 Okay, we're back. This is Think Tech with the closing show of the day, The 5 p.m. Rock. Welcome to Community Matters. I'm Jay Fiedel. Our show today is called the United States, Congress, Russia, and Fake News with Fred Opigard and Julian Gorbach of U.H. They're both assistant professors of things in and around journalism, huh? We're talking about literature and stuff they've written and thought about around fake news and also no news. This is a combination show. So welcome to the... We talk about Russia and... Oh, we started out with Russia. We first conceived of this. There is a certain amount of fake news about Russia you'll agree and also no news about Russia. I say no advisedly. It means that there should be news, but there isn't any news. Nobody's following the action. Welcome, Fred Opigard. Thank you for having me. Welcome, Julian Gorbach. Nice to have you here. Let's talk fake news in the first place. We have a new phenomenon about fake news. You've written about it. You have a paper, but I'm going to present the paper not too long. What have you discovered about it and studying it? Well, one thing I wanted to look at was just to try and understand how this kind of entered the bloodstream or the ecosystem, the public sphere recently. So that was the first thing I tried to figure out. When did we start talking about fake news and what is it exactly? Because it started to become this pinball word where it's just bouncing around. We're all talking about it, but everybody is using it in these different ways. Donald Trump has become a favorite term of his, but I think he means it in a very different way than some of the others. Then I actually started looking historically at it, and I used an article. There was a quick history of fake news in the Columbia Journalism Review, and I used it as kind of a foil. In other words, I kind of set it up and I wrote about a 25-page paper. I knocked the arguments of that Columbia Journalism Review paper down about history. I can elaborate, but you want me to continue? So basically regarding what it is, what fake news is, and when everybody started talking about it, BuzzFeed had published an article on October 20th, so just about two weeks before the election, where they looked at the amount of hyperpartisan websites, web pages that were posting news, quote-unquote, on Facebook. There were two sort of preliminary things that prompted this. One was a study by Pew that found that 44% of Americans are now relying on Facebook for their news. And the second was that- That is so scary, Julia. Well, you know, I mean, they're watching maybe CNN links or New York Times links, but one of the big phenomenons was this explosion. There was an article in The New York Times magazine previously, that August, about this explosion of hyperpartisan sites on the left and right. So BuzzFeed's initial story, actually, I was just looking at it again today, was kind of narrow. It just said, there's been this explosion of sites and an overwhelming majority of these hyperpartisan web pages have, well, it was, you know, on the right wing web pages, up to 40% of the stories were mostly false or completely false. So there was- there was somewhat of a muted reaction to this initially, but it certainly sort of showed something major happening on Facebook. Are you saying that hyper-sites are more likely to have fake news? Well, they just looked at the hyper-sites and found that of those sites, particularly on the right, 40% nearly half were full of BS. So then there was kind of a muted reaction. There were a couple of, like, think pieces about it, some chin stroking. Then Donald Trump got elected. And then two days after Donald Trump got elected, because of a bunch of internal discussion at Facebook and concerns, Mark Zuckerberg, I guess, felt compelled to come out and make a public announcement where he basically said, Facebook is not responsible for the election of Donald Trump. And what I found is, and you can see this in, I don't know if we have the graphic, but the, if you track the Google searches of the term fake news, but two days after he said that, there's this, you know, there was a whole bunch of news coverage and all the major outlets about fake news at that point, you know, basically reporting on his public denial. So, I mean, you know, he seems to have created a lot of the huge attention that it got, but from that point on, with the stories that followed, the news coverage about it and the, you know, the public interest and it just skyrocketed. I mean, that's really when, and also, the, February, I mean, November 16th, so about six days after Zuckerberg's denial, Buzzfeed published another story where they showed that fake news was radically outpacing real news for, so here on Think Tech. Yeah, so there's this, there's the, what does that tell us? So what that shows is, fake news is way down at the bottom in February through April, May, June, July, but by, by election day, of the top 20 stories, fake news has nearly nine million shares on social media, whereas real news has just over seven million, so a difference of two million shares. Why is that? I mean, it could it be that fake news is more appealing, more interesting, more provocative, and people want to consume fake news? Well, I mean, there's a couple of things going on, but I think the major thing is that, to put it simply, it tells people what they want to hear. And then I think there's another part of this, and again, this is some insight that I got out, you know, my method is to look at history, other people do social science or whatever, but definitely one of the insights I got from looking at the history of it was that, you know, a lot of things are too good to be true. And, you know, if, if Hillary Clinton actually murdered an FBI agent, or was running a sex trafficking ring out of a pizza parlor, I mean, that's, everybody wants that. You know, you can't make this stuff up. Well, you know, you can't make it up. And you probably can't, you can't find any real stuff that's interesting, and that reinforces what you already believe. Okay, the big question is, why do people do that? Well, because they're, they're, I mean, looking at the history of fake news, one of the things you find is that whenever people were going out, like, like literary people, people