 Aloha. Welcome to Talk Story with John Wahey. Today we have an exciting guest and he's sitting on the side of the table that he's not normally used to. This is Dr. Chad Blair. He is a reporter and all around very important person with civil beat, which is probably Hawaii's outstanding political newspaper or document. I mean, you guys actually pay attention to issues as opposed to just writing. But anyway, welcome, Chad. Governor, a pleasure. Thank you. We are here to talk about a really important subject for everybody in Hawaii, everybody in the United States, maybe the world. And that is the freedom of the press. Now, our Constitution, the United States Constitution and the Hawaii Constitution both guarantee freedom of speech and freedom of press. I thought we'd start off by asking, Chad, what is the freedom of press? I mean, what is it? I know we have this vague idea that it means something that people can write articles. In your opinion, what is the freedom of press? What does it mean? Well, first of all, thank you for having an enemy of the American people. The opposition party? The opposition party on your show. I used that line the other day and I'm not done with it yet. I'm going to get some more mileage out of that. I think that's one of your greatest credentials. I do too. He's likely hired a PhD. I agree. In fact, it's a badge of honor right now. What does it mean? It's in the First Amendment, not the Fifth, not the Twelfth. It's the first thing that the founding fathers, the freedom of religion and freedom of press. Right, freedom to assemble. And the reason was because they felt a fourth branch of government, although I don't think it was called that at the time of the founding. But in addition to the executive, the legislative and the judicial branches, the three branches, they felt that a free press was essential. And of course, it was essential to democracy. Absolutely. And it was brutal back then as it is now. If you look at the Thomas Jefferson, John Adams contest in 1800, there were brutal things being said back and forth and things about Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. And even Jefferson himself said the newspaper is full of lies. But he also said I'd rather have a good newspaper, essentially, than a government, because you can't have government without it. Because there's an expectation that these newspapers, essentially, these pamphleteers, in some cases, would keep the government honest by reporting on what they did. Thomas Payne, common sense. Okay, way back then there was, I mean, practically every town, every corner, there was somebody writing something, maybe like similar to the bloggers of today. So, you know, but what does that freedom of the press mean in this modern era when the press is also a business? Well, it's tough because, as you know, the press is in a whole lot of trouble right now. It's a broken business. The model is no longer working, advertising, classified. And because of that, you're seeing a number of newspapers fold across the country. It happened here, the Honolulu Star Bolton and the Honolulu Advertiser merged into one paper. And frankly, I think we're a lesser community for it. It was better to have two competing newspapers. Well, that doesn't mean journalism is dying. And what has been surprising to me is people like Jeff Bezos or Bezos for Amazon buying The Washington Post, people like Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, founding Civil Beat and The Intercept and First Look Media. And now some are even looking towards a non-profit model to sustain it because it's difficult to get people to pay for news. Because you can turn on your TV, for example. And you get these tiny little snippets of what's happening in the world. The educational aspect doesn't seem to exist. But if you ask me what it means to have a free press, it means you need to have an institution that can say to President Trump, well, how exactly did President Obama wiretap Trump tower before the election? Can you produce some evidence? And when Senator John McCain follows up and says, yeah, if you can't produce the evidence, then you ought to retract that. This just happened. Who else is going to report that except for the press? And you can't rely on a biased media organization like a Fox News, like a Breitbart, like an Info War to do that. Or I used to say, I now believe that the idea of a free press, I believe with intensity. But I've always believed that it was an important constitutional amendment. But now because of our president, I believe that it's even more important. But at the same time, though, as I was going around saying that we ought to have a free press, I was going to say, but I don't like this particular Breitbart, for example. I don't like them. But a free press encompasses these crazies. They do. And mind you, they're a price that we pay or something changed. We moved out of a society that had three television stations and PBS and daily newspapers. We didn't have the internet. And we didn't have blogs. We didn't have talk radio. And somewhere along the way, particularly in the 90s and the early 2000s, we started to go into our own echo chamber. And rather than all of us sharing the same snooze stories, Nixon resigned. Everyone agrees. In 1974, there wasn't another article saying, Nixon forced out of office by bad dudes. He was a great president. Yay, Vietnam. That has changed to where people cannot make the distinction between what is real and what is fake. And for the president to say, you are misbehaving, you are misleading, you are fake, you are dishonest, is really a remarkable turn of events because people were already questioning the media because let's face it, we got some things wrong. WMD on Iraq, we called it wrong. Well, it didn't help that the White House at the time was feeding us a bunch of BS. But that's what scares me the most right now is that people, when Trump says something like what he says, it's happening today that