 Okay, we're back with Community Matters. I'm Jay Fidel. It happens to be Friday at 10 p.m. and I mean it. I mean this show. I really mean it. This is about truth. Is there truth anymore? Julian Gorbach, assistant professor of journalism at UH Minoa, who thinks about this kind stuff all day. Is there truth anymore? Truth is struggling to breathe right now, I think, a little bit. Some of us are, I guess, we're all trying to fight for the truth, I mean a lot of us are. Maybe half of us. Calling this show objectivity in the age, oh the thought wars, objectivity in the age of Trump. That's scary, but it's okay because I'm scared anyway. Why do you call the show that? Why would I call the show that? Well, I mean I think there's a, you know, if we're talking about objectivity, there's a long standing idea that that should be a professional standard of journalism. But it's become a real problem at different times in our history, the notion of maintaining objectivity and even a question of whether that's a sound idea or credo for journalism. And I think this is one of those moments when we have to question whether it's working. I mean it really struck me the first time I saw it where the New York Times would say the president falsely claimed this, that and the other thing. The president said this and lied. And wow, and by the way it was a piece yesterday where earlier he was counted at five lies a day, public statements, now it's like 20 or 30 lies a day, but he's ramping up, he's ramping up to the midterm so he's lying more in order to confuse and deceive more people would be the argument. But how do you deal with lies like that? You just let them, you know, you let them go and you say, well we're going to do balance here? Or do you call them out as lies? I think you have to call them out as lies. I mean I think you're always, I think the notion of objectivity and what falls from there suggests that there's maybe two different things that stand as important journalistic principles here and on the one hand there's the idea that journalists should try and rise above their impulses to see things a certain way because they have certain pro-election, certain views that they come into every story with. Like I lean liberal, I don't have a problem saying that. So when I come into a certain story, I have a certain bias, if you will, to see it that way. I mean we might just call it a point of view because the word bias gets terribly thrown around. I study a lot the rise of Nazism and Hitler and so I may have a bias towards making connections between that era and this. The objective or subjective? I think that that endangers objectivity. I mean in other words, you could argue that the idea of objectivity for journalism is to try and recognize some of your pro-elections and rise above them and try and look at the facts coldly. The opposite credo I think or dictum that maybe we want to follow is, and this was a comment from Scott Simon once made at NPR, said the best journalism comes from somewhere and stands for something. It's just simply the idea of being a moral voice. What point of view? Well every journalist writing or speaking any message, any news, always has a point of view. Well we all have a point of view. The other thing is do we have a duty to sometimes stand up for what's right? Call it out. Yeah, I mean if you're, if it's 1930, you know, to take us out of the moment for a second and go to that 1930s era, if you're a New York Times foreign correspondent and you're sent to Berlin and it's 1935, do you report on this rise of Adolf Hitler with objectivity and this kind of toned down impartial language or do you clang the alarm and tell people there is a incredibly cruel, brutal, barbaric, dangerous force rising in Europe and that you might even be able to envision 80 million lives getting sucked into this terrible. I don't know why, but that reminds me of the statement after Charlottesville, you know, white supremacists and ordinary people, they both had their good and bad. Yeah, remember that? Yeah. Yeah, I mean and say, you know, really he's got to be called this. The question is, does all of this lie telling by the president of the United States and believed by a number of people, by many people, by the base believe it? It seems to me they believe it more all the time. The more lies, more outrageous lies and more, the more these, the base people believe it. Journalism has a duty to straighten that out. For example, for example, coming in on NPR, there was a story about, you know, Trump's increased rhetoric now over the immigrant caravan coming toward, OK, and he says, he said in his own words, he said, if they're going to throw stones, we're going to treat those stones as firearms. I'm going to fire back. Oh, my God. You know, there could easily be violence on the border over this. It's incendiary what he's saying. And he's trying to arouse the base because there's an election in a couple of days. But, you know, then and flip to the Democrats, the Democrats are not talking about immigration. They're talking about health care, which is, you know, ho-hum relative to a war on the border. So you say, why don't the Democrats and the press call Trump out about his remarks over immigration instead of doing, you know, fault Leroy on health care in the middle of a crisis? Isn't it the duty of the Democrats and the press to tell it like it is? Well, you know, what concerns me, I mean, sometimes you wonder how much they really understand these things. Sometimes you think maybe there's just a problem of common sense here. I'm a little concerned that the Democrats did the thing where