like Mark Twain, and they were, they were producing fake news, they were always amazed at how much people would just believe the most unbelievable nonsense. This one going every minute. Yeah, just, you know, I mean, you know, there's, you see it again and again with hoaxes, totally outlandish hoaxes a lot of times, you know, and then never mind a really good, clever hoax. But even with the, with the ones where you're like, that's ridiculous. People are just amazed that these things take off like wildfire. And that's particularly true when you tell somebody something that they really want to believe and that reinforces what they already believe. You tell them a really good tale that reinforces the opinions they already share. So this has always existed to some degree, at least in this country, maybe in the world. But what we have now is a, you know, a huge increase. Look at that chart. A spontaneous increase all of a sudden. And I have to say it's connected with whatever happens in Trump. It's a Trump phenomenon. Is this, is this the new normal? Is this the way it's going to be? I'd say we have crossed that threshold a long time ago where people could self-publish whatever they want and distribute it worldwide. And that's really part of what's happening here. It used to be, you would need a million dollar printing press or a big radio tower or you'd need some kind of expensive equipment and infrastructure to pull something like this off. Nowadays you need a computer and an internet connection. Well, you know there's a point there I think. If I have to buy a printing press even in Gutenberg days, it's going to cost me some money. I have to be a responsible citizen and raise the money. I have to have investment capital. I have to have a physical place. I can't be a fly by night because I could lose that if I don't, you know, print real news or at least arguably real news. But now there's no barrier to entry. In fact, most people already own the equipment to generate fake news without putting a penny extra into doing that. And this somehow this changes it because there's no, there's no barrier, there's no burden. You want to make, you want to fool around? You can fool around at no expense. You don't have anything to lose. You know, there's a, someone we look to a lot named Richard Hornick who's, he's a big advocate. He spoke here. I met him, yeah. Yeah, he's a big advocate of news literacy. He's based in Stony Brook, but he spends winners here. Very articulate smart guy in this stuff and a very veteran journalist. And he identified four things where the internet has really in danger or the 21st century world of digital media has, has really presented challenges for democracies. And his four things were one, what you guys just mentioned, the fact that it's very easy to put something up on the internet that looks really authoritative and professional. You know, the, the Denver Guardian quote unquote newspaper, which didn't exist, one of those major fake news phenomena. The other points that he made is he made four. So the other points were that people can filter out what they don't want now. So they can, you know, they can create their own bubble that they want to exist in. And, you know, they're basically any facts that they're allergic to, they can, they could, they never have to worry about them anymore because they've, they even create these filters on the internet and the internet will help you do that through its search algorithms and everything else. The third point that it made is that the gatekeepers, you know, the role that the New York Times and the Washington Post and all those other folks had is, is gone. And so now you've got people that have to kind of make their own decisions about stuff that what should be legitimate news and what's fake news, whereas editors used to do that job. And you would trust to do that job. Yeah. And the fourth issue is just the sheer amount of information that just floods over us every day. You know, you can Google your way to the truth of whatever you want to believe by just typing, you know, our, our, you know, is the moon pink. And you're going to probably find some sites that'll tell you if you want to, if you want to find that kind of affirmation. So the question I put to both of you is, how do we deal with this? How do we get to the truth now? Because it seems like the truth is more elusive now and there are more people out there trying to obfuscate the truth actively, intentionally, or for really bad purposes. How do we get, you and I have talked about this before. Yeah, I think it's not, the answer isn't a better algorithm by Facebook. The answer is better media literacy and people becoming more responsible for their media where they have to seek out and understand their sources and the publications and the journalists behind it. If we are going to try to fix this problem with the computer, we're going to fail over and over again. It really goes into a deep cultural place, I think, where we have to start taking our own personal responsibility for what we ingest and what we spread and figure out ways to root out the bad stuff. How do we do that? Is that going back to school or something? Yeah, I mean, these, there's now these, these new efforts, like the one that Richard's involved in at Stonybrook and there's also the newsliteracyproject.org because arguably one of the major issues is if we get them at college and we start trying to teach news literacy, is it already too late? Like maybe the education... Don't answer that. Don't answer that because we're going to have a break now. When we come back from the break, I am going to be dedicated to finding the answers. Hi, I'm Tim Apachello. I'm the host of Moving Hawaii Forward. A show dedicated to transportation issues and traffic issues here on Oahu. Join us every other Tuesday at 12 noon and as we discuss how we try to solve our traffic headaches, not to not to include just the rail, but transit and carpooling and everything in between. So join us every other Tuesday, Moving Hawaii Forward. Thank you. Hi, I'm Cheryl Crozier Garcia. I'm the host of Working Together on Think Tech Hawaii. It's a program where we discuss the impact of change on workers, employers, and the economy. So join us every other Tuesday from 4 o'clock to 4.30 we're live in the