 Good afternoon and welcome to Trump Week. I'm your guest host Carl Kempanya. Today we're going to talk about media. Today we're going to talk about news and fake news in particular in this era of Trump. So that's really where we're going to go. We're going to discuss a number of different issues with regards to I guess truth and fact, maybe not truth as much as fact, and how we take in the information and some of the challenges that we have before us within this, I guess, era of Trump that we have. Problematic in many ways. And to really help me understand this, actually I'm thrilled to welcome to the show Mr. Brett Obegard, who is, well I'll let him explain everything that he is, but I'm quite thrilled. Coming from the University of Hawaii Department of Communications to talk with us about journalism and what that means with regards to media in this time of Trump. So welcome to the show, Brett. I know you've been on other shows before here with Jay. First time we're meeting and talking, but I greatly appreciate the opportunity to learn what I can. Well, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Excellent. So okay, media in the era of Trump, what we've got is a lot of disparate information all over the place. We've got a lot of facts and non-facts, issues that people are having a hard time really understanding, or really knowing where to turn and what to believe. And I think that's the biggest problem we have. I personally think that that's by design. I think that's being done intentionally to confuse us, so therefore we can't get in the way. That's my opinion. If you would, first of all, start by telling us and this audience about yourself, about what you do, and then we'll jump in to what it really means with regards to media today and maybe as we think forward. So tell us a bit about yourself. Okay, well, I'm an associate professor at the University of Hawaii, and I teach journalism classes, including the capstone journalism class. And my research expertise is in media technologies, so I'm really interested in the medium and how different messages get changed by the medium. Okay, excellent. Okay, so I would imagine then you spend time working on social media. Social media is not my expertise, but I work mostly with mobile media. Mobile media. Yeah, and social media is a whole different thing. But I am familiar with it and I do understand the basics of it. Alright, so as far as mobile media, help me understand what you mean there. Well, in 2007 we had this miraculous device that came into our consciousness, the iPhone, that basically changed the way people communicate in dramatic ways. It's the fastest-diffusing technology, communication technology in human history, the smartphone is. The smartphone along with all of the various applications out there that provide the opportunity to do real-time, this is what's happening with my camera phone. Right, but I mean just the hardware. Okay, yeah. People have, like you have a phone in your pocket. Yeah. One in mine. Probably everybody watching has one in theirs. That's right. And it's really changed a lot about humanity. Okay, I think it has. And it's affected the way even we understand politics too, in the sense that things are crunched down into these 140-character messages or Facebook posts or whatever that really aren't vetted in the way they were before. And before the smartphone there wasn't easy access to social media. Like think if you had to go to your desktop computer and log into Facebook and do it and most people wouldn't do that. So if you had a thought that you can condense into 140 characters but had to run across town to get to your desktop in order to type a thought in, you're not going to do that very often. And the people didn't. Yeah. And what changed it was the smartphone. Yeah, and all of a sudden everything is okay and I'm going to comment on this. Here's my food picture, here's my rant, here's whatever, whatever my selfie. I tend to do more rants than food pictures myself. But I have some food pictures and family. Yeah. All right, so excellent. So okay, let's get a different context in here. Before the show you and I were talking about a range of things but one of the things that came up was the idea of journalistic ideology and specifically as the overarching thought with integrity as well. That's one of the biggest challenges that I think we have right now is what we've got is a president and an entire party that seems to be talking about, not to always make everything about this party versus that party but it seems to be one party and one president in particular who is pushing this idea of what's fake news versus not fake news. And that's only muddying up what was already a confusion landscape of what's going on in the world. So with that in mind, what are some thoughts that you have or let's discuss this idea of journalistic integrity and ideology. What can you tell us from a university perspective anyway with regards to this? Well, I'll step back just a bit and say that the Republican Party for the most part has not chanted fake news at people but they have not stood up to Trump either. So I think it's a little bit unfair to put them in the same ballpark. Now they're complicit in a lot of ways but I would say that they're not doing the same kind of bullying tactics for the most part. There are some people like in Montana, you had the legislator who body slammed a reporter and these kinds of things have happened and they're definitely concerning but I would say for the most part the Republican Party is more guilty of being complicit. And it's been a growing thing. What I hear echoed in the back of my mind is mainstream media being like an evil thing. And most of them don't say that out loud. They may think it or they may support it. But Trump is a completely different character. He has continually surprised me. I've never seen anything like him in American history. You see characters like him all the time in Banana Republics and dictatorships around the world. But before he was elected I truly thought America would never allow something like this to happen and now here he is. So we have to deal with him. Exactly. Well in many ways, in many interpretations of it, that was the purpose of the Electoral