 We're live at three o'clock on a given Wednesday. I'm Jay Fiedels of Zink Tech and the magic word is demise. Okay, D-E-M-I-S-E, demise. And the title is here in Community Matters, the demise of local journalism in America. It's a serious word to use. And for this discussion, we have Brett Obergaard. He's the chair of the journalism program at UH Manoa. And Tim Apachele, he's a guest and host in many of our shows and has been such for years to examine and create this mosaic, that's the word, right? Mosaic of news things that we have learned from and become educated about the way it works. And so, wow, what a team, what a pair, what a panel, huh? Welcome to the show, you guys. Yeah, thanks for having me. Good afternoon, Jay, thank you. Let me start by getting the environment here. Local journalism, snapshot. Or I should say dynamic snapshot. How has it been doing over the past few years, Brett? You looked into that, you studied that in your teaching and what? Can you tell us what is happening? What is the dynamic right now in local journalism? Sure, I'll speak very generally because there's a lot of complicated parts to it but very generally speaking, daily newspapers are going away. We're shifting to, as you might imagine, news websites and news through social media. And basically what's happening is because the value of news at larger scale is more valuable, local news is not incredibly valuable in terms of economic perspective, not in terms of how you might use it in your real life but economically local news is not as lucrative. So we're shifting away from putting resources and putting our smartest people into local journalism and we're putting that into the scalable systems that collect a big audience but really don't have a lot of civic good. Let me offer a thought and see what you think. You know, the big national networks, they have five minutes of advertisements for every five minutes of news roughly and they get paid big bucks because they reach tens of millions of people. Okay, so if I'm an advertiser and I wanna get some clout going and I wanna sell my soap, I am not gonna go to a local newspaper or a local TV station for that matter. I get much more bang for my buck on national news and the result is I put my advertising money into the national news. And there's just no mileage at all for me to spread it around the country in small time stations, radio, TV or newspapers. And as a result, that is what creates the desert. Isn't it? The money is being funneled, the advertising money is being funneled to national news. And so there's nothing left for the small stations, am I right? Well, I think that's partially true and there's also social media that's in there. Basically, social media took the last mile to the door part of the news distribution process. So when you control the last mile to the door, that's when that's where the money is. So they gathered all that power and all that money and then they've completely abdicated all their responsibility for what that means to bring people news. And I think what you're getting at is the idea that the economic model for journalism is changing. It's always been changing. This is not necessarily new. If you look at it historically, we've always had a capitalist type system from the fiery printers of the American Revolution all the way through. It's always been based on capitalism and business models. But I think at this point, it's pretty hard to imagine that being sustainable. And I think a lot of people, including myself, are imagining what the United States needs to do in terms of supporting local journalism through public funds and public media. And I'm thinking that's where the future will lie or we're gonna just get worse and worse journalism and see that current model working. Oh, I can see Tim nodding his head on that one. So what can we do to reverse this process? Because as Brett said, it's going on a long time, but it has every indication of getting worse. How can we reverse it? How can we get government in there to change the way this works without offending the First Amendment? Is that to me, Jay? Yes. Well, first off, I think FCC does have some authoritative powers which they're sitting on their thumbs on. And again, the balance between preserving the First Amendment right versus going after those characters that are causing public damage and damaging the public. I'll talk about COVID-19 as one. Reporting about COVID-19 as an infection and also the false cures, the snake oil cures and now basically advertising about the vaccines of hoax. So that's a damage to the public health. And then of course we have about the election. So the FCC does have an obligation to oversee broadcasting and make sure that the public is not harmed in any way. And they have that right and they have the authority in lieu of protecting the First Amendment. So that's number one, but that covers ABC, NBC and CBS. You know, cable seems to get a pass. You know, no one's really providing oversight over content and preventing misinformation. They get to, it's the Wild West. It's like Facebook and Twitter. It doesn't seem to be any regulatory oversight on it and anything goes. And Jay, as you and I have argued and gone around about quite a bit, I think that's why we're in the stew that we're in. Our country is completely polarized over multiple stations, be it on the right, be it on the left, that are providing misinformation and they're whipping up the emotions and the hysteria within people's minds about the election and COVID-19 and it's taking root and people have now polarized into a belief system versus values and attitudes. We're now dealing with beliefs, which is so much more difficult to try to change in