 Think, Tech-Away, civil engagement lives here. Community Matter is beginning the day on a Friday. I'm Jay Fidel. You know, for years we followed HPR. We, me, I was on HPR for eight years, and therefore I have followed it ever since. You know, I mainline on HPR. And one of the guys on HPR that I greatly admire, I mean, for years and years is Chris Vander Cook, who participated as a host in the conversation every day. And he's here with us now. I'm so happy to see his face. Thanks for having me. Yeah, great to have you. So tell us about, you know, your, give us a bio. How about that? A bio, Chris? I'm a guitar player and in order to stay alive, I started working in television news in the 70s as a news photographer. And stayed with that for the better part of 15 years. That's what brought me to Hawaii, where I started working as a cameraman at Channel 2. I later became a show producer at Channel 2. And then I did that for a while at Channel 9 as well. Worked in government in various capacities and then ended up quite by accident as a co-host to Beth Ann Kozlovich on a new program that was started in 2011 called The Conversation. A program being based on the premise that there's more, there's something to be added to what we get in our day-to-day news consumption and that that gap might well be filled by talking to people for a little while, you know, an extended conversation. And our format was that each co-host would do interviews of roughly eight minutes in length with people of our choice. And in the early first several years, Beth Ann, executive producer of the show, handled more the news and public affairs subject matter and I dealt with arts and culture and kind of expanded that a little bit into environment and science. And then in the last year or so, my last year or so on the program, I started moving more into the news public affairs arena. Well, you know a lot about that, so it wouldn't be hard for you. Yeah, I couldn't draw on a certain amount of background for that. But the premise I thought really paid off, which was that, you know, let's get the guy in here and find out what he's got to say. Yeah. You know, and not really, I would never prepare interviews or prepare questions. He would sometimes be sort of put off when they'd say, what are you going to ask me? I'd say, I don't know, you know, let's just start talking. But I think there's a value to it. It'll find its way. Much like this program is a matter of fact. Of course, yeah. Well, I mean, you could be describing think tech with all of that. Yeah, yeah. But you know, it works. And I like particularly the live element because, you know, this is coming out unedited. And trying to avoid, at the same time, being an intrusive interview in terms of, well, this is my point of view. It's impossible to do that, as you've probably learned in here. You have to loosen up a little bit and actually express yourself. Yeah, yeah. But you know, you don't want to sort of, there's a fine line. You don't want to dominate the opinion side of the show. Exactly. Exactly. You know, you have to sort of find out what people have to say and not necessarily, you know, debate it. So that, you know, you want, in a way, a format that can allow people to say, you know, global warming is a complete hoax and, you know, whatever. You can't let that happen. It's like, well, OK, you know. Sometimes you have to speak up, you know, on Earth. Makes you say that, you know? Yeah, right. But that's kind of what, when we started talking about doing this program, got us going. You know, the whole idea of, OK, how do you decide what's true? You know, there's a thing that's happened in recent years with both science and journalism, both of which are, you know, vocations that have you following a fairly strict regimen as to what's true and what ain't. And it used to be, you know, that once I read something in The New York Times, I knew that, you know, that he or she had made some phone calls and corroborated what was that. So that's pretty good information as of today. And science with the scientific method is so rigorous that the thought of doubting a scientific conclusion when I was coming up was unthinkable. Yeah, yeah. But now people do it. In fact, an example comes to mind in this morning's New York Times. There's a piece about Rosenstein, OK, in the Department of Justice. Right. The deputy AG now. Yeah, yeah. And he was, the Times reported that he said that he wanted to do, to tap or record, record Trump's conversations at some point in time. I mean, it's sub-silentio, I think, I'm not sure. And they reported that. And that's the Times. And as you, the Times has a lot of credibility with me. Yeah. I mainline on the Times, too. It's my hometown paper, right? Me, too, yeah. And so, but this morning, Rosenstein reported the Times was wrong and he took them up on it. That's why I find that very interesting that the Times, you know, and I tell you the truth between the