 Okay, we're back on Community Matters, but actually we're doing a two-part show. We're doing a two-part show about Sinclair Broadcasting Group, which is in the news a lot. And in fact, at 12 noon, Tim Apachele did a show with our host for two shows, Brett Obergaard, associate professor of journalism, School of Communications, a U.S. manoa who cares about this a lot, about propaganda and fake news in Sinclair media. And now—and so you identified the problem in the last show, and I'd like to follow that, you know, the caboose, so to speak, and talk about what the solutions might be. But first, can you summarize what happened in the first show so we get the landscape? Sure. Jay, what—I think what Brett and I discussed was a—what recently occurred that created this firestorm of concern about Sinclair Broadcasting Group and how they made the anchors read a script word for word across the country. So that was kind of the beginning of this whole thing. And then we talked about what is Sinclair, how big is Sinclair, and how big do they want to become, and they want to acquire Tribune media and make it even larger. So we talked about the nature of Sinclair Broadcasting Company and what its goals are, where it appears to be the goals. I suppose a good question to ask before we get into possible solutions is, suppose there is no solution, what happens? What happens if they acquire Tribune? What happens if they're permitted to do whatever they want in this arena? What happens to the country? Brett? Well, I think it—I mean, it's a likely scenario that money talks and there's no real guard here protecting public interest. So what we're going to be dealing with here is a media sphere with less people having more influence and their message getting larger and larger, and less diversity of opinions and diversity of information for the public to have in their hands. Yeah. That's why you called the propaganda in the last show, not only fake but propaganda, which means one person can control the thinking of many people. We had that in Germany and other dictatorships, Russia, where the news was controlled. People only got what the dictator wanted them to hear. And boy, that's really a scary parallel to right now. So let's talk about possible things that can be done to stop this onslaught onto the First Amendment on the news, on what do you want to call it, the news education of the public and the electorate, and therefore on the Constitution, which seems to be more jeopardized every day. Wow. Yeah. All the loopholes are being dove into. Yeah. So let's talk about some of the solutions. I mean, and I'll identify them. I'd like to know what you guys think about these solutions, whether you have other solutions, and whether these solutions work, or we're back to Brett's original answer, well, it just gets worse and worse. And maybe that's the default position here that's what we're facing, you know? Well, I mean, one interesting scenario that has been kind of bouncing around in my mind is there's always been this talk like, how do you get real change in politics in America, and that's to bring a very divisive, polarizing candidate to the forefront. And Trump basically is the embodiment of what this proposal would be like, like bring the most radical offensive to one side of the equation, party or person to the forefront and let them do all sorts of damage, and then see, does that actually inspire and get people off their couches to protect democracy, or are we just going to let it go? And I think this Sinclair thing has some parallels to that. If everybody just sits back and lets this happen, at some point they're going to say, geez, I don't like this, and it could be too late at that point. Hope so. Hope they listen to this show. Very old slogans, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, although sometimes what does kill you kills you. And in this case, it could be. It could be. Okay, this is not democracy. I mean, democracy is not a guaranteed right that we have. True fact. It is. People in the United States especially don't appreciate how unusual this is. This is the great experiment of democracy, and we've done it, and we've only done it for a couple hundred years, so compared to all other types of governments that have lasted and been tried, so all other attempts at democracy have eventually been extinguished by dictatorship type forces, and this is the challenge we face today. Yeah. Unfortunately, the schools aren't teaching this particular lesson, and a lot of people in this country do not understand how vulnerable it is, and how we have to work to keep it. My thing about Ben Franklin comes out of what Independence Hall in Philadelphia, and a woman, a secret, what goes on inside, women approaches him, she says, Dr. Franklin, Dr. Franklin, what kind of government are we going to have? And he thinks for a second, he says, Madam, we're going to have a republic, but only if you can keep it. And we still have that challenge, don't we? OK, possible solutions, and this is not necessarily of importance or likely of success. One is, how about all those guys in the Sinclair organization quit in protest? They quit. What happens? I think it would be a good move if they could pull it off. I just have a hard time believing that they could do that. It comes down to people with mortgages and kids to feed and bills to pay. And in broadcast journalism, there's a lot of safety nets for those folks. Yeah, and if you quit in a huff in protest from a big company, which controls a lot of media, you're not going to get a job so quick with the other branches of that company. Definitely not with other branches, but it could be a situation where other media organizations hire those people as a sign of support, so it could work out that way. But I just don't think there's necessarily the capacity to hire all those