important you know as democrat I mean I'm not even talking about a debate with the right about you know which needs to happen also yeah about Roe v. Wade and silly things yeah I'm just talking about democrats arguing among themselves and I just I don't hear enough concern about let's get objective for a minute and say what are our what are our what are our priorities need to be because we have genuine global concerns genuine global problems that we can't just spin or decide well I feel this way or that way so I put you in uniform as a journalist and I put you on the floor of the you know of the convention where selections will be made and I give you a yellow pad and I tell you to go talk to them and the first question is always what do you think about climate change what do you think about the environment and you make them answer that question do you have do you as a journalist do we as a journalist as a journalist industry if you will community have the power to change those those priorities if you ask the question over and over again if you never take a bad answer if you always remind them they haven't answered you and that you must have an answer aren't you in a position to affect to affect the agenda as it is reported as the people read it and see it don't you think yeah I mean well I think that what I guess I was trying to say is that the media can do a job in terms of framing it if if we seem to be sort of using climate change as a exact synonym for environment you know and they're they're different things and we have an environmental crisis we don't just have a climate crisis and we see that living in Hawaii very much so so so there's there's an onus there on the on the journalist but then the other part if and I hope I'm answering your question directly not but the other part of the journalist role here is that we should be demanding that our politicians be leaders and not followers and so I do think you know you were saying well we can't expect detailed plans from from presidential candidates well they're going to be stumping and getting media attention for over a year I think the media should should say we need to see some meat on the bones here you want to talk about Medicare for all we need to see details about that let's get beyond the bumper sticker and get into how is your plan different than Kamala Harris's plan how is your you know are you saying get rid of privacy and they're beginning to but like with climate change with the green new deal very early on we should be learning stuff here and we should be right away saying what is that what are your specifics how do we get this to actually be real what's give us a multi-stage give us a strategy and put some meat on the bones here you know we're not we're not going to cover it if you're just saying what 60 other candidates in the Democratic primary are you saying right right you know and you have answered my question Julie and I think it's a great answer I think it's doable and it will have the desired effect just keep on asking him what's the plan and ask him you know thoughtful incisive questions about the real details action points in their platforms and the priorities in their platforms in that way I think the press can have an effect and now is the time to do that now before 2020 now's the time for the press to step up who this has been a great discussion thank you Julian yeah as always I'll be doing it again so thank you aloha