 History is here to help here on ThinkTech and to help us understand the relationship between democracy and the media is Julian Gorbach, associate professor at the School of Journalism and UH Minoa. Welcome to the show Julian. Glad to be back. Glad to be back. Glad to see you. So let's talk about it because this is really important going forward and I don't know if people truly understand the relationship of democracy and the media and the First Amendment. Can you talk about that from your advantage? Yeah, I mean, I would say that one of the things about it is that I like to, when I teach students and I try to get them talking and really genuinely understand it, I try to get them to just understand it on a on an everyday basic, kind of a big picture level. Like these words are big words, democracy, the First Amendment, the media, but in our lives they come into play all the time and we have to have a real concrete understanding of them. So like for example, when I teach just the 100 level course at UH on news literacy, the first things I do, well the first thing I do really when when they come into the class at the beginning of the semester is, and I mean this could be a little tricky, I've tried to set it up in different ways and I kind of have a strategy for it now that I think may work but I kind of try and get the students to argue, to debate or like just to argue. And I also ask them when I kind of set up that exercise to have at least one person in each group, when I break them into groups, be the observer of what has happened. And then once I've kind of run this exercise, we have a discussion about what just happened and I asked them not who won and you know they think the exercise while it's going on is about whatever it is they're arguing about. I know that the exercise is about they're arguing and so when it when we kind of run the exercise and we talk about it, I say what did you notice? Were you listening to each other? Were you presenting facts? Were you presenting evidence? I mean early in the semester it's a difficult exercise to set up right because everybody comes in and they want to if you just say okay everybody go talk to each other, let's do an exercise together. They're all meeting how do you do and where's the party tonight? It's beginning of the semester everybody's excited and friendly but what I really want to get them to do is is look at how well do we actually listen to each other and do we use facts and evidence when we talk? And then I ask them you know do you do that with your friends? Do you have a rational debate when you're deciding where you're going to go out at night or whenever any kind of conflict comes up among friends? Do you have a rational debate in your family? Do you have a rational debate when you get online on whatever platform you're using whether it's Snapchat or TikTok or whatever and they all kind of shake their heads. I mean to some degree it often ends up very polite in the classroom although this way I can I can jigger things with the way we do the exercise to change that but the overall point is I say look there's only 30 of you or 60 of you in the classroom right now and you were supposed to come to this decision or this rational conclusion about this thing how well does that go when we actually try and debate and argue and discuss or whatever and I said that's the concept of self-governance that's the concept of the democratic system at its heart right and really actually I'm wondering about that Julian you know you can have an argument on everything you can argue you know whatever turns you on at breakfast but we have to have it we have 330 million people in this country right and they have to have a common understanding about what brings them together as a country otherwise it's chaos and we have seen chaos emerging during the Trump administration where people you know sort of got off that bandwagon they no longer agree on what is important in the country they no longer agree on what the constitution the rule of law mean and so yes I agree we have to argue about specific public policy issues we have to keep um keep current keep updating ourselves on what's important uh you know in our society but the fundamentals that bring us together the mesh that connects us 330 million people and I see that as democracy I I see that as the the agreement to be together but but what is democracy JJ it's it's us getting together and if I if we can't do it with 30 students in a classroom who are all gregarious and happy to meet each other and and wanting to talk about what's going on that night and and friendly if they can't have a rational discussion a rational disagreement how well does that work with 330 million people and that's not even bringing in the the factor of of this communication being mediated through newspapers through cable through whatever so just what I try to get them to understand is that this is the concept we get a group of people together the idea of government of the people is literally just that it's nothing more fancy than that it's that we are responsible for our own governance right and then you add in the distortions and and and all of the things that happen once it gets mediated and that gets a lot of times that's amplifying the problems that we have innately with just having a disagreement with one another you know I I just what I'm asked the students to say is how much do you naturally take the media completely away from the picture for a second how much do you naturally over you know interrupt each other shout each other down not rely on the facts or ignore facts you know when they come in have a disagreement about what the facts really are now try that with 330 million people and try that with snapchat and facebook and you know all the social media platforms all the cable news networks all the algorithms and and and that's in a nutshell you know you'd ask me what's democracy and what's the media you know the idea of the press in in you know jefferson's times ideally was that it it