studio on Working Together in Think Tech Hawaii. Take care. See you soon. Bye. We're here with Brett Opengard and Julian Gorbach, both sister professors and in and around journalism, I can say. We're talking about fake news, also no news. And I want to tell you when I was in school in New York they taught us to double fold the New York Times. They taught us how to read a paper. They taught us how to look down the columns and look for the good stuff and we had to find it and all that. There was a study where they actually did this formally in school. Do they do that now? No. Although I guess if you double fold you could read it while it was in the commute. Yeah, right, in the subway. It was all about the subway. The subway is an essential part of this whole discussion. As far as our students know, there isn't a physical copy of the paper. I'm not sure if they've seen one. So you're saying is high school too late, is grade school too early, is college, when do you learn critical thinking to ascertain the read and the check? When do you learn how to press for the truth? We teach children to read books. One, two, whatever. As you're reading, talk to them about what do you like about this, what do you think makes this valid, whatever it is. Whatever you can put into a child's language. And then bring that up as part of their basic education. It really is, as Julian said, I think too late by the time we get them as freshmen or sophomores to dramatically change their habits. We can incrementally change their habits and we can prompt them through reward systems like read the newspaper every day, we'll give you a quiz, that kind of thing. But as soon as you take the thumb off, then they'll be back to their same habits. I really think this is something we have to go deeper than we have in the past. You're painting a very tough picture. It's sort of like the issue of the Constitution. If you don't teach the country the Constitution, next time you look the Constitution is falling apart. If you don't teach them about reading the chaff and truth and otherwise, by the time they're at whatever age is critical, it may be too late. As university professors, we also kind of have to teach literacy. We have to teach students how to write and how to be good just basic readers. And what we've encountered, I know in my own personal experience, pretty early in my teaching career, I was teaching in South Louisiana, which has really serious literacy deficits, but you have it pretty much all over the country. It's not unique to South Louisiana. Is there a political will to fix that? You read to your children before they go to bed at night. We have a lot of overburdened single moms and a lot of poverty. They're plopping them in front of TV sets. Generations to generations. There are millions of people in the country who have never gone through this process. You're developing at that age, you're developing so quickly and so dramatically that if you miss a year or two development when you're three to five years old, you're only five. So if you're a year or two behind and you're five, you're really behind. You're optimistic or pessimistic? Unless we get on a dime about it, I'm pessimistic. I don't think there's been an honest discussion about... There are honest discussions in some circles about early childhood development and education, but not enough. Not where it needs to happen. Not in say areas where there's huge numbers of single moms that are struggling with just trying to pay the bills. It gets even more difficult. This is something that came up in our discussion. Maybe it was in the break about how the technology changes the need, changes the way, the methodology of looking for truth because of all that material out there. And we haven't learned how to deal with that. It's a runaway with us. We haven't kept up with it. We need to make a special effort to deal with the new kind of literacy that's involved in the 21st century electronic age. That's a big point that like, for example, when I've talked about the Stony Brook University Project, the Center for News Literacy, which they're trying to do this sort of spread this internationally. They've got programs going on all over Asia and Europe and all over the country where they're trying to catch up. But the analogy they use is with reading. The analogy they use is when the printing press was first introduced by Johann Gutenberg in the 1400s, that basically everybody had to learn how to read in order for the real power of that technology back then to really take hold. Why doesn't that sustain us with the electronic age? I mean, are we saying here that reading then and reading now is a whole different thing? Well, I mean, what we're saying, we're using an analogy between literal literacy and digital literacy. Because digital literacy means learning how to recognize that there are sources and news stories. And being able to sift through what's a good source, what's a bad source, what kind of a source you're looking at, what a source is in the first place, paying attention to the fact that sources matter. All of this stuff is something that when a lot of people get on the internet, they're not educated people. I mean, I'm constantly surprised that people I know that are quite educated don't pay attention to the source of the information that they're looking at. It's easy to get confused. But let's go to the second point we want to discuss. We talked about fake news, the problem, possible solutions. What about the no news? And this puts the spotlight on the press. Because sometimes the press doesn't catch it. They run after the news. They're into the next cycle. They want to keep everybody charged up with something. So they maybe forget something they could have. And what comes to mind in my mind is Jeff Sessions lied in his consent hearing. And nothing ever happened to it. He managed to get by that by saying that he would recuse himself in anything involving the Russian investigation. But sorry, that doesn't solve the problem of lying to Congress. You know, clearly shown in the New York Times. So, you know, the press hasn't really covered it. We haven't heard about it again. They're chasing the next cycle. We have no news on that and so many other things that we've talked about. So what about that? How does the citizen