they pay the political consultants who pour over the data and found these polls about polling really well on health care and thought, well, this is an argument we can win and let's do this. I don't understand how you can, on the one hand, say that the young vote is so important. And then, I mean, I teach students. I think my students don't understand health care policy particularly well and they're not facing a lot of bills for that. If I want to get my classroom full of students to get out and vote, I actually talk to them about the environment. I mean, I could talk to them about student loans or whatever. I mean, the economy is firing on all four cylinders right now. You also have to deal with that issue. But I mean, we never want to talk about the environment, right? And or the whole idea of the truth and basic integrity and democracy under assault. So yeah, I think a few people have made the effective argument that you've got to match blow by blow. And you can't kind of camouflage yourself or try to hide from the fight that they want to have. You've got to match the fight for what it is. So I mean, we're talking about kind of a duty of a journalist. And I don't know where that is. I mean, conventionally, the duty was to balance, be objective. Has the duty changed? Well, that's an interesting point that you make. Because maybe that's where you come to think of it. Maybe that's where we have two different things here. Because there's duty, and then there's the notion of professional standards. And maybe they're not the same thing. A long time ago, Walter Lippmann was one of the main voices that suggested that maybe objectivity, not in so many words, but essentially he introduced the argument that maybe objectivity is one way that we could create a professional standard for journalism. And that we could address a lot of the problems that journalism was having in 1919. So just pretty much exactly 100 years ago to this week, or the last couple of weeks when he was starting to do his first articles about this. But on the other hand, the idea of duty suggests a kind of moral imperative. So maybe objectivity is a professional standard, but the idea that a journalist has to also be a moral voice is a duty. And I think we're dealing with a paradox. I think we're dealing with two things that are always in tension with one another. Saying what's right and standing up for what's right is not always the same thing as kind of trying to play this detached, impartial referee of some kind. Because you're trying to play a referee of the facts, but you're trying to play right and wrong about what's morally right and wrong. Do you remember that blimp that caught on fire over New Jersey? Hindenburg, yeah. Yeah, Hindenburg. There was a journalist on early radio who was watching the thing go on fire. And he was watching people being cooked and jumping out of the cabin there. And it was an awful thing to watch. And I suppose there was a similar kind of phenomenon going on in 9-11, too, where a journalist would look up and see this really horrendous thing happening. And it would be reflected, of course, in his journalism, how could you not, as a human being, forget journalists, as a human being, react through the Hindenburg or the 9-11? So if I see, for example, the country coming apart, if I see children being shot at the border, if I see things that are morally outrageous, if I see things that threaten our lives together in this country, can I get a little excited? Yeah, I mean, I think that one thing that you're bringing up there is just the idea that both in our journalism, a minute ago we were talking about the Democrats and sort of what their election strategy should be. But I think in both cases, there is an imperative to match the white hot rhetoric or the terrible circumstances. To get back to the environment for a second, I see horrific things happening with the environment. I don't even hear them talk about it on cable news. I hear a lot of shrillness on cable news. But on some of the things, they're just not even on the playing field. They're not even talking about it. That's the most important issue facing humanity in the world. Well, I mean, there was reports now. We could debate whether the press got the science right. And we were sort of talking about that up and down the hallway in my building with some of the environmental reporters taking a close look. But there was this report that got buried in the press this week that 60%, more than half of the world's wildlife, has been wiped out since 1970. It barely got a headline. And I try to limit the amount of cable news I watch. But I can be willing to bet you that it got almost zero time on MSNBC or CNN or to talk about the Democrats. How much time did our great progressive, Bernie Sanders on the campaign trail, talk about the complete collapse of the ecosystem? I'm talking about climate change specifically, but the complete collapse of the extinction of species, what they call the sixth extinction, the idea that since the Ice Age, we are now creating within a generation the kind of event that, at a minimum, arguably what we've already done since 1970 would take five to 7 million years to recover from the damage we've done since 1970. That's a longer length of time than human beings can comprehend given that we live for 70 years. Well, human beings as a species may not live that much longer given the fact that we're going into the dark ages and hostility and hatred. And ultimately, that leads to war. But I do think that there is another thing going on. I mean, I think you brought up a bunch of things to unpack there. I mean, on