 We're back for live. It's five o'clock on a given. What is it today? Tuesday? Here in the beginning of a new year, a new and hopefully better year, we can hope, can't we? And Karen Buzzard, she's a professor emeritus retired who's been in many schools and who has studied not only media, but art and media, which is a combination I really want to hear about, how those things intersect and how they affect us. Welcome to the show, Karen. Thank you. It's good to be here. So, you know, I made a list of keywords. I've never done this before, but I want to read you the keywords that I thought would be appropriate for a viewer who wanted to find this show if he searched on these keywords. Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, popularity, Karen Buzzard, there's a good one. Communications, media, ratings, that means TV ratings, public opinion, reporting journalism politics, politicization, COVID, pandemic, Afghanistan, that relates to his popularity, build back better, the same thing. Voting rights, Joe Manchin, Kristen Sinema, Democratic Party, Republican Party Congress, and filibuster. That really defines the little world we're going to talk about, doesn't it? It does. So, we agreed that we were going to talk about how the media on this show, this brand new show called On the Media, how the media is affecting his decline in popularity. Can you talk about that? Yes, Ashley, there's been a couple of major studies that have come out recently, because I think Biden himself is worried about his decline in popularity, but both the Washington Post conducted a study where they used a computer analysis to review like 200,000 news articles, and these were news articles on TV, cable, newspapers, all the different media. And to conclude the question, was he getting more negative news coverage than Trump? And they concluded that he was during the same time period. But of course, one of the other factors that's important, I think, is the outlet that it's on. If you look at Fox News or one of the conservative outlets, his coverage is, according to what their research, 79% was negative of his coverage. And the key things they tend to focus on on these negative coverages is immigration and his executive orders. So there's a kind of theory out there right now, which is called Great Migration Theory. And Fox News covers anything that seems to fit into that theory. And that theory is great. The white people are being replaced by minorities, basically, that they're becoming less in the majority. So basically, any story that kind of feeds into that narrative of this kind of replacement theory is being picked up by Fox and presented as related to Biden. The second one is, I think it's interesting, is Pew itself, Pew Research Center did a study. And basically, they focused on a couple of issues that I think were interesting. One was the framing of the news. They found that Biden, most of the news was framed around his policies. So it was kind of policy oriented, whereas with Trump, it was focused around his personality or leadership skills. So they had different focuses or they do have different focuses. If you think about what Trump was up to last night or last during his first year as president, there was a lot of coverage of Russia, Russian kind of spies in the election. So and also a lot of coverage about the media, calling the media, fake news. He basically had eliminated a lot of, ended up eliminating a lot of the traditional news sources to focus on Fox News commentators, that kind of thing. So the framing of the news is very different, I think. And a second thing I think was important is who they use as sources, according to Pew. The sources for the more level news tends to be people from the administration, Biden experts, such as journalists and academics, that kind of thing. Whereas under the conservative news, the experts tend to be other commentators. So I think both of those kind of have an impact on what we're seeing as negative coverage of Biden right now. Let me throw some thoughts at you. Seems to me, kind of you before the show began, that during the lingual administration here in Hawaii, she had two terms. She, I guess she was popular enough to win the second term, but she was not popular among the Democratic Party because she was Republican and proud of it. It was a different time and a different Republican Party, by the way. In any event, they criticized her in the press mercilessly for the eight years that she served, in my opinion. Now she's gone and Neil Abercrombie was elected governor, and the press attacked him in the same way they had attacked her. It was kind of a culture of attack. And let's sell some raw meat on this. Let's excite and titillate our readers and viewers to always keep them interested about how this governor doing a bad job. And they just kept on going and they criticized Abercrombie in the same way, even though he was a Democrat and arguably closer to the people. That may be a debatable point. In any event, I suggest to you, Karen, that what happened here in Trump was the press, however they operate, and we should talk about that, was criticizing Trump. And now Trump is gone. He's off the air for most purposes. And we have Biden instead. And the press needs something to excite and titillate their viewers and readers and the public. So they're always looking for something to criticize the president about. It's the same kind of mentality, even though Biden is a decent, honest, honorable, hardworking president, as opposed to Trump, who was none of those things. Do you agree? Yes, to a certain extent. But again, I think it goes back to the type of media outlet, whether it's conservative or liberal or neutral somewhere in between. I do have noticed one of the news sources I watch, PBS News, that they've made much