deal with the fact that the press has a short memory and is looking forward rather than back? I think part of it is you have to understand the strategy of diversion that's taking place where if we keep dropping mother of all bombs on different, you know, places every day, of course the journalist has to go there and there are only so many journalists around. There's only so much of a news hole and there's only so much airtime. So a lot of that just gets put on the back burner. And if you saw the movie Spotlight, there's a scene in there where the towers go down in 9-11 and the Spotlight team has taken off the Boston Globe story of the Catholic priest for a significant amount of time. I can't remember for months or a year. But they did come back to it. And I think that's a lot of what's going to happen here. There's just so many starting points. We won't come back to all of it, but we'll come back to the important parts, I think. And I'm also optimistic maybe more than others about our ability to catch up with this technology. I think we have to see ourselves in the very early phases of this evolution. We're not 600 years in. We're just a couple decades in. So I imagine going forward, our society and our different systems of education will catch up with that and we'll have something new to complain about then. Your example of Sessions is, I saw a stunning example of how that issue's been overlooked when I was listening to National Public Radio's show from the East Coast on Point. And a caller called in and brought up that very point of what happened to Jeff Sessions and there were three journalists in the round table. It was the week in the news that they were doing that. And Tom Ashbrook. And one by one all four of them said, oh yeah, the Russiagate story of the Russian hack. Yeah, no, we're going to be on that. And that's going to be, and not one of them picked up on the fact that he was talking about the fact that Jeff Sessions had allegedly lied under oath and has suffered no consequences. That his recusal managed to get him out of it. All of them just, you know, whether it's distraction or whether it's that Washington Press Corps national news habit of kind of repeating what the person next to you says, because that's what keeps you in the job as everybody's on the same page. And there tends to be this incredible group think that takes on. But all of them missed it. It was just amazing to listen to the show and be like, you know, wanting to call in, you're never going to get through. You know, the New York Times has a special editor called the public editor. And he's supposed to protect the rights of the reader and all that. They could design another editor, call it the look-back editor. The one who figures it out that what we missed here and we got distracted and we chased the news cycle. But you know, we have to attend to what was unsolved before. Wouldn't that be good? That would be perfect. You know, one thing that has never, I've never heard mention of national media since we're obviously national media here. Sure, we're national right here. Yeah, we're on the internet. Yeah, exactly. It is, whatever happened to like, you know, telling, don't they have to say, I'll tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth? They do. Is that the same standard if you're attorney general for the rest of us or is there a lower standard for them when they have to testify? That's what you can get away with. Yeah. Because people start saying, well, he meant to say something else or whatever. But it seems to me they have to take that whole truth, etc. Oh, yeah, we got to get liberal about this kind of thing. You mentioned early on, Brett, that we lost X number of coal mining jobs in this country in recent past, but we lost a lot more jobs in journalism. And that means that the journalism infrastructure is understaffed. What do you think? Yeah, a big issue for the president has been to bring back the coal jobs. There's been a lot of discourse about how great those jobs were and how people had family legacies and working in the coal mines. But when you look at the raw numbers of coal jobs lost, it's actually quite a bit less than newspaper jobs lost. And I've yet to see a single story about somebody trying to bring those back through some kind of federal intervention. And I think that's something that we just have to deal with as a society, that we've lost something really valuable to us, and we have to come up with a new plan for bringing it back. And this idea of rehiring the coal people, bringing back the coal plants, let's have that kind of initiative for newspapers. The stakes are so high. They are the nation itself. We cannot afford not to be informed. I saw a headline that the entire coal industry hires as many people as Arby's. And the Washington Post, that was the headline. Well, we have one minute to close, you guys. What's the coalescing? Let me ask you first, Yuli, and then you can close, Brett. What do we do here? What does it look like? What's the can we achieve a new credibility in the people who report to us? Well, I don't know about new credibility in the people who report. I think there's some major stories that get overlooked, like our ecosystem is collapsing according to scientists, but we only talk about climate change, whereas that is only one of the really crisis level insults to our environment that really is going to affect our lives. And as far as fake news goes, fact checking which there was a lot of during the election, there's a lot of social science shows it's not effective. So I think news literacy is really the hope that if we educate people that way there will be, you know, our system will work better. You mean it will survive, don't you? We'll have a healthier democracy or we'll retain a democracy. This reminds me of how physical education and music and various other arts, the philosophy that's all taken out of the schools and then what are we left with? And media literacy to me is one of those things that because most of our life is mediated, most of our life is lived through a screen it should be an imperative that we learn how to do that better from all levels of education. Imperative. Let's leave it there. Brett Overgaard and Julien Gorbach, thank you so much for coming on. We'll do this again. Thank you.