the one hand, I think sometimes when I'm watching CNN, as maybe a partisan, if we're anti-Trump from the get-go and we turn it on, some of it may really register. Sometimes we may feel like they're getting too wound up. But if you're a nonpartisan, if you're someone is a bit confused, ambivalent, whatever, and you turn on CNN, and they're really amping it up, and it's not something that you particularly connect with, it seems to reaffirm this whole thing of the Trump derangement syndrome. So there is this issue of a measured response. But also, the other thing to unpack from what you were saying is that they create an outrage or a supposed outrage in one area. Maybe there are other areas, like with the environment, where they are creating outrages, but they're not talking about it, where we need to get outraged. So Trump is always setting the agenda. And that's a thing, right? In media studies, we talk about agenda setting, that we discovered and there's strong data now to back it up, evidence to back it up, that the media, they originally said the notion of agenda setting was the media can't tell you what to think, but they can tell you what to think about. Well, certainly the president can tell you, because he has such a bully pulpit, what to think about. But the press has to deal with that, has to set its own agenda. Well, one moderator, one newscaster on Fox News recently called Fox News a propaganda organ. I think that was a mistake. I think he was castigated for saying that. And after this break, Julian, I'm going to ask you a question I often ask myself. Do you watch Fox News? And if you do, or even if you don't, I like to know your views about it, where it fits in the firmament of news and journalism. Oh, we'll be right back after this break. Hello, my name is Stephanie Mock and I'm one of three hosts of Think Tech Hawaii's Hawaii Food and Farmers series. Our other hosts are Matt Johnson and Pamai 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. Hey, Stan the Energyman here on Think Tech Hawaii. And they won't let me do political commentary. So I'm stuck doing energy stuff, but I really like energy stuff. So I'm going to keep on doing it. So join me every Friday on Stan the Energyman at lunchtime, at noon, on my lunch hour. We're going to talk about everything energy, especially if it begins with the word hydrogen. We're going to definitely be talking about it. We'll talk about how we can make Hawaii cleaner, how we can make the world a better place, just basically save the planet. Even Miss America can't even talk about stuff like that anymore. We got it nailed down here. So we'll see you on Friday at noon with Stan the Energyman, aloha. Yes, community matters. And we're talking about thought wars, objectivity in the age of Trump with Assistant Professor Julian Gorbach of the journalism program at UH School of Communications. So we left them hanging with my cliffhanger. And so I'm going to press that question. Do you watch Fox News? Yeah, that's a tough question to me, Jay. You put me on the spot, because I teach in news literacy. And I mean, we wouldn't be doing our job. We wouldn't urge the students to read a variety of sources from a variety of different points of view. But I just found I find it increasingly hard to really spend a lot of time on the right, leaning between Breitbart and Fox, spend a lot of time watching it. I just feel like I know what the president's saying. I'm inundated by his speeches and sound bites of him. And I feel like I end up following it very closely. He has the bully pulpit. And then I know what Lindsey Graham is saying. I know what Brett Kavanaugh was saying. I feel like I've heard out a lot of the arguments. And I've heard out a lot of the facts. So I don't know. Maybe I'm not giving, because I don't tune in on Fox News all the time, the right-wing media, enough of a fair shake. But I will say this in my defense. Maybe it's kind of a weak one. People can make up their own mind. But I don't think I watch or read the left-leaning, or sometimes we call it the mainstream media, with a complete, like I just take it in like an empty vessel. I see, I feel like a lot of times I'm reading it for what's not there as much as what is there. A lot of things about The New York Times and The Washington Post and the main cable stations that are quote unquote left-leaning frustrate the hell out of me. And it's not so much a left-right issue. It's that I think they miss a lot of the really obvious story. I think there's a huge disconnect a lot of times between our political conversation and or just our public sphere conversation, if you want to call what we have a public sphere at this point and objective reality, the two are not at all in line. I mean, like the amount of time that left-leaning media outlets have spent talking about the right and not about the huge amount of the country that just doesn't participate at all or seems to be a drift. I mean, the fact is that, OK, to go back to this idea that I read a lot about the 30s and 40s, I think a lot of people know when we look at the history of Nazism, a lot of historians write books about the average German. What the hell was the average German doing during the rise of Nazism? In 20 or 30 years, historians are going to be looking pretty closely, if we survived this, are going to be looking pretty closely at what was the average American thinking? What was the average American doing? Because we only had, in the last election, it was like 26% voted for Trump, 26% voted against Trump. That left, like, 48% of the country just on the sidelines. And really, like, you think you can sit