people. If they all simultaneously quit, I don't see how the system could absorb it. But I think that would be a great effort to see what would happen. And it could actually work. I don't know if there's an organizing force or a union or something that would help that. Let me just add that if all those guys quit at the same day, Sinclair would have no problem in filling those jobs the same evening. Well, that could be true. They have 64 percent of the job market. That was a statistic I recently read that not only do they pay better than some of these other broadcasting media companies, but they also have the majority share of positions open for employment. You get better pay to sell your soul, you know. OK, anyway. That always works that way. Another one, not necessarily more important, back in the early 20th century, we had the anti-trust movement. What was his name now? Sinclair Lewis. Am I right? The same name as Sinclair Radio's in the broadcasting group. Sinclair Lewis wrote a book. And I forget the title of the book, but this was about trust-busting. He revealed the robber barons. And as a result, the federal government, Teddy Roosevelt, right in there, they went after the robber barons and they broke them up. They broke up the trusts. And that was federal, of course. But it was led by a president and supported by a president who believed in that. And it was the right thing, for sure. It was one of those fundamental building blocks of the country, as we know it today, the trust-busting. So could that work today? Would that be a good idea, for example, to break them up state by state or market by market and say, you can only have one company per market? It's a great idea. I don't see anybody with a political will or political capital to pull it off. But I think if we just reverted back to the way media ownership was in the 90s, we would have a much improved system. How was it in the 90s? Well, it used to be that you could have one television station, one radio station, or one newspaper in a market. And then anything beyond that was considered monopolistic behavior. Simple. This was the rule of the FCC? Yeah, he had one channel that you could have. And you could have neighboring channels say 100 miles away. I don't remember the specifics of that particular time period. But we gave it up because we drank the Kool-Aid of the Internet. That everybody was going to have access to information everywhere. And it was all the citizen journalism was going to rise up. And everybody was going to be engaged truth-tellers. And nobody was going to try to trick us or steal our data or give us propaganda. You were so naive, weren't you? Oh, we were so naive. I was part of that group. I believed in that future. But it hasn't worked out that way at all. The other thing about that is as time goes by there were consolidations in industry. Not only in media, but in so many other things. One of the things I saw in that examined all the consolidations that have happened in the past 10 or 20 years, it's remarkable. We have dozens of airlines. Now we have three or four. Big banks are bigger and there are fewer big banks. You name it, all the major industries have been consolidated. Why not media too? Of course, media is special. Media wears the badge of the Constitution and protecting our democracy. So the rules of merger and acquisition Monday, that's what they call it, should not apply to media. We don't really want mergers and acquisitions of media. But that's what's happened. They got on the bandwagon and merged and acquired every day, not Monday every day. Well, a great untold story of this is the web. The worldwide web, everybody thought, oh, everybody, you know, you could in a half hour make a website and have your information on an equal playing field with the New York Times. Well, what people leave out of that story is nobody is coming to my website that I made in a half hour. They are coming to the bigger stations and those people are gobbling up all the eyeballs. So it really, despite the potential, hasn't worked out the way we imagine it might. And there have been exceptions, but for the most part, the people with the most money get the most viewers and they gobble up everybody else. Doesn't that lead to the point about facts and the validity of facts and how the facts are being filtered one way or another by a media's agenda, be it political or social agenda, that the facts are being filtered. And I think people are starting to catch on to that. The viewers are starting to catch on that you're going to get a different set of facts at Fox Broadcasting versus you might get a different set of facts at MSNBC. You know, these are two polarized, different media companies. So who's reporting the true facts? And this idea that mergers and, you know, one or two big media companies will all have their different set of facts. Fox News is making a lot of money. And in my personal view, it's telling a lot of lies. And I know that there are, if you put them side by side, I'm sure you've thought about this, MSNBC over here and Fox News over there, they're squawking at each other. You know, they're attacking each other. They're in their own little bubbles. They're fighting over the facts. And if you're a man on the fence or a woman on the fence, you get confused. Even if one of them, in fact, is telling the truth and the other one is not. So, I mean, I think it's public confusion, and it's also got to do with education in the schools and critical thinking and a whole bunch of things that have changed in the country where the public doesn't feel connected with the government or responsible for it and they don't even vote. What a horrendous application that is. How can you run? This is rhetorical. How can you run a democracy that way? No. Yeah. So, let me go on. Okay. You're talking about regulation going back to