facilitated this conversation of self-government and that's why he made that famous statement you know so many of these things become cliches that we forget what they mean but but that statement where he said you know would I have a government without the the press or the press without government I would I would prefer the press without government and I think what what Jefferson meant by that is if you have the press and the people you essentially have a democracy because you have the heart of government so they will work out the rest but if you just have a government and you don't have a free press you aren't going to have a democratic system so it's not a system that you prefer and you know what's happened is the technology has evolved but you know if if you even look at Jefferson's own life you know he had terrible relationships with the press in the in one of the things that I look at in a in a media history class is the era that we call the partisan press when things got incredibly vicious I mean it's it's really a pretty close analogy to the you know Fox News and MSNBC and CNN and and Republican versus Democrat situation where we have now where they were they were just at each other's throats by you know 1798-1800 and I I I kind of don't you know I don't try and speed spoon feed a lot of times I have an idea of what I want to get across for any given period or whatever some main points but I try not to spoon feed to that to the students I sort of say what you know where's the connection between this viciousness in 1798 and the incredible toxicity in our media today and the answer is in 1798 we weren't really used to the idea yet of having political parties and so the idea that they're of the loyal opposition the idea that there was this other political party and that they may disagree with you on all these fundamental principles of governance but but everybody agrees on you know the the the constitution and the democratic system in the United States that is what sustains civil discourse this idea of the loyal opposition and and we didn't have that yet in because we were such a new country and we have it now it you know then it hadn't really formed yet now it's fallen apart and you know we have we have the republicans and the democrats who are seeing each other as as like the way you would talk about a foreign enemy I mean let me but let me interrupt you sorry you know it's the whole notion of balanced reporting where you give credit as in your class to what the other side feels false equivalency yeah but sometimes you know the other side is lying right the other side is his view is built on lying right Donald Trump lied 30 000 times in the course of his administration and and his right now his whole view of the world is his view to his followers is based on the big lie um Vladimir Putin has state tv and he lies to them all day long about about Ukraine it's built on lies and so my question to you is can you should you do you want to have this kind of I yeah I'll listen to you when you know that one side is trying hard to tell the truth and the other side is trying hard to lie no I mean and and you know I think one of the things we can talk about today is that that this isn't my first rodeo with you jay where we get on and talk and to a large degree we we dug into this in previous conversations about these kind of old notions of objectivity and the press being fair and impartial and unbiased and you know this both sides is on that goes on in the media but you know let's pause for a second just to say that part of the nature of the problem right now is that um and I'm not saying I agree with this but if you're a Trump supporter and you believe Donald Trump and you hang on every word I mean we can debate what these people really think okay but but but there are certainly a lot of people who have listened to him and have bought this idea that the democrats rigged the election that they you know they would stop the steal that they stole that they buy into the big lie and if you actually believe that then you see the democrats as like the enemy and like all bets are off for what you're willing to do so I'm not justifying it I'm just saying that you know when we look to history and and and our democracy in this country there was a time right near the founding when the two sides saw each other as like the way we see foreign enemies and we are back to that now now as far as you know what you're saying about um I mean you know if you're if you're moving students I mean what I'm talking about students okay I'm talking about your students yeah that's the student and I'm sure you have this experience one student in the class is um is on the GOP side and the other is is on the you know democratic side um now and you want them to have to argue the points you want them to reason together come to sort of I hate to use the word consensus but some kind of a greed conclusion about the reality in terms of factor policy but but one of them is lying or operating on the basis of lies how can they come together if that is the case well you know that's an interesting aspect of this right when I said before imagine the Trump supporter who believes Donald Trump you know I I think one of the things that we have to take into account with this when we look at it is you know I was a reporter in the deep south for a while and there were times when I you know in in Louisiana there were times when I confronted people who had a real deep genuine contempt for the press and they saw themselves as patriotic Americans and that was when it dawned on me that not everybody in this country who grows up seeing themselves as a patriot necessarily loves a free press or the idea of everybody having a right to vote or all the things that we associate when we wave a flag or when we pledge allegiance whatever it is we do with being a patriotic American that there has always been a really retrograde really scary uh currents in the united states of people who have really no interest in democracy right