on the side? I mean, how much? This is what happens if you do. Yeah, I mean, do we call these people complicit? Do we call them collaborationists? I think just calling them apathetic, I don't think. They're ill-educated. We've forgotten civic education, and this is the price we're paying for it. They don't care. They don't know. They don't want to be involved. They don't realize this is social fabric, and democracy requires participation. They don't realize that. Part of this is not only have we neglected in the education, but by neglecting it as the story, by burying the lead here, missing the story, it's gotten worse and worse. So now, you try and engage a non-voter, a nihilist, or someone who voted for Gary Johnson or whatever. Their heels, and I've done it a lot, like on social media, their heels are as dug in as the deepest partisan. I mean, nobody talks about that. But you try and get somebody off of their position of why they voted for Gary Johnson and what they're going to do this time around or whatever. You're not going to find an easy person to change their mind. Their minds are made. If they decided not to vote or they decided to vote for Harambe in the last election, as much as we may disagree with that, their minds are as made up as the people who are chanting CNN sucks or whatever at the Trump things or the partisans that we see at the liberal things. Wow, it's a football game, and you have your loyalty, and your loyalty is unshakable. Even if you know at some level, and you're thinking that Trump is lying 20, 30 times a day trying to, you know, when Kellyanne Conway spoke in the course of the campaign, I want to tell you my personal experience. When I watched there, I couldn't stand it. It was like having bugs all over me. Now, I practiced law for a long time, you know, like 50 years, and I deposed a lot of people of deposition and in trial. And I got to find out that the species lies. People lie. They lie for a purpose. They lie for a bad agenda, even a good agenda, but they lie. And when they lie, you, the lawyer, who is like on the other side of that, you're concerned that the judge or the jury may be confused by the lie. So you react. I do anyway. I did for all those years. And when I saw Kellyanne Conway lying, I said, you know, I know she's lying. I know that, I can tell. But can the judge or the jury, that is the American people, the base, the voters, do they know? And it would so greatly concern me that they did not know that they would buy the lie. You know, they couldn't watch her. This was before the election. I could not watch her. And the same thing with Trump. But when he lies, I can't watch. And Fox News, I can't watch because I know they're lying. And the reason is I'm afraid that the obiter, the judge, the jury, the people will be confused. And it troubles me so greatly that they will accept the lie and double down on the lie the way he does. And I believe a lot of Trumpers out there, they actually increasingly believe the lies. So we have a deterioration of truth and therefore a deterioration of he. Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of disturbing questions there about why people lie in the first place and what the consequences of that are. There are specific reasons why Brett Kavanaugh either shaded the truth or lied, depending on how you want to look at it when he was on the stand about whether or not he has ever blacked out or about what the reference in his yearbook page to Renata being an alumnus of this girl, this high school girl, Renata, said, oh, well that was just because we were friends. That's why I called myself an alumnus of Renata. The inside joke about calling her a slut, if you don't mind me using that, was all over the yearbook. And the question that people didn't get to on cable news and as much as they prognosticated about it was why was he lying? He's not a dummy when it comes to illegal proceeding or which is somewhat like what the hearing was. And he made a calculated decision that it was better for him to, if you want to call it shade the truth or lie, than to come clean. As risky as his strategy might be to do that under oath, he looked at his chances and he said, well, if I come out and I tell the truth about the fact that maybe sometimes I blacked out, as many of his classmates have said he did at the time or must have, first of all, they can't prove I ever blacked out. They can't get in my head. And second of all, the Renata alumnus, I can get away with that. I'm never gonna get prosecuted for perjury for doing that. And if I admit it, what kind of a can of worms is that gonna open in terms of this proceeding? Pragmatic. Yeah, and then the other side of it is what's the defense or what's the, so the one question is why they lie and what the consequences are. Trump lies for different reasons, a different diatribe. But anyway, the other question is how you respond to that. When you talk about Kellyanne Conway and her alternative facts, you know, we've been fixated on the idea that if we fact check, if we pick out these individual things, if Trump says this thing and we prove it wrong on this website, Politifact, then we've done our duty. Well, the thing is if people, if demagogues are in the business of creating myths, like we talk about what the Nazis, the idea, the big lie, okay, that you create some massive myth. And if you bring people over the river, what was the Rubicon? You cross the Rubicon with these people. They'll believe anything you say. That's what's happened. Or what's effective is that you create a simple problem, a simple solution, this is another take on the big lie that