the 1990s when, you know, multiple units, you know, you couldn't pass a certain number of units in an area that was a good time. I want to respond quickly to this rhetorical point you made. A lot of the emphasis now is on the journalist side of the equation and how the journalists are responsible. The journalists really are the last bastion of defense. They're not the foreground, the four runners of what the democracy is. Those are the government officials who are, we elect to do those jobs. And so they're falling down and it's like a stack of dominoes and the journalists are at the end here getting crushed and getting all the criticism when really it's starting so much earlier in the process of where the democracy is failing. I agree with you. And the problem is the press was sacrosanct. I can only think of Jimmy Cagney as the newspaper editor back in the 30s and all that. I mean, strong principles, strong ethics. I think now it's corporate and the corporate board of directors wants a return as Fox News does. They're not taking wooden nickels. They want a return to do anything, say anything to achieve that and it really doesn't matter what the quality of journalism is to them. No, it's become commodified. And I worked for a company called Gannett at one time and I saw the corporate structure of news and they delivered us a big packet. It was called News 2000 and it was about 500 pages of how we should do our business in our local market. And it was basically designed for efficiency. How could you efficiently make news in ways that made them the most profit? How do we cut people out of the newsroom? How do we efficiently get diverse voices? Not because we wanted these diverse voices because it was like a tokenism type thing where you had to get three people of different ethnicities to answer your question and you had to make sure their picture was in the paper because you wanted to illustrate that you were doing a diverse... Wow. Yeah, I mean it was a whole prescription of how to do news like a commodity. And that's to me the real problem with corporate ownership is like any kind of corporation, it takes all the local expertise, all the local interests out of the equation puts in this bigger profit-oriented orientation and they don't really, like you said, they don't really care about any particular place, they just care about how much these places are making money. It's very scary, Brett. I'd just like to address that comment because one of the proposed solutions of a Sinclair or any large media conglomerate that tries to influence the local news station is that local editorial leadership, the executives of that media company have the final say of what story and content is going to be shown on that particular night at a news station. And I think that's starting to be... Based on your story you just mentioned, that's being pushed aside where these guys are not being in control of their own content and what the journalists are producing and they're being told to move that story aside. I'm going to sell propaganda. Right now we're going to do some propaganda in a small break. It's going to be PSA's, Public Service Enhancements. We'll be right back for more with Brett Obergaard and Tim Apichella. Hi, I'm Pete McGinnis-Mark and every Monday at one o'clock I'm the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Research in Munna. And at that program we bring to you a whole range of new scientific results from the university, ranging from everything from exploring the solar system to looking at the earth from space, going underwater, talking about earthquakes and volcanoes and other things which have a direct relevance not only to Hawaii but also to our economy. So please try and join me one o'clock on a Monday afternoon to Think Tech Hawaii's Research in Munna. And see you then. Aloha, my name is Mark Shklav. I'm the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea. Law Across the Sea comes on every other Monday at 11 a.m. Please join us. I like to bring in guests that talk about all types of things that come across the sea to Hawaii, not just law, love, people, ideas, history. Please join us for Law Across the Sea. Aloha. Okay, we're back, you know, and I'm really sorry you weren't around for the break because Brett came up with something about the dominoes are already down. Will you please express that? I was just going to say that the radio stations for the most part have already fallen in this. So if you want to see where TV's headed, that's where radio is. And essentially, through deregulation, the licenses have been bought up from, you know, suburban or even rural areas, nearby big metropolises have been bought and then brought into the big city and turned into something that they were never designed for, alternative rock stations and things like that. And then when that wasn't good enough, these stations have been turned into robo-satellites basically where the real show comes from a city, you know, thousands of miles away that's doing 40 shows an hour, the same person, you know, saying they're... So efficient. Yeah, one person doing the morning show for 40 cities, you know, saying, hey, this is Sally from St. Louis. Hey, this is Sally from Portland and she records her little blip. They insert it in, they play the same songs and it's just homogenous type media everywhere. Like if you ever travel to these different cities and hear the radio shows, you'll hear the same person in different cities because it's really one person doing the whole shebang and that's probably where we're headed with this TV thing. Yeah, it reminds me of the shopping centers. Go across the whole nation. Go to the shopping centers and see the same stores in every shopping center. So you hear the same thing on the radio. And with media that's extremely dangerous because you think it's local. It's not