more effort to critique, I guess, the interviewees that they get this after Trump, because they were letting a lot of Trump people come on the air, and they didn't question them or challenge them at all. But I see they've stopped that and they really push back if they feel like they're saying something that's not true or is questionable, even including senators and so forth that come on or Congress people who are obviously feeding into the big lie or something like that, they'll challenge them. So I think some of that's true. There is a more of an attack mode with the media as a result of the Trump presidency, but also I think there's more pushback as well. Yeah, I had the same observation about PBS and the news hour, and it really hasn't been as interesting to me because there was a time, and maybe that's still happening to some extent, where they were making an effort to be, quote, balanced, end quote, balanced. Well, if you have one character who is trying hard to be decent and honest and doing the right thing, and another who is a psychopath with serious pathological problems, you're going to give them equal time, you're going to balance. If one tells the truth generally, and the other one generally lies, balance doesn't sound like it's appropriate. What do you think? I agree with you. I think that they're doing well to do this pushback because it's clear that if you have somebody on that's saying lies, basically, for example, that the election was stolen or something like that, then I think you have to challenge it. And I think for the first year of the Trump presidency, the media was so overwhelmed. They were used to this objectivity where they had two sides and they were impartial. They didn't handle it very well. They didn't push back at all during Trump's presidency. They let them get away with it. So I think there's been some learning, I guess, with the press. Yeah, digging inside the press for a moment. I remember here in Hawaii, we had a scandal, if you will, with the Kamehameha schools back in the 90s. And there was an event that took place at the Pacific Club, it was. And some people spoke about it. And I was sitting next to a reporter for, let's say, one of the dailies. Actually, there was only one dailie. No, there were two dailies at the time, too. So I'm not telling you which one it was. In any event, this reporter was very young. This reporter was, like, uninitiated. And she was writing notes and everything about what happened. And I was sitting a few feet away and she made her story and I read the story the next day. And it was nothing like what happened. And I said to myself, I've always assumed that when they make the notes and they sit there and listen and write it out so carefully and use all their brain cells to report to us about what happened, this was an extraordinary experience to see what happened and then see the story and find that it didn't reflect what happened. And so I began to take another look at the press. I'm saying it's only flesh and blood. It's only people. And sometimes they're really uninitiated. They don't know what's going on. They're young. They may not have a lot of training. They may not have the kind of acuity that you need to actually see things and interpret and report on things. And so when the decision is made in a given newsroom about what the priorities are, what's important and what's not important and what story do we do and how do we look at it, I always think of that day and that incident and I'm really not sure that I'm getting the right skinny. Am I right about this? I think yes. I think learning to kind of see what you're writing about because if you're not informed on the topic or even how to write a story, then it does, you know, and also your worldview. Maybe you see it, you know, as we're seeing now with the two different worldviews, one worldview is completely different than the other worldviews, apparently. So yes, I think that's true. Part of, I think journalism is also just sourcing your materials that you have, you're sure that you have correctly, you know, made the right assumptions. Yeah. Well, I'm worried about it because it certainly, it sounds different, feels different than Walter Cronkite used to feel for me. I just generally believed him. He was the news. And by the way, in those days, during the news program that you watched, there were no commercials. It was just the news. The commercials were at other times on the dial. And so now what we have is the news and they can tell you that the skies are falling, and then you have a soap commercial. And you say to yourself, wait a minute, they're telling me that this soap is good, but the sky is falling. What's the priority there? What do I take away, you know, in my mind? How do I process all this with the soap and the sky is falling? And then of course, you know, you do have the profit motive is so clear. And the notion of their journalism seems to be in large part, especially on the conservative side, out the window. The idea is, we are going to keep you excited. We are going to engage with our base, with Trump's base. And we don't care if it's true or not. Alternate facts are just fine with us because it sells the soap. It all seems like a mess, doesn't it? It does. I think one of the major issues was letting Rupert Murdoch into the country, you know, he's Australian, letting him have the citizenship to own a media outlet in the US. I think Fox News is really a huge issue. I know myself growing up in Missouri in the Midwest, every television in Missouri seems like they're watching Fox News all day. And I think I wouldn't even call it a news outlet, really, if you go by traditional ideas of what news is because it's all basically opinion and distorted opinion at that. Well, we have one host on Think Tech who