Goebbels said, you create a simple problem, a simple solution, and you keep repeating that simple solution. So what's wrong with our economy? What's wrong with our society? This invasion of brown people from the South. And that's the problem, and you keep repeating that over and over. Well, to combat that by fact checking individual facts when it's a narrative is like a Maginot line, the way the French built a thing around the French border, and then the Germans just came around through Belgium. The Maginot line didn't work. Yeah, you just go around it. So, and it doesn't, so you can sit there trying to, it's like whack-a-mole, you're trying to hit all these individual facts, and you're missing the fact that he's managed to sell the story. Right, and the calling him to task is always later. So when he makes the lie, it has an effect. When somebody calls him out, it may not have the same effect, because it's later. And what troubles me, and I put this to you as my last question, because we're almost out of time, is it enough, is it enough, Julian, to counter-lice? Is it enough to say, when the president said this, he lied, or that, he lied? And then to count him, he had five lies today, and then 30 tomorrow, and all together, 13, 14, 1500 lies. I mean, are we supposed to be bowled over by the fact that it's 1500? That's a big number. That's like the species that have been exterminated. It's a big number, we can't really fully appreciate it. Is the press telling us the outrageous quality of a president lying? Do we get that, or is that the new normal? Where people say, oh, everybody lies, it's locker room talk, it's no big thing. He has to lie, that's his job, pragmatically speaking. Can the press do more about this? Well, I mean, this may sound like a strange response to it, but I wonder, at a lot of universities, they're shutting their philosophy departments. And we've gotten really weak as a country at just remembering some basic philosophical questions and issues. One of them would be, we talk about gun control, for example, and we never question, are people fundamentally good enough as just a human race that everybody should be entitled to a right to a gun? And we've spent so much time as liberals arguing regulation without saying, wait a minute, is there something about human nature? And then the Republicans say, oh, well, we need to deal with the mental health problem in this country. Well, maybe the problem is human nature, but to the point about lies with this, a simple philosophical point is that lots of little facts are not the same thing as the truth. I mean, we had a lot of uncomfortableness with Kellyanne Conway talking about alternative facts, but it gets a little bit blurry because on the other hand, we're not just interested in little fact here, little fact there, little fact there either. Just like Kellyanne Conway says, well, I can take the facts and do what I want with them. Well, on the side that's trying to combat this, we have to remember that it's not just about getting this fact, this fact, and this fact right, it's about the truth. The truth is not the same thing as an individual fact. We've gotta weave them together to explain what's really going on. And so even talking the way that I am now about some of the stuff about the basic philosophical grounding, we used to have these debates in the 30s and 40s and 50s when a lot of problems of our modern democracy emerged and we've forgotten to have them. A lot of times we act like the Constitution is engraved in stone and we forget some of the fundamental assumptions they had that A, led them to create the Constitution in the first place, and B, where maybe they got some of even those assumptions wrong by creating the system of the Electoral College or the way we created, as we're now seeing this issue of two senators in Wyoming and two senators in California. So there's a lot there that just philosophically we're not rising to the occasion of addressing some of the basic question. I don't think it has to be complicated. You don't have to be referring to Kant or any of these Heidegger. I don't even know my philosophy that well. But just basic questions of who are we? Where are we? What do we believe in? When Facebook would just allow anything to allow it to happen on its page, was it going back to the old beliefs of the Democrats of just let people argue it out and it'll work itself out? And is that the problem? Or are there all these other variables that are tilting things so that the worst of human nature is coming out in the internet? Is humankind perfectable or imperfectable? Can you fool all the people all the time? We're gonna find out soon. So before we leave, let's take a look at your book. You wrote a book about Ben Hecht. Here's the cover of the book. Tell us in one sentence what this book is about. Well, I mean, I think one of the central ideas is that Hecht had very dark views of what he call, what I call the soul of man. So this idea of human nature that I've been talking about, he thought that a lot of people might be motivated by the bigotry or dark impulses of prejudice and fear of the other. And that's really come to rear its head in the last few years. That if you could stir up the kind of tribalistic or bigotry, the animosity that we have, which is latent in us, that you could really create havoc within an undermined democratic system. Right, and using Facebook, you can accelerate that whole process. Thank you so much. We really appreciate you coming down. I want you to come down again. Can we talk about this all the time? Sure. Julian Gorbach, thank you so much. Yeah. Aloha. Thanks.