the population of this country. Going to the question of the demise of local journalism, though, we have a capitalism type of process where the money is going to the big boys. And by the way, I believe that we can talk about this too. They, the big boys are having a huge effect on the news and misinformation that's reported. It's not like the good old days. But my question to you is, how can we change the flow of money? How can we change the demise that Brett was talking about? How can we restore true journalism to the hinterland? Well, what did we have in place in the 60s when news was a lost leader and there was a firewall as thick as 10 bricks that news would not be influenced by advertising dollars, be it in newsprint or be it in TV or radio. And what happened to that firewall? What happened to that separation between advertising dollars and the true news? I don't know the answer to that. I don't know if it was FCC still has it on the books or FCC just chooses not to enforce it or did that go away back in August of 2011 when the fairness doctrine was abolished by Congress? I don't know the answer specifically to that. One thing that comes to mind though, is that back in the day, and of course you can do things indirectly that you can't do directly, but back in the day, I recall there was no commercials during news broadcasts that the broadcast was sacrosanct. Now, Walter Cronkite, now we're going to talk about news, stop everything else, we're just going to focus on news and the studio got quiet because this was the Holy Grail news. So, Brett, what do you think? I mean, how can we get back to that? How can we change the economics and how can we fund or at least take some of the money that goes national? You know, they used to say that politics was all local. Tip O'Neill said that all politics is local, but now all politics is national. And before we had a lot of local news, call it gossip, if you want. And now all the news is national and all the money is national. How do we change that? Well, I would say the economic issue is something lots of people are grappling with. I don't have a clear answer, but I can say that we've tried a lot of things. We've tried billionaires, buying media sources and funding it as a, you know, either for public interest or a vanity project or whatever. We've tried to pull up your bootstraps and crowdsource the money and, you know, everybody's working out of their van and trying to make it happen. We've obviously lived off this kind of, you know, what do I call this, just corporate model, I guess, for quite a few decades that has been pretty, you know, been pretty sustainable. I think now we're into this new phase where the bigger corporate media sources like the New York Times or CNN or NBC or whatever, they're gonna, or Fox News, they're gonna have plenty of money. I'm not worried about them. I'm worried about the, you know, town council coverage, the local crime coverage, the, you know, how do you get a vaccine coverage in your community? That's the kind of stuff that's getting lost. That's not gonna appear on cable news or on any big station. That's the kind of thing you need journalists living in your community who are professionals doing the hard job of averting out what's true and what's false and making sure they're accurate and getting that information to people. And I think that's something that needs some kind of new level of support. I always think about how successful the BBC has been. BBC is obviously a large organization with lots of tentacles, but if you think about what funds the BBC is just a $200 a year TV licensing fee. And that creates one of the greatest news organizations in the world. I mean, the United States could easily do something like that. They could do a lot of things, but they just don't seem to have the will or courage to invest in journalism. And then that's creating this weird dynamic we're in now where people are losing a complete tether to what is true and what is not true. And it's all political partisan speech. And we're moving into these very dangerous areas, including areas where a lot of academics who study dictatorships, who study political dysfunction, who study insurrections, are having dire predictions about what the state of this country is and its future, including, I think it was this week or last week, a Canadian political science researcher who studies this topic. He predicted that the United States would be a full-on dictatorship by 2030, if not sooner. We have three retired Army generals, I think it was last month or a couple of weeks ago, said we need to be planning. We need to be gaming of the next insurrection. We need to be ready for it in our military. This is not something that we can imagine is not gonna happen again there. It publicly went out and said this needs to be a war game that we plan for because it's gonna happen. And there's been a lot of people who really study, I mean, they're not studying just the United States history, they're studying world history, they're studying all the different countries that have had their democracies degraded or destroyed and they look at the warning signs. I'm not saying that's what's gonna happen in the United States, but I'm saying that we're in a very dicey era and I think everybody should be thinking quite seriously about how we're gonna get out of it. One of those ways is to support local journalism, start bringing neighbors back together, bringing communities back together, get people out of their corners and start working together to all be Americans instead of Republicans or Democrats. And Tim, this reminds me of what you were saying a little while ago. If you do away with local journalism, local media, then