now in my classroom you know I'd have to say before we get to the speed bump up of the students who are republican and the students who are democrats they all come in and they say the media is bias and we need an unbiased media we need the media to be just the facts and standard they all say that when I give them online forums or when I just let them talk in the first week and when you do do like now not only am I teaching a news history uh news literacy class when I'm teaching a history class I say to myself I introduce ideas like maybe that's not the most sophisticated way to think about the media and what it should be doing right now but I also hold my fire a little bit because I know that after we get to the partisan press we're pretty soon going to get to the civil war and it's kind of once they start seeing the black newspapers and the northern you know abolitionist anti-slavery newspapers and the pro-slavery you know pro secession newspapers and the fact that you know if you were a Yankee reporter and you tried to go down south you'd probably end up with a rope around your neck but if you wanted to go report down in Mississippi or Alabama in in the months leading up to the war anytime during the war you damn well better go undercover and send your dispatches through code a good friend of mine has a whole chapter in his book on civil war reporting about this um and then they begin to get oh there isn't always both sides to every and then another thing that I say to them is you know we went through this last year with the with the um with the when the pandemic was going on and there was all the vaccine issues going on and they all say just the facts just the facts Kelly and Conway said alternative facts we don't believe in alternative facts we want just the facts and I hate to to break this to everybody I mean I'm a good liberal like a lot of people okay but you know when we talk about alternative facts if let's let's take the vaccine for a second I said to them how many of you and they're all you know good kids at UH Manoa they've all been backs and I say how many of you believe in the vaccines believe the vaccines are safe they all raise their hands this is the kids often I have in a class I say how many of you have friends who are anti-va they all raise their hand and I say okay let's go around the room but I want each of you quickly to tell me what just the facts you're going to tell your friends about why they should take the vaccine we go to six different people seven different people doesn't matter every single person has grabs a different group of facts and organize a different way to say the fact is the vaccine is safe they want to say the vaccine being safe is or an effective is a fact god damn it but then how you interpret all the little facts how you put it together how you construct the argument it can really vary and some arguments are stronger than others and so now on the other hand when I go to the store do I know my way home do I know that I was born do I know that I was going to die like some facts are just facts right but we live in a world also where where you know tons of data tons of pieces of information that we have only have meaning when we drop them into a web of me and so it's you there's no such thing as just the facts generally at a certain point you know what I what I introduce students to early on is it you have to understand this about the media you're always going to have fact and forum right and fact is when it's just just the straight news we want you know there was a robbery blah blah blah forum is all of the space and we do as you know as older people who are so a mesh the media were well aware of this is the vast amount of space in our media system that is devoted to interpreting and debating those facts and you know and and of course you're going to say you know because I can see where you're coming from this is completely falling apart that you know now you have the the liberal media over here saying one thing and and Fox News and OAN and all these others and they just tune each other out and follow their own facts and form that's what we have and you know so you talk about facts about them the vaccines well it's been politicized and you know it's understandable how a lot of people are confused and it's it's too bad because it's a life and death issue and this this you know Trump has gone a long way to engender and enhance that confusion and that's that's the way autocracies work don't you connect that you don't you feel that in an autocracy you create the facts yourself and you create them for your own interest and it doesn't matter what the true facts are so the more autocratic the government is the more likely people are going to be confused or completely misinformed well it seems to me that that a lot of the problem is that we've you know we went through these painful stages of of self-regulation of the media when it came to newspaper right in the 1920s that's when we really uh the professionalization of journalism got to the point where by that by 1920 we had journalism schools you know we had the University of Missouri where I got my PhD was the first which established in 1908 and Pulitzer School at Columbia had been established by 1920 we had a whole bunch of them right and we had the the the guilds of you know the the you know the association of American editors and and and all of these established codes of conduct and there were big debates could you decertify people just like the way doctors or lawyers can be you know stripped of their licenses to practice can you and of course we can't do that because of the First Amendment but we also went through it with radio right we had to there's only so much space on the radio dial we had to figure out how to assign that in a fair equitable way that was good for the public right and and whether we arrived at the right things we had to do with movies right with the Hollywood code which was an enormous fight through the 30s and yet like we're just such a myopic