two, I'll believe Rosenstein. He's a man who's demonstrated his courage and, you know, his character. So the Times got it wrong. So even the Times, Chris, gets it wrong. Well, of course they do. Of course, any journalistic operation does. It's, you know, you're facing a daily deadline. That's why you have a corrections page. What we've seen in the last, how long ago was Janet Cook? Remember Janet Cook with the Washington Post? She had won a Pulitzer Prize. Later found out to have completely faked her stories. The New York Times had won like that, too, if you remember, about 10 years ago. And then they had, yeah, I can't remember the name of the guy at the Times, but the Washington Post, New York Times, were, you know, roundly discredited. Long about that same time, around 10 years ago, CBS got discredited. Dan Rather got dumped. And the story that he was working on, which was what was George W. Bush actually doing during his period of National Guard service, got completely overlooked. You know, that never, that question that they were setting out to answer never got answered because CBS rushed to air with an uncorrelated interview, an interview that was later retracted. So even the best producers getting trouble. But, you know, if you were, let's put on a conspiracy theory hat for a minute. If you're on the far right, what was your fondest dream 10 or 15 years ago discrediting the Washington Post, the New York Times, and CBS News? A miracle. It's happened. Like a strike in bowling. Hallelujah. But, and, you know, fake news is not new. Let's think for a moment about William Randolph Hearst and the war he started, you know. There's a great line in the movie that's a thinly veiled caricature of William Randolph Hearst's Citizen Kane, in which Kane, the newspaper editor, says to his people, you know, don't you let guys, if you guys need a war, let me worry about that. I'll give you the war, you know, which is why Hearst... The tail that wagged the dog. I'll create it for you. Yeah, yeah. So manipulation of media is nothing new. Mistakes in media. But it's different now, isn't it? Tell me you agree. It's different now than it's ever been. Isn't that right? It's frightening. And we are rapidly heading toward the point where in the Trump second term, journalists are going to be, you know, facing a lot of the same threats to their existence, to their careers that they do in the kind of countries we've always felt superior to. So let me see if you can reconcile this. Washington Post two days ago, a story about the dramatic increase in students of journalism. And in fact, it's happened here at UH. That's happened across the mainland recently in the last few months, safe with a full term. All these kids are signing up to take journalism as a course and as a major and as a graduate program. And, you know, I mean, the superficial analysis would be, they are somehow encouraged by what Trump is doing. They're siding with the underdog. They're finding courage perhaps they wouldn't find in another time. Something is changing, Chris? Good, good. Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Right? That's, you know, that's how journalism has worked for a very long time. And without that critical institution, society's in a lot of trouble. And we will be in that almost inevitable Trump second term that I see coming. Well, it's scary that, and this is kind of a metric of how powerful he is and how he feels when he tweets on a given day and how it all falls into his strategy or non-strategy as the case may be that he would attack the press. You know, slow news day, let's attack the press. I get attacked, I attack the press. Attack the messenger. That's what it amounts to, no? Well, here's an example taken from the Woodward book, which I'm about halfway through. Fear. Well, no, it's apt. Perfect title. Perfect title, no question. And I had forgotten this, but if you look at, with the judgment of a responsible historian over the year 2016, one of the top stories of the entire year would be that the intelligence community came together as rarely, if ever before, to say we have got proof, chapter and verse, Russian interference in the election, trying to sway the election. We've got it, you know. This is, you know, intelligence community has always been extremely cautious, right? There's no caution aside. We've got the story. An hour later, the Access Hollywood tape came out. So, you know, it used to be my task to decide what national, international stories went into the... This is for the conversation. You know, this was back when I was a producer of local news programming for television. In Hawaii, as in many places, the six o'clock is your local news, and then in the 10 o'clock, you integrate everything else. So, you trim down your local stories, your lead might be a local story, if it's a big story, or it might be... A national story. A national story. Suppose you were producing the 10 o'clock news that night, you've