what you're doing by comparison, a relative process is you're giving greater power to the national media because they have greater influence in on the smaller communities, but a lack of any other source of news. And if they wanna do misinformation, then the local communities are getting that. I mean, hundreds, thousands of local communities are dependent on the national networks for the news. And so if they're watching Fox News Live all day, they're getting the lies and there's really nothing to dilute that. And then you get into this misinformation, the misinformation has much greater impact if there was nobody local to question it. And if you look too, and I'm just setting up the question here, if you look too, you find there's so few that are of interest nationally, there's not a lot of news media happening. There's the times in the post and those are the primary news sources. I don't know if there's a lot of others. And then there's MSNBC and CNN and Fox and of course, BBC as Brett mentioned, that's the best of all of them actually. But there's only a handful of these news sources and we are dependent on how well they do. And they're not doing that well, your thoughts? Well, my thoughts are, I've got lots of thoughts because you bring them up and you suggest them to me. But the big one is look at Russia, look at any dictatorship, it's information dissimilation is through state media. You don't have independent little news offices around Russia. It's all controlled by a state media, via Cuba, via Venezuela, you name it, you're not gonna have independent news sources. And I think that's the direction, unfortunately we're starting to head into where Fox News, quote unquote news, Fox News is a misnomer and or an issue of somatics. It's really Fox Entertainment, is it not? And this comes up to play when Sean Hannity is being subpoenaed. And he's saying, I'm not a journalist or I am a journalist. He's an entertainer. And the problem is, and I've said this a hundred times on either my show or whatever, is that we need a firewall, we need a real separation between what constitutes news and which is being confused for news is really editorial and commentary. And in the old days, you're right. Walter Cronkite said, and now commentary from Eric Severi, you name it, we had a separation where we knew a bullet point format of what the news was not being diminished by one's opinions and filters of the newscaster. And now it's rare to see this factual news being reported even on ABC, CBS and NBC. I've watched some of them and after they point out a bullet of information, they have like a sentence of their personal evaluation of that news point. And that has to stop. And why does that have to stop? Because we cannot agree on the facts any longer. No longer is my truth, part of your truth, and vice versa, because I'm watching one source and it's being filtered through evaluation and opinion. And we don't agree on the facts, therefore we can't agree on policy. And now we're in the stew of a coats of a war, in my opinion. Brad, you mentioned earlier politicization, how the media has been politicized. And a good example of that is Rupert Murdoch. So there was a headline that I saw earlier today where the number 57 popped out. 57 is the same as the Heinz Ketchup, if you remember. It played in the Manchurian candidate. The question then was how many communists are there in the Department of Defense? And Angela Lansbury looked at the breakfast table and she focused in on the bottle of ketchup and she said there are 57 communists in the Department of Defense. This is in McCarthy, right? Anyway, 57 telephone messages from Sean Hannity, calls or messages from Sean Hannity through the White House in the afternoon of January 6th. And that really suggests the whole thing that the press, at least Fox News, they're not just reporting either fact or opinion or some mixed bag of information and misinformation. They're active players. They're active players, they were active and they still are active in Trump's, Trump's, Michigas, they're really reporting for him. They're his agents. They're in his sycophants. And this is worse yet than just lying. They're players. What do you think about that? How can you have news by the players in a given, I don't wanna say ideology, but a given agenda when they're also claiming to be news reporters? Well, I think it's a scourge of the whole industry. If Fox News definitely has its problems, a lot of people have a very difficult time figuring out who's the opinion host on Fox News and who are the news journalists. There are some good news journalists at Fox News, but they're also these totally non-journalistic shows that include misinformation, disinformation, like you said, sycophant behavior. They're just all sorts of things that are on there and it all gets stuffed into the same container. So it's hard for, you have to be extremely news literate and media literate to be able to pick those apart. But it also goes into like we were talking about before the show on local news where advertising and news is getting mixed. You're having, particularly on local television, but also local radio I hear quite a bit too where the quote unquote journalist or the host or whatever will have some kind of pattern with one of the advertisers that make it sound like this is just an everyday radio or television conversation or some kind of news coverage and it's in fact some kind of advertisement. I think there are a lot of boundary issues that have developed and this again is sort of along the lines of what we were talking about earlier about how to bring back local journalism and really it's the ideology of journalism as opposed to the ideology of quote