society that we act like we have no history and when we get to the internet which is a new technology we act like we've never regulated the media before and we have these incredible debates that we get mired in that are stupid that we can't seem to get out of like there's a difference between the government's restraint of First Amendment which which Elon Musk doesn't seem to understand or at least he didn't in all of his first statements about about Twitter that the government has to be incredibly self-restrained by the First Amendment of just letting people say all kinds of things right but then companies have always mediated their content and one of the things that I was I mean I'd imagine you saw the January 6th hearings was that two days ago one of the things that I found most interesting it was just kind of a side thing but you had that audio of the guy on Twitter talking about the back and forth that they were seeing and I mean everybody acts like these these social media platforms are so massive and so impossible to control and monitor and you know it just is a machine and and it's an out of control machine and what can we do there's billions of people on Facebook it was really clear to me from that thing that they are watching those messaging you know that messaging back and forth very closely and we've certainly had social media in this political environment and these platforms long enough that these guys have a pretty clear idea maybe it's not like a newspaper or a cable channel or a Hollywood movie studio or a book publisher but they are curating their content they have say in what the character of their if they want to be a Chan and they want to have Nazis parading around it's like each of them has a park or a Starbucks cafe and they can make that as open and closed as they want if you don't want people in in full Nazi regalia walking into your Starbucks and hanging out at that counter you can throw them out because you're Starbucks you're not the American government okay which is restrained in what it does as well it should be and you know what Walter Ruffin said over a hundred years ago was there may come to a point where people and I think maybe he's being a bit optimistic here because if the people may break before we're able to correct the system but he said where people in a fit of temper are going to demand action or he said actually when congress in a fit of temper is going to come down on the media as an axe and the regulation of media is a is a subtle and difficult enterprise and it has to be handled carefully and we do not want it to get to the point where the government has to step in and regulate well here's a really this is a really important point Julian you know we have chaos we have misinformation we have disinformation not only from sources in the country but from sources out of the country trying to influence voters and public opinion in the country from an informational point of view we have chaos and it's getting worse and I you know I just wonder where the first amendment is these days and and where the media is these days given the chaos everybody is into his own thing his own self-interest and his own you know let's get some advertising here it's just remarkable to me that we we see all this news on television and it's all terrible and then we see happy happy commercials or we see this news on television talking about a civil war and then we see a movie that's all about violence and vengeance and it's really hard to draw the line and I think you know the FCC may not look at these issues and the government may not look at these issues but how do you fix the chaos you know doesn't the government have to step in in some way carefully within the least revised version of the first amendment and and bring things into order somehow you know Jay I mean I think that I guess the point I was trying to make a moment ago is that we we can't forget that certain norms are still there like some of these major media platforms Facebook Twitter the idea that you know that we live in this brave new world and they can't control the content that goes on there I think we need to be seeing the end of that that being said that doesn't necessarily mean the opposite of true that the that the the internet in some ways isn't uncontrollable and incredibly dangerous and I don't have answers for some of this like one of the things that I find really disturbing about the July 4th hearing and it's funny because this is an idea that that to a large extent you and I were talking about three or four years ago when we talked about how politics is to a large extent psychological and often feeds into the very dark parts of not just the individual psyche but the but the dark parts of the collective psyche something we saw with noxious where you saw society god Matt and there's really no political explanation for Nazism it's a it's a dark site psychological one but I would say with the with the July 4th thing what we mean the January 6th thing no the July 4th massacre what you saw from that kids social media postings is that psychopaths people who are homicidal get together and network now that the that the internet is not just a networking tool for people like you and me to have a zoom chat but for people for people who are killers or are really bent can now seek each other out in a way that they couldn't before the internet existed and I think a lot of the craziness that we're seeing online at all kinds of gradations when people were just a bit politically extreme the people who are getting on there talking about large capacity magazines and posting snuff films to each other is is what we're reckoning with with the networking the incredible networking power of an internet you know what can the you know the press the media do what can the government do how are we going to bring this back to some sort of arrangement which keeps the country safe an arrangement which keeps the country as a democracy because I think those are threat right now the country is not is