Congressional Budget Office says, look, Obamacare repeal is going to be 14 million people are going to lose their jobs. Trump immediately says, ah, that's not true. Not true. So who do you believe? Oh, I don't know. But when I ran for office, the press said I was going to lose. So who am I supposed to believe? And how did the press treat you when you were in office? Well, they treated me, I think, full on. The way I wish that everybody else who they would treat everybody else. But we also had to help them. We passed the open records law. Right. Thank you. Which, by the way, made life miserable. Oh, it did. For anybody, for me and others in office. But it was the essence of what they're there for. What I worry about is you now have a president that says that what we consider to be objective reporting, at least within the parameters of objective, is a lie, or is wrong, or is in opposition and deliberately says the opposite and the press, his press, follows it. Oh, Steve Bannon ran Breitbart. He's now the senior advisor. Some people say he's the spendalli. There was Sputin, the guy that's really running things back there. Well, this is a big concern. There was a poll just the other day saying that a majority Democrat still feel that news gets it right. And it's fair, and if it makes a mistake, it corrects it. But a majority of Republicans feel that you can't trust the media. There's even some indication that they trust Trump more than they do the news. That's right. More than they trust the idea of a free press. Now, what I'm leading up to is his secretary of state. What's his name? Rex Tillerson. Yeah, Rex Tillerson. Hasn't held a press conference. Never. Won't talk to the press. Won't let the press go with him to Asia. Won't let him travel as is the custom, right? But at the same time, there's going to be, I'm assuming, if it's like everything else, somebody from the Trump administration feeding news to Fox. So you have a little bit more than just taking an opposition view. What you have is the president of the United States, an administration, actually supporting the business aspects of one of the members of the press. You have Sean Spicer, his press secretary, leaving CNN and The New York Times out of a briefing off camera. That is really remarkable. You having the White House allow these other news, I'm going to use these quote marks, these so-called news services, to come in there and be treated on the same level as an NPR or a CBS or even CNN. I'll mind you MSNBC, I think, has its own biases. There's no question that there's a problem with bias in the media. But if you can't trust the media. But if you allow government to choose who listens to or talks to the people in government, then the cure, it seems to me, the way to achieve objectivity is to give everybody opportunity to say something. But not everybody has the same value of things to say. And I think what the media does, and I'll admit sometimes it puts, we put ourselves on a pedestal and we think a little bit like, we're going to be the ones that'll make the call. And we could learn some humbling from all that has happened in the last year and a half. But someone does have to be able to say when something is false, when what the president or Sean Spicer, and if that is then taken into doubt by millions or tens of millions of Americans, that's a very serious problem. And I'll point to that. Well, I think for politically, that's a very serious problem. For the country. I mean for American democracy, it's a serious problem. I'm, what I'm sort of interested in is the fact that after the Secretary of State announced that he was not going to have anybody traveling with him, what the media did, at least the mainstream media, was to have a meeting and sort of, oh, this is terrible. And but, you know, the reaction didn't seem to have been that strong against it. Now, true that on the federal level, there are a lot of the access that was granted to reporters was done by custom. It's not necessarily required by law, but it was done by custom. It was thought that this is the American thing to do. This is how our democracy functions, right? But, you know, all of a a sudden this happens. But he stepped one step further. And that is there was direct government sponsorship of players in the media, of the press. Now, how does a struggling newspaper or a struggling TV station or radio station continue to be the party of the opposition when their competitors are being fed the news? Fox doesn't have to go on the plane to Asia. Fox will get reports back every day. But CNN might have to. They might have to pay for it. So, now you also got an economic... I think it was Sean Hannity that was essentially flying candidates, maybe Trump on his own plane. You know, Fox actually has a couple of good people. Brett Baer, I think is fair. Chris Wallace is a good reporter. I think Megyn Kelly. Having said that, that's a den of sexual harassment, as we've been seeing since Roger Ailes was leaving there. One of the lessons that I've learned, and this is coming from a Columbia journalism review, as you know, there's a good one of the best journalism schools in the nation there. And the lesson is, maybe we got too close. Maybe the press got too buddy-buddy with the people in power. And I'll have to admit it. I like politicians. I like you, Governor. Well, thank you. And I find you, as long as you're not reporting on me, excellent person. I love the fact that I have your cell phone and your email, but maybe it's too close. Now, you're out of office, but do we lose our objectivity when we start thinking of the lawmaker? We'll come back right to that after... Oh, it's a time for a break. A time for a break. Yeah. And by the way, folks, call us if you have any questions at 415-871-2474. Thank you. Aloha. I'm Kauai Lucas, host of Hawaii Is My Mainland here on Think Tech Hawaii every Friday at 3 p.m. We address issues and importance for those of us who live here on the most isolated landmass on the