unquote information or whatever you wanna call it where journalism has a particular code of ethics. Journalists have a code of ethics they follow. Journalism has an ideology, a way of seeing the world and when we go outside of that into these other forms and start putting them on the borders of what is journalism or what isn't including comedy shows and things like that that's where people start to get confused and they start to lose trust in the real journalists of the world. Not sure, but it's a shrinking pomegranate, isn't it? I mean, for example, I'm a little confused about this but you and I had a conversation a few months ago where you mentioned that COVID had actually increased interest on the part of students in the journalism program and that you were having more applications from more seats these days. How do you reconcile that with the fact that journalism is under demise in many communities and it is not, nobody could say that what those guys at Fox News do is journalism and that goes for Sinclair Radio and many others. I was gonna tell you the story before here and I think Rachel Maddow covered this. There was a certain news story and they went around to various TV stations, radio stations and they found and she had clips of it. You found that one after the other all around that system use the same language to deliver the same news and opinion. The same exact words, there's 300 of them. And so, what's happening is somebody is instructing them. Somebody is telling them what to say and they're all saying the same thing. And if they're all saying lies, well, we have a huge distribution of lies going on. So, is that journalism? Could it be journalism when you were told what to say? I'll get it back to your point about student interest. Students are very interested in understanding their times and trying to prepare themselves to live their life in the 21st century. And part of that is building a news literacy to figure out like what is true and what is false in the world. We have so many great discussions in our classes about that. And it's a really important skill for the person living in this time period. And it's also helps to understand the amplification process of journalism like you're talking about. I guess I would push back in the sense that there have always been thought leaders. I mean, you could say the New York Times is a thought leader and it pushes out information that's often repeated regionally, locally, people of any particular political mindset or whatever. But it's always been true. And then now we're getting this national level new, quote unquote news being circulated that's misinformation, disinformation or it's even more complicated than that. Wednesday CNN is covering the president of the United States giving a speech and the president saying misinformation, disinformation. So what CNN is doing is totally legitimate journalism like you're documenting what the president says but then the information inside that little wrapper is not right. So I guess what we need to come back to is the idea like how do we turn this tide? How do we get it back? And I think the only answer to that is more truth tellers in society. It's journalists, but it's also government officials, also business leaders. It's everybody demanding that facts matter and that we're gonna stick to facts and we're gonna reject the people that don't do that. And if we don't collectively come together and push away that what can be a real power grab if he is misinformation, you can get a lot of power but it also destroys the thing you're trying to have power over. So I think that's where I would like us all to aim. Yeah, well, it's misinformation is along the road to autocracy. It's part of the failure of democracy and one goes with the other. But Tim, I wanted to ask you how you feel about the influence of advertisers and guys like Murdoch, the owners of these stations. It's remarkable is it not that Fox, pretty much every reporter on Fox will deliver the misinformation. And sometimes it's defamatory. The voting machine incident was clearly defamatory and there's a lawsuit over that. And when they crossed the line into defamatory then you've got them. But most of that misinformation affects public opinion. And so you have a very small number of people giving instructions to these quote reporters end quote, who are having a huge effect on public opinion. And ultimately, that has an effect on our democracy. This is very serious business. And one thing I just wanna throw one more thought in there, as Brett said is that we have to call them out. There was a whole struggle back in the early days of Trump as to what the press would do when they found Trump was lying. And they ultimately came up with, I think the times did. Well, we just say it's false. The president falsely claimed, and then the rest of the statement, the misinformation. And query whether that's enough, whether you need to be more strident in court. That's an outrageous lie, what he just said. And you're merely saying that he falsely stated. Is that enough to straighten it out according to Brett's suggestion? No, it's not. And I guess time is of the essence here. We don't have a lot of time to correct years and decades of this mixing of news versus opinion and commentary. This has been a slow moving process for decades, really. And now it's ingrained in our society as far as acceptable that we get to watch the news and at the same time, someone gets to a pine about it. We don't have a lot of time for that. So I asked the question is, what authoritative powers does the FTC have right now in its quiver that they could pull out and say, look, we've got to get back to everyone to agree on what facts are