not safe the government is broken and thus the democracy is broken what can we do and that includes you and me it includes the media includes the government I don't know Jay I mean you know I I I don't have an answer on some sort of a programmatic theoretical way except to underscore maybe what I was saying is that this is not our first rodeo with self-regulation right um this is you know there are ways that these you know that these these these huge tech platforms have to see themselves as media platforms and we have to I mean a lot of the problem I have and this is why I'm saying it's not theoretical it's not programmatic is we have to stop having stupid debates for hours and you know the the part of the press that is functioning needs to get a little better at looking at the facts and letting some oxygen in the room so it's not the five people that we're seeing on msnbc all day every day like spend some more money and have some smarter people or some different people come in people like you and me that can come in with a different idea because like why are we still stuck in the confusion of the difference between first amendment restraints and the fact that these companies can do more and that's just one example okay there are things about the abortion debate about the gun debate about joe biden's management and the arguments within the democratic party um where there are just enormous blind spots and factual spots in that forum part you know i was saying fact and forum in the commentary part and and there's a lot of repetition of what they say over and over and a lot of like kind of rubbernecking about you know stuff about donald trump i mean i was thinking yesterday with the with the um the the uh january six hearings that we seem to be stuck in this in this really scary stage where if you guys remember the uh 1984 you know the end of 1984 where he says how many fingers that i have up and he's holding up four but he wants the guy to say five or maybe it's the other way around but but we seem to be stuck in a thing where the liberal media the mainstream media if you want to call it that is saying we still have four fingers up right like we're we're going like the january six uh hearings have introduced a tremendous amount of really important fresh information i don't know where the justice department is i really don't and i don't know where their communication is i mean and i think it's dangerous okay but having said that we the rest of us seem to be in this kind of pattern where a lot of the repetition is saying these are four fingers aren't they we don't have five do we and we're and meanwhile we're getting gas lit and and it's almost like you can feel the collective sanity the resistance of saying it's four fingers this is four fingers is getting harder and harder to do i mean if you think about how much of the january sixth hearing of the last one was just devoted to trying to remind the public and reassure those of us who have been following every single hearing that four fingers is in fact four fingers we're spending a lot of time on and one of the reasons is that the actual democratic side the Nancy Pelosi's the Chuck Schumer's the Joe Biden's there's been failure there that we have an address you know when you look at i mean and i don't i know this is facile and it's over the top drama to to talk about the hitler era and the 30s and world war two but you know i recently read the rise and fall of the third right i wrote a book uh in world war two era stuff the depth of the parallels and the reasons for the parallels between the 1930s and 2022 are terrifying and a lot of that had to do with pushback from the pro-democratic forces that wasn't forceful enough to counter the kind of incredible aggression that hitler brought to you know the incredible force that hitler brought to bear you know hitler just said i mean Trump said something interesting after the the early primaries with the republican field he said to either a quarter of a colleague they're weak Marco Rubio you know Ted Cruz Jeff Bush they're weak and i'm going to break them and i think that these people especially Trump you know who kind of group with this sort of mobster type of puff new york scene looks at Joe Biden and looks at that democratic leadership and says they are weak and i am going to break them and and you know we could get into that and look i'm not on the left okay but we need to have a serious conversation if you're whether you're everything from a former republican who's become a never trump or to you know just mainstream i mean i just voted for the mainstream democratic going all the way back when i started being able to vote i never was on the left side of whatever i always was a mainstream democrat and we both but for those of us who are there many of us and you can see it in the polling about Biden are incredibly frustrated by the way they're managing it and yet when i turned on my msnbc you know to a lesser extent i mean i think that the papers the washington post have been the new york times have been a bit better but we are not as a democratic party or as a non-trump part of the party we are not doing what we need to do to figure our stuff out okay we'll have to leave it there truly you make some you make some really powerful points and i would like to continue this conversation with you i'd also like to place it against the backdrop of the most important story of our lifetimes which you told me about last time we talked which is climate change and the irony is that here we are talking about things that really don't hold a candle to climate change in terms of an existential threat so julian it's so nice to talk to you we'll do it again we'll set it up again thank you very much today aloha thank you so much for watching think tech hawaii if you like what we do please like us and click the subscribe button on youtube and the follow button on vimeo you can also follow us on facebook instagram twitter and linked in and donate to us at think tech hawaii dot com mahalo