has a firm belief and you can hear him anytime because he's on a couple of times a week. And what he says is it's all opinion now, or worse than that, it's fact and opinion all mixed up. And they don't tell you when they're doing fact and when they're doing opinion. They don't check the facts. As a matter of fact, sometimes the press may not say this, the press lies, unlike on Fox. It lies. They'll say one thing privately for you, vis-à-vis the insurrection and their communications with Trump during that day, January 6th, a year ago. And then they'll report something completely different as if, again, they were two realities. So you have a serious problem about this between fact and opinion and lies. And then, of course, there's the question of the First Amendment. Can you stop them? Can you fix this up? I mean, Twitter knows what to do. They took Marjorie Taylor Green off. She's disqualified, although she still has an account as a Congressperson. But what I'm saying is, how can you fix a situation where the press has devolved into rampant opinion or worse? We know, I think a key issue is to revive the fairness doctrine, which, if you recall, Ronald Reagan did away with it. At the time, there was a lot of controversy and there was press that were going to make it into a law, which they never did. But the fairness doctrine said you have to present equal time to both sides. You can't be on the air and just be a propaganda network as Fox is, I think. But if there was a way to revive the fairness doctrine, I think that would go a long way toward making sure at least both sides were presented. Well, let me ask you a hard question, which I've been thinking about, and this young fellow I mentioned has been thinking about. He says the only way that we can fix this is by government intervention. Somehow, the federal communications, some federal agency would actually vet what is being said somehow. I don't know how you would do that, but I'm wondering what you're thinking. The fairness doctrine was from the FCC. It was a rule that they all had to follow, all the news at that time. So it would be a federal intervention. Were they to reinstate it or whether they could get it passed? Well, they do have a new kind of more liberal FCC chair, and they're much more interested in kind of taking these issues on. The previous chair was in the pocket of Trump, so he was pretty lax about doing anything about that. Well, all this is political, I guess, because on the one hand you have the conservative channel or channels, and don't forget Sinclair radio with 300 radio stations. I'm sure they play in Missouri too, right? They do, yes. All day long. Every retail establishment will have Fox or Sinclair or both. Anyway, so you have this division, this political division, and it's been exacerbated to an enormous degree during Trump's years. And part of that, see if you agree with me, part of that is because the press is sending these disparate messages, and some of it is not true, but people believe it. And it's all kind of hateful, really. And so if you wanted to fix that, you would have to fix the press, in my opinion. You would have to fix the press because people get their news, they get their information, and they get their opinions from what they hear and read in the press. So you have to fix that if you're going to fix the breakdown of our society. Yeah, absolutely. I think it's, as you say, devolved considerably because in the air before, when the fairness doctrine was in effect, everything was fact-checked. You couldn't go in the air unless you presented allowed both sides of the issue. You would consider both sides of the issue. And I think cable news also has this 24-hour news cycle has had a lot to do with the devolution of the news where they have evolved almost a series of commentators as well who have to keep something on the air. So they resort to commentary so much of the time. What you say reminds me so much of Jerry Seinfeld. In one of his episodes, he had this remarkable and very wise statement. He said, you know, it's so interesting. It's amazing, is it not, that there's just enough news to fill up the newspaper? Well, it's an interesting point because, you know, you have to think about of all the things going on, what gets covered. And usually there are like five main stories every day. You know, you get the vaccine coverage, you get the stories about the attempt to pass legislation, you know, build back better. There are certain news stories that seem like they, they're the five top stories that are covered all the time. And you think, well, what about other news stories? So there is a sort of emphasis, I think, on certain stories for some reason. Well, I think they're trying to keep people's attention. Right. And they can't keep talking about the same story, even if it's really a critical story, because they got to feed, they got to feed the beast. They got to come up with something new on every day. They have to feed the beast. Right. So, you know, right now, if it, you know, we have COVID, I guess, kind of feeding the beast right now, the COVID stories. Yeah. So this is, this is troubling because I don't, I don't feel that there's an orderly rotation of stories. In other words, so, so we were talking about build back better. And then we stopped talking about build back better. And we, we were talking about voting rights. And then we stopped talking about that. But we have to feed the beast. So we talk about other things and we focus on the other things. And what happened to build back better? Hey, what happened to climate change? That, you know, which is the biggest story in our lifetime, really. Absolutely. So, I mean, who's making these decisions? Is it Rupert Murdoch? Yeah. I do think on the Fox News channel that he has a huge influence