for the news. Opinions be damned. We could put that on another desk and swing the camera over that way and let them report on their commentary and their editorial. But what can the FCC do now to write the ship correctly and say, we've got to agree on the facts and the facts of the news? And does the FCC have any authority in that? And if not, what would it take? Or do we need a legislative action and have President Biden use the bully pulpit to try to get to this problem? But we could talk about voter suppression all we want. But if the message is going out and it's polluting the populace, then that's where we need to start. And I agree with Brent that we need from a local level all the way up to start making changes and investment in journalism. That's going to take time and we don't have it. So we need, I hate to say, as an intervention, an intervention for journalism. Oh, we thought about the title of the show. We might go back now and change it. Does journalism need a dramatic intervention? Brent, we're running out of time, but what are your thoughts about all of that? Don't we run into problems with the First Amendment where we try to constrain those who would lie? Yeah, that's a really tricky issue. And the classic line is, we don't stop hate speech or misinformation or disinformation by constraining it. We stop it by giving the right information and more speech. I'll say that. That's what Merrick Garland said this morning. I don't know if you guys heard that part of his speech this morning. Which in some ways was stirring and in some ways it was a nothing burger. But, I'm sorry, what he said was, and I think he's going to regret these words. He says, I don't care if it's true or false. Under the First Amendment, they have a right to say it and we will not prosecute them for saying anything false. Oh, I mean, really, I think we moved on from that. Well, this is why I say that the community leaders need to step in. Journalists, this is what another misperception people have about journalists. Like journalists are simply in the place to tell the citizens what's happening. Journalists are in the place to make things happen. And when a journalist is doing a good job, they'll tell you what's going on and then the citizens have to rise. The leaders in the community have to rise, the government, the business leaders, everybody has to respond to it. And the journalists, I mean, we had a great symbolic moment. Last year, with two journalists, one in the Philippines and one in Russia were given a Nobel Peace Prize. That was a really important moment for journalism. Something that hadn't happened in decades and I think it was a message to the world, like, wake up. But also we have to understand where the journalist fits in society and the journalist fits by giving people factual, accurate information and the people have to decide what to do with it. Well, some don't do a good job, I'm afraid to say. And my question to you, in a larger sense, over the past four or five years, with Trump testing the press in every way he could of propagating lies and misstatements and encouraging, I'll never forget Kellyanne Conway with alternate facts. Are you kidding me, alternate facts? My God, we have come 2,100 years and we can't agree on what a fact is, gee whiz. So anyway, my question is, in a larger sense, the journalist community in this country and maybe globally, has it done a good job? Would you lay any of the problems that we have been discussing in the decline of truth and democracy? Would you lay any of it on the doorstep of journalism as a profession, as an industry? I think we all have to look in the mirror and say what could we do better? So I'm not gonna say we're not accountable and we're not responsible for the things that have gone wrong in journalism and there's been a lot of that. But I also think there's a structural problem here with our focus, so we have a lot of consolidation. So it's all about profits and not about the journalism. I mean, really as an industry, I think journalism has lost its way and has turned into people sitting in bar rooms thinking about how much money they're gonna make and set up people out in their communities thinking how can they make it better? And I think we need to start there and refocus what journalism is and get people to participate in it. And you don't have to necessarily be a professional journalist, you can be a citizen journalist, however you can do it, there's lots of people like the sedition hunters who are running down the January 6th insurrectionists on the internet. These are often anonymous people. They're sort of like in this weird place between pseudo law enforcement and pseudo journalism. It's really a strange kind of thing, but they're taking videos and photographs from the insurrection, they're studying them very carefully, they're looking for other clues on the internet, try to identify who these people are, and then they're exposing those people. And sort of like a journalist would do, those people aren't arresting the insurrectionists, but what they're doing is they're making the world transparently know who these folks are and what they did. And then the next step is for the police and the judges to figure out what to do with them. So I think, I guess my answer would be there's a lot of great journalism, some of the best journalism I've ever seen in my entire life is happening now. And then there's also some of the worst, most strange, most destructive type of journalism. So there's not a binary on that, but we have to all kind of become accountable for what's happening here and journalists can help us get through this. Yeah, wow, we're in interesting times and you're in an interesting