local. You think this person had those thoughts himself or herself, not so. It's really like a bullhorn coming from far away and you don't realize you're part of a receiving audience of millions. That's what Sinclair is doing. I don't think—I think people are basically deceived about that. Okay, more—the possibility of litigation real quick. Litigation could stop what's happening. It could reverse in the federal system, reverse what the FCC is doing on one basis or another. I don't think that's likely because it's really expensive. But it's possible. Maybe somebody will mount an attack on that in the next few weeks because the FCC is about to rule on the Tribune acquisition. And that will make it much worse than it is today. Okay, another one is state litigation, although I don't think that's going to happen. We had state litigation about the immigrant issue with Douglas Shin. I don't think that's going to happen. It's expensive to do antitrust type litigation. And I don't think the attorney general of Hawaii or most states is going to mount that attack unless they're better funded. You got, of course, you got congressional action and Congress could fix this in a minute. What's the chance of that now? Not a chance. But you've got to try. You do have to try. You've got to energize the citizens of this country to say, right, you're congressman. You've got to try. Okay, well, you've got to be part of the process. But let me offer this, that it's a bit of a chicken and egg problem because you don't have a chance about changing profound bad decisions like this until Congress changes its membership. But so maybe this could happen after the midterms. But remember that these stations, Sinclair, maybe Sinclair plus Tribune, have huge political effect. And they're going to be speaking to political issues and races all over the country in those smaller markets. And so you have that. You have social media. Remember Mr. Koftrop? Mr. Koftrop? He's the guy that was the social media manager for Trump's campaign in 2016. He's now, and he did very well, he's the guy that interfaced with Zuckerberg, right? That it's all connected. And they used social media brilliantly, just like the Russians did, and had a big effect. We know that. So you have now, Mr. Koftrop is the, what do you call it, he's the campaign manager. The whole, he's the top guy for Trump now. And it's three years before. He's working his magic right now in the same way. So you have that. Social media. You have the Russians. They haven't stopped. And you have Sinclair and maybe the Tribune thing. So you have a huge number of vectors here. And you're forgetting about the biggest speaker in this is the Fox News. They're the number one channel for 15 years going. And this is a station that bills itself as the alternative to mainstream media. But they are the mainstream media. And this is, I think what you're getting at here is that this is a completely false story that the mainstream media is liberal because the mainstream media, the number one mainstream media cable channels, Fox News, that's not liberal. The number one local TV chain, Sinclair, not liberal. This is, it's like a straw man that's been put up to knock down so they can expand this hold on people. Right. And we haven't even talked about the religious right and the radio stations it owns in Hawaii and all over the country. It's Salem Radio right here. Well, Rush Limbaugh started it all. Rush Limbaugh. Rush Limbaugh was really the catalyst for this whole idea that he made millions, if not billions of dollars on this idea that people with a conservative bent need a voice on the radio. Yeah. And as soon as he proved that that could be a good moneymaker, then Fox News bought into it and now all these other folks have jumped on the bandwagon because this is something that sells. This is pretty, so you have various vectors all playing with each other, all interfacing, reinforcing. The same message is reaching people, will reach people, is reaching people in all these markets from various directions. And they're hearing it multiple times from various sources. They begin to believe it. I think that's the human condition. If you hear something from multiple sources over and over again, you believe it. Repetitio mater studiorum. Repetition is the mother of study. And that's for a good reason. If you hear it over, then you believe it. Anyway, so this is going to happen now before November. So it's a chicken egg, isn't it? You know, we've got to beat this problem now in order to have a good effect in November. That's why our solutions are important if we could make one. Well, this is not a partisan issue. I mean, there's no reason that our Congress folks should be thinking about this as, oh, these stations benefit my campaign, so therefore I'm going to support them. They should be thinking about what's best for the long-term health of our democracy. And if they're not approaching it that way, that is the reason to vote them out. That is. I hope people understand that. More possibilities, boycott. You're going to have an audience boycott. You can have an advertiser boycott. You can boycott these stations into less success. We talked about SBGI at Sinclair Broadcasting Group, Inc. That's their stock symbol, trading at $29 and change today. But it's been down like that. If we boycotted them in every way, well, they'd be down further, and maybe they'd have to reconsider what they're doing. It's a long shot, though. Look at what happened with Laura Ingram, whatever her name is. She basically ran off the radio for her comments. I think that really has an effect. If we're going to say we live in this corporate world and money basically rules it, then what's our most powerful option? That's to affect the money. The boycott does that. Through media organizations other than Sinclair, I might add. Okay, a