got 12 minute news hole to get everything in, and what are your choices? I've got Trump saying the following, the Access Hollywood tape and Hollywood tape, Access Halloween, right? And I've got this report from the intelligence community of Russian interference in the election. Well, one of them is a fat piece of paper that somebody handed you in a news conference. The other is a salacious... Salacious is really popular. So, everybody in his right mind led the news, as I'm ashamed to say I would have that night with the Access Hollywood tape. I doubt if I would even have put in the intelligence report, I would love to see papers, front pages from the day after, that showed how that happened, where they got place. But the point is, now the release of that intelligence community report is probably vastly more important than his stupid comments to what's his name in the trailer. But, if you are serving the news consumer, if I go to my boss, a news director, and say, listen, I got two stories, one of them is this, and one of them is that, I'm not sure what to put on the top of the newscast. He would say, are you nuts? Salacious, it's easy. What, are you kidding me? You know, we gotta take a break, but I just wanna tell you, one of our hosts who is a very excellent host, I'm a real professional, she's American, but she was a host in China and Hong Kong and Taiwan for years, and she did a great series. It was about women, mostly in women issues, and one of the shows she did was about prostitution here in Hawaii during World War II, okay? And it was an intellectual approach to the subject, but the title of the show, and titles count, right? Title of the show was something about prostitution in Hawaii during World War II. It's one of our top shows. This was years and years ago. It was like three years ago. Everybody wants to see this. So it's not just the producers, it's the people who consume that want this sort of thing. And that is relevant on a political level too, with politics and the Republicans and the red states. And when we come back from this break, I wanna talk more about that. Chris Vander Cook, he's here with us. We can take a break. Hello, my name is Stephanie Mock, and I'm one of three hosts of Think Tech Hawaii's Hawaii Food and Farmer series. Our other hosts are Matt Johnson and Pomai Weigert. And we talk to those who are in the fields and behind the scenes of our local food system. We talk to farmers, chefs, restaurateurs, and more to learn more about what goes into sustainable agriculture here in Hawaii. We are on a Thursdays at 4 p.m., and we hope we'll see you next time. Hello, and welcome to Out of the Comfort Zone. I am your villainous host, RB Kelly. Today we are playing Two Truths and a Lie, and I will tell you two truths, and you will tell me which one is the lie. Truth number one, this is a real mustache. Truth number two, I want you to watch my show on Tuesdays at 1 p.m. So tune in and let me know which is the truth and which is the lie. I'm RB Kelly with Out of the Comfort Zone and show up next Tuesday to see my mustache live. In case you forgot, and I'm not implying you did forget, but I want to make it clear that's Chris Vanderkirk. Chris, say hi. Hello. He's our host. I guess today we are so happy to have him here, even though he is a host, by nature. Yeah, I guess, yeah. So you wanted to make a point about salaciousness. Every, I think it's on a three month cycle, maybe a six month cycle. In television news, where I used to work, you have your ratings period. You have the book, May, and I should remember this, but anyway, during ratings, that's when everybody does the Nielsen diary and you find out what your percentages are of who's watching your show. So the news department of any television news operation is under a certain amount of pressure to give us some good stuff for ratings. What do you got for ratings? The discussion starts a few weeks before you get into the book, and but all your reporters are expected to come up with something, you know, attention getting so that there's been promotions department can promote tonight on the news. I guarantee you, it's become such a cliche during ratings, prostitution and like key. Oh my God, and then you have these like surveillance shots of, you know, with your head cut off, the short skirts and the dim lights and you know, and all this kind of thing. And it's like, it might not, there might not been any change in the law or any real change in the situation. No real news. But it's like, oh my gosh. We got footage. Yeah, yeah, and so, you know, as I said, I was a cameraman, so it just becomes this cliche, is like, I'm gonna have to slip down to like a key, sit in my car and get these little surveillance. It's satisfying these salacious news consumer, you know, but you can't entirely rule that out. I mean, was the access Hollywood story worth reporting, was this, did this go to the character of the man who's running for