planet. Please come join me Fridays at 3 p.m. Mahalo. Okay, I'm here with Brett Overgaard of the Faculty of the School of Journalism and the Department of Communications at UH Minoa. We've had a number of shows. We have a movable feast going on. And we talk about journalism. We talk about language. We talk about communication in general. And we talk about the effect of that on the country and on individual people. Brett, it's so good to be able to discuss this with you in our movable feast. Oh, it's my pleasure. This is a great opportunity. You'll have to come back again and again. Okay, deal? That's the deal. Brett Overgaard, I'm Jay Fiedel. We care about everything. Thanks. Welcome back to Talk Story with John Wahee and our guest, Dr. Chad Blair. And we were just talking about the fact that maybe over the years some members of the press and of the political establishment may have gotten to be too friendly with each other. I was talking to someone the other day, and it might have even been you who said this, that back in the day, Jack Burns, whose son, Judge Jim Birch, has passed away, would actually meet casually with reporters, but it was all off the record. Is that right? All off the record. In fact, that it used to be, he would sit right on the Capitol. And especially, well, at first, he was at Eolani Palace. Then he would sit right on the front stairs of the Capitol, right where the Lili Eolani statue was, is right now. And reporters would gather around, they would take notes, and he would actually talk. The attribution was off the record. The substance was open to anything that they wanted to be discussed. Now, Jack Burns, on the other hand, was very much, you know, he didn't hold that many press conferences at the same time. But he probably had one of the best informed press scores in the country here in Hawaii. We're not talking about that now on the national level, because what you're talking about is deliberately keeping reporting away from the issues that they're interested in. Burns never dodged the issues. He just never wanted to be quoted. So after a while, you kind of figured out who was actually saying these things. This is back when guys like Tom Kaufman doing great work and Tom still around today doing books and video. Oh, Budsmizer, George Chaplin and all these guys that were here. And in fact, one of the interesting things about back then, we had three separately owned TV stations, not only two different newspapers, but three different stations. And it's all changed. Now we have three stations owned by one company, and the three main stations are owned by corporate mainland interest, and that's a concern. So what you had was you had C.S.A.F.T.L., Bob Berger, and I forgot who they are. They were doing editorials on their stations, often in opposition to each other. Now it's all about a severe weather channel and what's the traffic like? Getting back to the idea of excluding the denying access, actually, Hawaii had a similar case, getting back to when Frank Fosse was the mayor, he had a war with the advertiser. Richard Verrecca, was he on the advertiser? No, Richard. I think it was Star Bolton at that time. But he kicked him out of Honolulu. I think he was with the advertiser. But the argument that Fosse had was that they both were owned on the business side. The joint operating agreement. Right. And in fact, I was treated to two hours of why that's a sin with Frank. And it makes sense, but it still was not something that people went along with. They said, okay, no, we need two newspapers, not one of them. Okay, so what Frank did was he banned Richard Verrecca, as you were going to say, from attending his press conferences. So that is a mild version of what is happening now on the federal level. The advertiser took that to court and won the case. And our Supreme Court basically said, you can't deny access. Otherwise, you don't really have freedom of the press. Because access is an important part of this freedom. How do you think our U.S. Supreme Court, especially one that's going to be five to four again, Republican, would weigh in, should such a similar case at the federal level? Well, what would happen, let's you and I speculate. So instead of just going to a meeting, all these media people got together and said, we're going to file a lawsuit and we're going to do it in California. And we're going to come up, we're going to do it quickly. Because the trip is coming on up, we're going to need an injunction, we're going to need something. And take it up there, have the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, get that referred to a divided Supreme Court, which four to four says we don't want to hear it. Sends it back to the Ninth, right? Well, it means that the ruling stands and that becomes the Constitution. But I don't see that kind of aggression. I wonder, though, if such a test might happen. Remember, Trump, as a candidate, said he even wanted to revisit libel laws. Absolutely. I mean, he evolved people, the things that are said. That scares me a great deal as a reporter that what I say, I mean, there's already restrictions on what I can and cannot disclose. I have to be careful about sources, using anonymous sources. I'll tell you something, though, back to this idea about whether we should be friends with the people they're recovering. Neil Abacromby, you know the former governor, he supported him. And he was having a press conference when he was in the fifth floor. And I've known him a long time. In fact, those of us who like Neil often advised him that he should not have as many personal press conferences. It might have been wise because he said, you know, let's get rid of the pro bowl and I'm going to roll over the AARP. But I introduced a new reporter. I said, come along to me to the fifth floor. I'll introduce you to the governor. And he went right up and asked him a question and said, can you tell me about Lanai? We had heard that Lanai was being sold to Larry Ellison. And