new president would solve the problem. In impeachment of a new president, we wind up with a new FCC director, a chairman. He might follow the same thing. Yeah, I don't think a new president necessarily. More Salem broadcast stations. And he went Sinclair, but... Okay, and the last one, I wanted to comment on this. It's the possibility, what was it, of organizing an alternative with the proxy fight buy stock and go and change directors in Sinclair or buy them and go out and buy all the stock. They're traded, right? It's a public company, and if you have enough money Bill Gates might have enough money, Jeff Bezos might have enough money for their policies. Where's Carl Icahn when you need him? Exactly, somebody very rich could do this and solve the problem. In the end, as you said, in the end it's money. What was our other big solution that we were talking about? People have to take charge and support the media that they want. And that really is what it comes down to. Whether it's through boycotts or viewership, if you understand what you're getting you support it or not support it. It's going to be on you. If nobody's watching these stations they're not going to be in business. It's a hard road for a lot of people to go down because it means they have to actually work at the democracy. But it's also if they want to have freedoms like we have, they have to preserve them. That's why people should support their print media online and actually subscribe. Because of news and web media they're losing money and they're going out of business. So if you really feel very strongly to this issue, go online and pay your $10 to the Washington Post or the New York Times or whatever one you feel akin to. I'm worried about the Honolulu Star advertiser. Did you see the piece yesterday about it was discovered that they have listed their print facility for sale. I don't know what that means. It's pretty interesting. You need a print facility actually to print the newspaper. I'm making money online if you've seen your website. I agree. There's one more possibility and that is with Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates or somebody like that. You build another Sinclair but it's clean. Maybe you've broken up into a lot of little parts of the big part. Jeff Bezos, if he bought Sinclair it would turn into just a flip of the same situation. It would have the attack on this would be a liberal chain that is taking over. Similar to what's happened with the Washington Post under his ownership. Even though he apparently has no direction involved in the news production part. What would it work, do you think, a lot of little Sinclairs who are fresh, who do not have these agendas, who did not have these instructions and these employment agreements that require you to stay on the point. A first amendment type organization but smaller with no control of the newscasters and the opinion givers. A lot of them, hundreds of them. I think of it as people have stopped buying groceries at the big grocery stores and they go to their farmers market. You know, this is something people could actually take action and change if they stop supporting these big conglomerates and instead of going to their big chain media organization they start supporting local ones that rise up and give them news about their local area whatever those are. Whether it's radio or TV or on the web or even there's a lot of print magazines that do a good job too. I think they need to put their money where they want it and what they want and it's going to take a kind of awareness like a growing awareness of what you're ingesting in your media diet. Well, you know, it's possible that think tech could be part of that. Can you imagine a nation with hundreds of little baby think techs all over the country all with sort of an open agenda on what you want to say freedom to speak and do journalism as you wish wouldn't that be great? Hundreds of think techs everywhere proliferated, no control over editorial policy. What do you think? Great idea. I mean this is where we should go. This is the decentralization of media and the thing I love about coming on here is this is a place where you can have an open discussion about ideas that aren't circulated anywhere else and you can have it at a depth that you don't get anywhere else and that's something we should preserve. Great to have you on the show but let me ask one final question before we say farewell to this huge subject which I'm sure we're going to cover again is at the beginning of this show I asked you what's going to happen if we do nothing and it's possible with all of these ideas that I hate to say it but nothing may happen so I like both of you guys to tell me whether you think in your heart, whether you think something any one of these or something else will happen to blunt what is a very offensive attack on the press more offensive than all the other attacks to date do you think something will happen or are we going to be faced with the worst case analysis? That's yours Tim I'm ready to run with it vote with your pocketbook vote with your viewership let them know that their declining stock prices are going down as a direct result of their very ill mannered approaches to media in local markets so vote with your pocketbook I'll say now that this issue has been raised to the level where we're having think tech shows and lots of people are publishing about it there is a good possibility that some monkey wrench will get thrown into this deal now I'm not necessarily hopeful but I think there is a chance that that could happen it will involve people demanding that this doesn't take place and we'll see if we're up to that task we'll see if we're up to it may I say from your lips from your lips to God's ears thank you thank you Tim great to have this discussion with you we'll do it again thank you