president of the United States? Of course. Yes. It does. It's very interesting because it has outrage. Yeah. You know, you tend to, you know, re-react with outrage. What I thought was so interesting is that his response essentially won the day. This was just before the election and he doused, you know, any attack from that story completely. You know, why? Because every man in the country said they were put for the race of God. Everybody's putting in a locker room, yeah. Yeah, you know, it's unfortunately one of the flaws of the American male, you know, that sort of boastfulness. So I think an awful lot of people said, well, yeah, as they're saying now, with Kavanaugh. Yeah. You know, hey, well, yeah. What about Kavanaugh? You know, the Me Too movement is coming on to that. There are a lot of women out there who, by the way of the surveys, they've turned their vote against Kavanaugh, including, you know, some Republicans on the committee. I think may turn their vote against Kavanaugh. And it's not clear exactly what happened yet. And the charge itself is having a huge effect. And my question to you is, is the media, you know, overblowing this charge? You know, the problem with that story is that I don't know how you're going to prove yay or nay as to what happened. And you do want an accusation like that to meet a pretty rigid legal standard. You're talking about an accusation of a crime. That said, as a friend of mine from high school, in fact, who's now a university professor, just put a post up this morning saying, you know, this thing of saying I was in high school and that doesn't reflect the real me, it doesn't wash with me, because he said a lot of my friends from high school are still my friends, and their basic character is very much the same as it was back then. And high school is the time when your most vivid memories are formed. That's when you fall in love with the music that you fall in love with. That's when you have your first romantic encounters. You know, you don't forget. Now, you remember your first date? You remember your first kiss? You certainly would remember. You could say where and when, can't you? And you would remember an attempted sexual assault where your buddy had to drag you off. Yeah, yeah. But here's the thing that is also, this is a little bit of a tangent, but I think it's something that's worth saying in terms of the state of modern journalism. We always, you know, in that field, we're always told get both sides, you know? I couldn't come in and say, I got the story about this guy who's suing the state for whatever, you know, any decent producer, editor says, fine, I don't know what the state says. You know, ask him. So that's responsible journalism, get both sides, right? What if the story is global warming and you do a little split screen with, on the left, a Nobel laureate talking about the reality of global warming and on the other side of the split screen, an imbecile. You know, a complete... And you give him equal treatment. Balance, balance. And I say to that, that's not good reporting. I say that too, you know, and I've had this discussion with a number of reporters is like, well, you know, what if the other side is a complete nitwit? I don't know what the hell he's talking about. Right? You know, you just elevated said nitwit. So you have to make a judgment call. You must make a judgment call. Yeah, I guess. I'm not saying I know the answer to that because you can't just sort of... And I think that, for instance, NPR News is falling into this trap of being so patently an anti-Trump organization that it's losing its value. It's becoming the Fox News of the left. And, you know, because Fox News is so patently, you know, bought and paid for, doesn't mean that you respond by, you know, being completely the other way around. So let me take a tangent off that. All right. Say, how do I deal with the Fox News problem? Because there's a lot of people who suck up the Fox News, who believe everything Fox News says, and they don't recognize or agree that it is an instrument of Donald Trump, which I believe it is. But how does the press properly respond? I mean, the responsible press to what's happening in Fox News, because you don't want is this, you know, dedicated, committed news organization that spends all its time supporting him, and then, you know, you're fair and balanced on the other side, but you're having much less effect. How do we balance that in a free society? Well, we, you know, we who are supporting what we consider our notions of a free society have been completely overwhelmed by the sheer momentum of the fake news movement. And, yeah, there is fake news. It's called Fox News. Fox News, Fox Fake, all the same. Yes. But, and to this date, legitimate media have been completely knocked off balance. Look at the difficulty that all the media have had with the simple three-letter word, lie. Yesterday, the president told a lie. They don't quite put it