College. The purpose of the Electoral College was to prevent someone quite like this from getting through. But clearly going back to the idea of ideology there was a specific ideology that was willing to allow it. Yeah, I mean Electoral College should be abolished immediately. It has no purpose anymore. I agree. And it's a complete fraud. I agree. So I mean that to me is just an obvious step that we should take in the evolution of our democracy is to get rid of this farcical Electoral College. You can understand at the time that it was created and that's where we have to look at things from the perspective of historical place and time. It had its time. It had its place. It had its time and its place. But it doesn't need it anymore because we have such a media access everywhere through our phones. At any given minute of any day, every given second of every day, I can access something. So the purpose of the Electoral College was to make sure that there were opportunities and that we were representing a number of people that may not have access to all of the news in a certain way. And that was part of the original formation of that. Well, we're not there anymore because we have not just the technologies but all of the abilities through our constitution to be able to make sure that we've got this there. Now, one of the really disappointing to imagine that your vote is like 3,000 times less valuable than somebody's vote in Iowa or something. And that's actually the debate, isn't it? That's the debate. So the reason we have the Electoral College is so that someone in Hawaii where we have very few people comparative to others, our vote is supposed to mean more because of the Electoral College. We have three whole electoral votes as opposed to 57 that another state may have or more. But in effect, what that does is it's almost the reverse effect. We're giving more power to a smaller grouping of people in some cases than others. And it's a smaller group in areas of less importance in our country's overall scheme. I'm not saying that North Dakota or South Dakota, those people don't have important lives. What I'm saying is if the economy of North Dakota collapsed, it would not destroy the country like if the economy of California collapsed. There's probably truth in that, but I think the people in Dakotas will take issue with that. Luckily, there's not very many of them. Well, that's one of the keys to the whole principle and the argument against making any changes to it is we want to make sure that we are giving the smaller states, smaller popular states as much power in some ways. Maybe more power is what it feels like in some instances. But that's a very important debate that we need to have. But going back to journalism and going back to the idea of media right now, there's so many different facets going on. Earlier we were talking about, okay, there are bubbles. There are media bubbles, what do you call it, a bubble in an echo chamber. You've got some media outlets that seem to cater to one thought process or ideology versus another. What are your thoughts on some of those concerns or maybe how that has come about? Well, people have abdicated their responsibility in many ways to the media organizations of the past like Cronkite or whatever where he said it was true, Walter Cronkite. And what they really should have been doing is build their own media literacy to be able to understand the way journalism works and the validity of pieces of journalism and not trust a particular person but trust their own process and understanding media and the content in it. And I think that a lot of politicians in particular rely on people not fully understanding or having the time. That's the political platform of Trump is rely on me. Anything I say is true. Anything anybody else is false. And you don't have to do any thinking. And he's come out blatantly to say that. I'm the one person who can solve this problem. No one else can solve this the way that I can, he says. And then labeling everybody as fake media. You're fake news. Therefore you're irrelevant. So how can we, what is some advice you may have for us to think about this media literacy idea and how we can better assess what is fake news and what isn't fake news? Well it starts with taking personal responsibility that you don't just bring in everything that's given to you and accept it as gospel. You have to examine everything that crosses your path especially in social media and think carefully about where did this come from? Why is this story written this way? What are its biases? How does this affect my understanding of the story? And most importantly where can I find independent sources that would potentially contradict this? If you think of it in terms of a dialectical process where if you put all the ideas together and the truth comes out of the mix then that's what every individual should strive for. Now realistically people don't spend eight hours a day analyzing their media. And that's why they rely so much on their friends to do that kind of betting. But friends and family aren't doing that. So it's really on you to make sure that you understand what's going on before you fervently believe it. And that's why tweets are popular because it's 140 characters of information that you kind of absorb, consume and move on. Well the tweets are a perfect propaganda tool. And I would say the ideal way to use Twitter would be a headline and a link to more information. If you don't have the link then it's propaganda because it's just like skimming the headlines. You don't have any understanding of what the sentiment is. So Mexico is going to build the wall and you're not getting the link to explain well what does that mean? What does that mean? Then you're falling into propaganda. Absolutely. And that's actually a huge concern that we have these days. Now part of that is, and we're going to go to a break in a second, but part of that is also the difference between investigative journalism and opinion pieces. So we're going to go to a break and when we come back I'll try to explore that a little bit if we can. Okay. So thank you for joining us. This is Trump Week. And I'm your guest host today, Carl Campania. We'll see you in one minute. Thank you again to our guest today. Mr. Brett Opegard and we will see you in one minute. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. Elevate your match day experience. If you drink, never drive. Welcome back to Trump Week. I'm your guest host Carl Campania and welcome once again to the show. Professor Brett Opegard from the University of Hawaii Department of Communication. Is that correct? Right. Excellent. All right. Welcome again and thank you. Thank you. So we were just talking about the idea of opinion pieces versus investigative journalism. And one of the things that you said earlier, well, it starts with taking personal responsibility. That all kind of comes together a little bit when you think about it as I don't have enough time in my day to take the personal responsibility to vet out something that somebody has said or written. But you know what? I believe, I agree with almost everything that that person that keeps tweeting these things says. So I'm just going to keep following them and I'm just going to get all of my information from them. And then I'll just repeat what they say and I'll sound smart. That's where we are right now. That's where we live right now. So how do we address that? Or what can we do? What possibly can we do? I don't think you have an answer to this. I don't think anybody has an answer. I'll try. I'll start with the idea that if you don't have time to figure it out, then you're making time to be confused and misinformed. So I think that's a false reasoning. Okay. Also, we've always had thought leaders in our communities, you know, presidents, senators, whatever, business leaders, you know, philanthropists. But we haven't had the power that social media creates before where your message can literally be circulated among every human on the globe and instantaneously. So that is, to me, really a threat, a propaganda threat that we have to face with action, not passively sitting around waiting for somebody to figure it out for us. And if you go by the 80-20 rule, which a lot of people do, 80% of the people will just go along with what you say and 20% will investigate. Well, 80% of the people are just listening to what someone, some thought leader is saying because they have particular idealism that they agree with. They're just going to go with that. And that's how we have such a division in the country at the moment. And that is represented, I think that's echoed in these bubbles or these echo chambers that we have as far as Info Wars, Breitbart, and all of the conservative right media versus MSNBC and all of the, you know, maybe you include CNN and all these other, what is considered more leftist opinions. So again, going back to this idea of what is an opinion, what is an op-ed versus a real piece of journalism. And that goes back to one of the earlier thoughts was what's journalistic ideology. What should a journalist be doing? Well, the ideology includes opinion and includes all sorts of things. It includes reviews, it includes investigative pieces, it includes service journalism, like when the festival is and how do you get there and how much you pay. So I want to make sure to not make a binary that's investigative or nothing. But what I will say is that in the history of journalism, you have, you know, an arc basically that started with individual printers for political news of whatever they wanted. There was no code of ethics or validity or accountability for what they printed. And eventually that transformed into the objectivity that we now think of as modern journalism, but that wasn't until, you know, the early 1900s. And then we went through a period where journalists started to think of themselves in more literary terms and we had a literary journalism movement where we started to see more storytelling journalism. And in the last few decades we've had a real battle between objectivity and what's called advocacy journalism when you argue for a particular position. And the advocacy journalists have, you know, basically contested objective truth and said there's no such thing as objective truth, which you can make an argument for that. But if we don't have common ground truths, which we apparently don't have in this particular presidential administration, then we have nowhere we can stand and actually talk to each other. And that is the biggest problem that we have is we do have a lack of trust. And I think this was manufactured is what it appears to be, manufactured over a period of time, not just Trump, but going back in time, manufactured to this disbelief. And at this point there's been a discrediting of the media, a discrediting of the intelligence communities, a discrediting of science to the point where all of those people that you're used to having answers are in going to for answers, we don't trust them anymore. Well, this started with deregulation in the mid 90s, and that led to the rise of right wing radio, Rush Limbaugh and those types of characters, which then led to the television version, Fox News. And that's their whole shtick was we're going to counter the mainstream media and tell you how they're lying or fake or wrong, and that's how they made all their money. It's actually cynicism, not skepticism. Skepticism is very healthy, cynicism very unhealthy. And I think we've passed this very terrible threshold where most people are cynical now about everything. And then we can't come back together to get common problem solved. Yeah, and that's because the division, the gap between the sides, and unfortunately there are two, there's more than two, there really are more than two sides. Within the Republican Party, there are many different factions. There are more extreme conservatives and there are more moderates and there's everyone in between. Same thing on the Democratic side. Up until the last, well, decade, we'll say, really or so, that division hasn't been as much of a problem because everyone has understood, okay, you know what it's that middle ground, it's those moderates. We need the people on the extremes to help the conversation along a little bit, but the compromise is what people lead to. As compromises was going to actually be the most beneficial where we'll all come to an final agreement. Well, those compromises aren't