spot, aren't you? Because you're teaching these young journalists and feeding them out into the media. Very important that they go out with the right standards. So Tim, sometimes I feel that the press doesn't actually prioritize things. You and I for years have been talking about connecting the dots. And I think sometimes the press looks at raw meat and entertainment and let's excite the viewers, let's excite the sponsors because of the more viewers get excited, the more eyeballs the better the Nielsen ratings and thus the higher the advertising rates and money. And this is very troubling. And there are things that get lost. You know, it's like the new story of the week. And then the next week it's gone even though it's not really gone at all. One thing that struck me, by the way, and I think my 57 number applies to this one instead of what I said before, 57 candidates running for office, okay, were involved in the insurrection, they were there. They were in the building as insurrectionists, 57 people who were running for office this fall. And if you will remember, okay, article 14, that is amendment 14, section three says, if you were involved in an insurrection, you can't run for office. So a number of those people really are disqualified. And I am waiting to see the press lock on to that because there's no self-executing procedure for disqualifying them, except you know, the press falls in the place to raise the issue. If the press was screaming and squawking about it, they would have a really tough time in running for office when they were involved in the insurrection. So is the press getting the priorities right? Are they connecting the dots? Are they calling out the things they should call out? I'll go with Brett's comment that the press has never been better during these last four years and during these times. And yet at the same time, they've fallen horribly on their face. So it sounds like Charles Dickens. The best two of the times. Yeah, it's true. And you know, look at the Washington Post, look at their subscription rate has gone through the roof. The New York Times through the roof because people are interested in these issues and they're concerned about our democracy and they're concerned about, you know what they normally don't see as far as administration implement government. And in the last four years, that's what we saw five years. Excuse me, you know, the Trump administration. But I'd like to kind of just finish up on something. I know we moonwalk away from, you know, hampering with the First Amendment and how journalists are to conduct their business and their job, their profession, their career. We moonwalk away from it. At the same time, you know, I looked at the FCC's website today and it said the FCC is prohibited by law from engaging in censorship or infringement upon the First Amendment rights of the press. It is, comma, however, illegal for broadcasters who intentionally distort the news. And I submit to you that the reporting from Fox Entertainment about COVID-19 and its nature and its deadly nature and poo-pooing it as something not serious and the 2020 election, I submit to you that that was pure fabrication and distortion. And if the FCC does have regulatory powers, it's time to act. And if they don't feel like they have regulatory powers, then perhaps President Biden needs to knock on their door. Or it's time for the legislature, like social media, Facebook and Twitter. Maybe it's time to look at cable news and say, maybe we should include them in this regulatory oversight. Oh, okay. So we are completely out of time, Brett, but you get the last word. So what are your thoughts that you would like to leave with our audience? And how would you respond or agree with Tim? I think Tim's right that the government has a big role to play in this and that, you know, journalists don't charge people with crimes. Journalists tell people what happened and the police need to charge people with crimes. And then the crime needs to be tried in a court of law and that sort of thing needs to happen. And I'm not sure why it hasn't happened. I don't think you can blame the journalist for that. But I'll just, I'll end with a real optimistic note. I'll say our journalism classes that you each know are overflowing. We have a tremendous number of incredibly smart, engaged, dedicated, just bright people that are coming in and they're wanting to learn about journalism because they want to make a better future. And I think we have the potential to turn this around in our next generation of folks and we'll see where that leads. And the older generation like me, we need to support those people, get them in the right place and stand up for what we believe is the core of an American democracy and hope we can do that. Will get any disagreement on that? Except I would like to add that, you know, we have 50, 60 citizen journalists. So if you think of it, when you teach these students about journalism and expressing themselves on important public issues, you could mention us, we will make room for them, okay? Thank you. Yeah, let's do it. Yeah, I mean, absolutely. There's a tech Hawaii is a great example of a journalistic organization that's bringing kind of raw unfiltered, non-corporate discourse to the community. And that's, we need more of that. We need people that have these discussions and however we can get them, I think that's great. Thank you, Brett, for those words. And thank you, Tim, for joining us and making a special effort to do two shows in the same day. I appreciate that. But these are the times in which we live and we have to discuss these things and bring in all kinds of, may I say, opinions. Thanks very much, Tim, Brett. Aloha. Thank you.