that way to this day. Times does. They'll say, the president falsely stated this. That's as close as they'll come. Usually, yeah. But it was pulling teeth to get them there, and it's pulling teeth to get everybody there, because, you know, we're just not ready for this. I mean, when Nixon lied, when Reagan lied, when Clinton lied, it took you a few days to figure that out. We never called it. We never called it. Well, but it also, it wasn't something that you could tell within five minutes was a lie. You had to kind of chase it down, and, you know, he is the president, and let's give him the benefit of the doubt, and then, you know, and then five days later, in the lower right-hand corner on page 12 would be, yeah, that was a lie, you know. But again, it wouldn't use that language. So I wanna, we have two minutes left. Okay. Let's, I wanna ask you one thing. And this is a, it's hard, for me, it's hard anyway. So there's this article in The Times where they say there's plenty of evidence to suggest that Trump was not only, he was eliciting the Russians to help him. He was eliciting the Russians to meddle in the election. That goes a step further. And then they start this article. And the article was so long, Chris, I could not finish it. It went on and on and on, and it was reporting meetings, conversations, letters, email, events, that you had to get journalistic evidence for. It had to be backed up. And it's The Times, which has hopefully a high standard. I mean, reputedly a high standard about this, went on and on and on. And it was more information than we ever heard from any government organization, including the FBI, who is beleaguered, including the NSA, CIA, who was beleaguered. And so here's The Times telling us in detail what would come out in court, the evidence. And I say to myself, there's a role change here. That not only do we want the press to protect our democracy, we want the press to tell us things that nobody else can or will. This is new, isn't it? This is really remarkable, isn't it? It's no different from, say, Pentagon Papers. I guess so. Go for it kind of thing. The press gets it, the press believes it. Go for it. You know, I watched the Steven Spielberg movie about the release of the Pentagon Papers presented as a journalistic triumph, which it was. And as the movie ends, they're just starting to, the Watergate break-in is the last shot in the movie. Yeah, right, I remember. But I remember thinking, with great sadness, that the whole process that is described in that movie about the Washington Post and the New York Times releasing the Pentagon Papers, that could not happen today. We are headed toward a climate of repression where that's going to be a fond memory. And I don't think it could happen anymore. The template, you know, you're immediately accused of exaggeration when you make this analogy. But the fact is that the template for all this was created in the 1930s by one, Joseph Goebbels, propaganda minister for the National Socialist Party in Germany. That's where the big lie comes from. That's where, you know, and that had roots going way back in Machiavelli and all kinds of other thinkers through that. But the truth doesn't matter. The fact is that times could produce an article that just said everything wrong with what's going on. And every liberal in the country would read it and go tut, tut, tut, and it wouldn't mean a thing. We're past that. Yeah, we're in a different past now. If it takes the form of a long newspaper article, go ahead and print it, I don't care. Yeah, and you mentioned Goebbels. I guess I do have one more question, you know. Goebbels are master of propaganda. And I was going to ask you, I even wrote it down to ask you, how sophisticated is Trump on the media and how does that affect things in the development, the evolution of our democracy? He has, I just cannot put sophisticated and him in the same. I understand. One of the things that comes out in all the accounts of life inside the White House, including the Woodward book, which I'm halfway through, is that this guy is usually the dumbest guy in the room and is not a deep thinker. You can tell from the way he uses words, he just doesn't think in any kind of multi-layered manner. What he does is operate on a kind of instinct, very much part of, he's very much a reflection of his mentor Roy Cohn, the former henchman of Joe McCarthy. Who would basically said, let him say what they're gonna say about you, screw him, just keep on moving down that road, and it has worked for him. What's to die in at this point? And you and I will have further thoughts about this as he continues to do that. I don't know, that might be all the thoughts I've got, Jay. No, but you'll be re-stimulated by what happens now. Well, just won't try. You'll come back and we'll examine this from a number of points of view. Sounds good. That's Chris Vandercourt. Thank you so much for coming down. Thanks, Jay. Aloha. All right.