on what's covered, you know, I think, you know, as they say that their focus is completely different than what's on the liberal news channels. And they're focusing much more 78% is negative on Biden. So they're trying to feed the beast by covering every negative angle on what's going on. As they say, they're trying to feed into this idea that white people are being replaced. So a lot of their focus is on finding stories that feed that emphasis. Well, you know, that's that's a big problem, not only for Biden, but for any legitimate politician. If the press is going to let them have it on every story and then linger around like on Afghanistan and, you know, sort of write him off on that. Oh, that was bad, terrible, bad. The result is that his reputation will be is being tarnished on a regular basis. I think that's true. Unfortunately, you know, to a certain extent, it does stick. You know, you throw enough, you know, negative stuff at somebody, some of it will stick. So in your mind, Sonic, Karen, what would you do if I made you the queen of the universe? And forget the First Amendment for a moment. And if I ask you, you know, how do we how do we go back to, you know, the the old time reporters, the old time way of reporting the old time system of informing the government in a fair-minded, balanced way, or at least mostly fair-minded, balanced way without allowing propaganda in the door. How do we do that? Because I don't think it's limited to the U.S. It's all around the world. I mean, we haven't even started this discussion because, you know, there's social media, and there's all this information flowing at us all day long. I don't know about you, but I get 500 emails every day, and my thumb is raw from deleting them, but to keep coming. And so, you know, I have to, I wish I could find a little cocoon, like a Walden pond, where I would only allow legitimate news, and I would sit there and think about it, but it's hard to do that. How would you, as the queen, fix this? Well, I think the first thing I would do is get the FCC to function and to actually reinstate some of the rules that existed back when there was more fair journalism. I mean, I think to a certain extent both sides, I mean, if you look at MSNBC, you could say that some of their coverage is, you know, to one extreme versus Fox News, although I have to say that I don't think that at least they try to be truthful in their coverage, and you can fact check them, whereas Fox News, I don't think makes any pretense about it, but I think the fairness doctrine, but I think there's another issue is just the problem with a lot of the local media has shut down due to economic changes with the internet. So they don't have a business model right now, like a lot of the small town newspapers have shut down. We were in an era of moderation, so a lot of the small town kind of functions that newspapers serve are no longer there, no checks and balances on local politicians, that kind of thing which they provided. So I think it's a larger issue of the economics of the media and what's going to be done in an era where the funding model for media like advertising, for example, has changed dramatically. It has, and they don't have the same leverage with those soap commercials as the national media who are selling you as much soap as they're giving you news. For every five minutes of news, you get five minutes of soap. Right, and even in the newspapers, you used to be able to put ads in, want ads, that kind of thing, advertisements, but now people have craze lists, or they can put things online, marketplace, whatever. So a lot of their former models of kind of the business models, they haven't really revamped yet, and unfortunately, like as you mentioned with Sinclair, they've been buying up all the local radio stations and television stations, so and they're extremely conservative, kind of a Fox news type group. So you have the airwaves being flooded by them, not to mention the shock jocks, remember like Rush Lumbo and whatnot, filling the air. So I think it's a bigger issue, but I think I would start with the FCC. Well, we should explore it. You should explore it. You want to just take one last moment and tell us what your plan for on the media going forward. I think it's one of the most important threads that we can possibly do here on Sinctech to examine this, and it's not just static, it's changing all the time. Well, I think my plan really would be to cover different topics, because I think what people don't realize it's not offered, they probably realize if you think about it, but maybe we don't stop and think about it, is that you're getting a spin on whatever is presented. Less of a spin, I think on traditional media that have actual journalists, as opposed to commentators, but so I think on the media with my goal would be to focus to kind of analyze what you're getting and the spin as well. Yeah, okay. I can hardly wait to see how this goes, because I consider it very important and the media treats itself sometimes as a sacred cow doesn't want to talk about how sausage is made. But the fact is that we as citizen journalists, you're a professional, but we think tech organized around citizen journalism, we really care to look at other media and how they do, not only for television, not only social media, not only the radio, but also the print press, what's left of it. That's right. That's right. What's going to happen to print? It's a good question. Yeah. Well, thank you, Karen. I look forward to a whole series of shows from you and your friends and associates in the media here and on the mainland and I stand ready to learn things I never learned before. Thank you so much, Karen. Thank you, Jay. I appreciate you're hosting this and it's a pleasure to be here. Aloha. Take care. Stay safe.