happening anymore because the extremes, because of this media direction, because of this advocacy media that has been driving one direction or the other, the division has just widened and the mistrust and the cynicism has increased. What do we do? Well, we rebuild what's the metaphor that Buber uses as the narrow ridge between us. If you think of a path, and on each side is a chasm where people are down in cynicism land, and there's a narrow ridge between us where you can come and coexist. That's what we need to be rebuilt. We need to find that ground where we can stand face to face and agree on certain things, disagree philosophically, but make some compromise for everyone to have a better life. Won't that require some of those thought leaders to open the doors to those paths with? I think it could require that or it could require a revolt of the followers. Thought leaders only as powerful as the followers, which is part of the issue with Trump is that he's in a position that we can't really ignore him. If he was in any other position like the charlatan real estate developer position or whatever he was, you could ignore him and know who cares. But when the president of the United States with nothing between him and a nuclear war, nothing, then we can't ignore him. And this was a conversation we were having earlier before we got on air, and I think it was an important conversation. You were suggesting that, well, if we ignore him it could get worse. And I'm going to say, well, how much worse can we get? And you came up with some really good points. How much worse can we get? Yes, nuclear war, but not just nuclear war. There are many levels. There's going to martial law. And once we do that, what you suggested was once we go to martial law, then that means we abandon the whole electoral process and election cycles. Well, as part of the fascist playbook is to discredit elections. Which has also been done. Then you get appointments, and then the appointments are your appointments. Yeah, this is not something that Trump invented. This is the fascist playbook. So that's what we have to be wary of. And as we have that conversation, and as I try to engage people in that conversation, if you're of the ideology or of the mindset that you're just going to believe or just allow Trump and whatever he does and is to exist, because somehow he's a conduit to achieving your ideological values. You're opening the door to allowing that type of fascism for this whole playbook, which can be shown. It is directly out of Hitler's playbook. Everything that has happened, the whole discrediting of everything we just mentioned. Not just Hitler's stalling. Not just Hitler's stalling. I mean, I would say it's a playbook. It's not, it's not, you can't just trace it to Germany. Not just one. Right, exactly. This is a standard operating procedure for people who want to claim power. So the only way, so those, the people, the followers have to be let down in order for them to pull away. Well, they have to open their eyes. Well, if they, they have to want to open their eyes. And the only way they want to open their eyes is because, wait a minute, that didn't happen the way I thought it was going to happen. Some of that might be happening now. Some people, there are reports that some of his support has been dwindling because he hasn't done this or is doing that. And they weren't expecting that because he promised one thing or another. So maybe some of that is going to happen. So perhaps the opportunity for 2018 and 2020 to make the changes that are important for the health of the country. Not about the health of the Democratic Party or the Republican Party or parties. The health of the country is what it seems to be. And in my opinion, we really need journalists. We really need the media to be one of the beacons that they're saying, pointing the way saying, here's this and here's that. And here's some different thoughts and here's different ways of thinking about this. And yes, it's true, this is a playbook. And this is how this playbook has been played out in the past. And by these, and here's some comparisons. Not saying that's what he's doing, but you know what? Let's be mindful of it. And we need more of that to try to cross that gap, right? Well, it's no coincidence, I think, that Trump has risen in a time when the newspaper business model collapsed. Newspapers were the foundation of, I would say, intellectual activity in the country before the, basically, the business model collapsed. We still have, of course, television news, but often that's just based on what's on the screen, not really listening to the content. So that's interesting. We're about 20 seconds out of the show here, but it comes back to what you're saying is the technology of our media these days. The technology and the opportunities that we have have actually created. Have created a void, right? Have created a void. Have broken down the belief structures and the, I guess, the common person, the everyday person, just believing what is in the media. It's one of the pieces. It's so disparate in so many different places. You pick up whatever you want, whatever you tend to believe it is, but you're going to continue to vote. So that's a huge discussion. Yeah, you got commoditized, essentially, what happened. And when it became a commodity, then it didn't have any value anymore. Which is a problem. So in my opinion, the corporatization of everything is the destruction of everything in many ways. Thank you so much. Thank you. Sorry, there's so much more we can get to, but thank you so much. That was a good start. I have to come back and we can dig in more another time. So thank you for joining us. This is Trump week. I'm your guest host, Carl Campania. J. Fidel will be back next week. He actually may be back shortly. And with another show coming up probably in about 10, 15 minutes, we will see you next week. Really trying to tackle the issues that are going on these days with this administration. So thank you for joining us. Thank you for joining us. And thank you to our guest today, Professor Brett Opagard. Yes, I'm saying it correctly. That was a good pause. From the University of Hawaii Department of Communication. Thank you. See you next week.