Neil Abacromby did not give him a straight answer. And I was writing home with this reporter afterwards who said, the governor of Hawaii just lied to me. And I thought about that for a moment. And I said, that reporter is doing his job. He is being critical and skeptical. Whereas I was like, hey, this is the governor. Yeah, he's this nice guy. But in fact, that's not our job. And that's something that I do think we need to be more careful about. And I say this as someone who has too many people that are friends and politics. Maybe because I came from the political background, right? And also lawyers, my lawing background. And so we exist in a world where it's possible to like somebody, but totally disagree with them. That's true. You know, and totally be completely on the other side of an issue. So I don't necessarily see that as something, friendships as being something negative. But if it affects, if your feeling has to be negative in order to say something negative, then maybe as a person, you know. But unlike a lawyer, we're not getting $700 an hour to defend someone we may not like. You see, that's when I started to decide that maybe I should have gone back. Unlike a politician, we don't have to compromise and trade horses to get legislation back. So you don't need to be a friend. No, what our job is is to tell the truth. And if our affection for someone, our loyalties, is interfering with that, then we're failing the people that we're serving. Well, yes, absolutely. But I think you need to distinguish between loyalty and telling the truth. Loyalty and friendship, in other words. Loyalty should not be there if you're a reporter. If you want to be loyal, go work for the guy that's being the governor. But friendship may actually help you get the story. There's no question that it has, and it continues to do that. I had one editor tell me, John Temple, the founding editor of Civil Beat, worked at the Rocky Mountain News for many years. And he said, even when I wrote a story, or we ran a story that was brutal, and he mentioned Ben Nighthorse Campbell, remember? Right, right, right. Native American from Colorado. And they ran a brutal story, which was true. And what John told me was they'll actually respect you more when you just do your job. Even though you may think, I'm being a jerk and saying something bad. He says, don't think about that. Report the truth. I'll give you an actual case. What are my friends now? I mean, I consider him a friend, and hopefully he thinks I'm a friend of his. Is Richard Baraka, who was a pain in the butt when I was in office. We got to be friends, actually. But I do remember once, I remember this incident. And maybe Chuck Friedman, who was my communications director, might also remember this. He wrote an article. And actually, the article was one that very few of the other reporters got. But in my opinion, he got it correct. He got what we were trying to do. I don't even remember the subject. But I do remember thinking, oh, this guy's doing his job. So I get on the phone, and I call him up, and I said, Richard, nice article. What? Nice article. This is absolutely. Now, that's set off an alarm. What did I do wrong? The next day, I get totally smashed in some report that he was doing. And so Chuck said, you never should ever tell. At least Richard, he wrote a good article. Now we have a problem with social media. I wrote an article about a David E. Gay press conference the other day, and his administration tweeted out the story, which to me is an indication that they liked it. And then that made me immediately think, whoops, I might have failed or something. Maybe you crossed the line. Yeah. Which brings us to- Which I don't think I did. Because I'm sure my editor is watching right now. No, I'm sure. But this is what brings us to today. So now we have social media. So we have a president that cuts off all the access to what we call the establishment media or whatever, how else you want to call it. But he tweets every day. So people are beginning to think that instead of reading a newspaper, I follow his tweets. And how does the system survive in this kind of a context? You bypass the media altogether to get your message. You know, I don't know if that's going to entirely happen. Even Donald Trump, remember he would actually make up names and call reports to give them tips about himself. He reads everything that is said about him in the New York Times. The problem is his staff actually tries to give him all positive articles, but he goes out there and he watches the shows and he knows what's there. I think even he realizes he cannot bypass the press because the press, in many ways, made him who he is today. But he has two formidable weapons. Yes, he does. And he's taking on a free press. And the real question that I had, you know, was coming full circle, was whether this free press is going to survive. Because those two formidable weapons are to pick and choose the businesses you want to support. And the second is to bypass their communication just outright. Because what happens if people stop subscribing to the New York Times? See, what happens at what point does the shareholders run into the New York Times and say, look, guys, you know, be nice to them? Well, let me add this positive note on this. The New York Times subscriptions have actually increased substantially. Because, as you know, journalism has been losing a lot of viewers, but it has actually kicked up. And there is a sense that this is a rare moment for the press, where it has to rise to the occasion and frankly take on saving the country. Well, I think and I'm hoping that the one positive side following up on that is the fact that it may become good business to be against the president. That's what I'm hoping too. And that's, by the way, that's how Fox News billed itself as being against the incumbent. And then all of a sudden, you know, maybe CNN might be finding it or somebody else. But whenever I hear someone say, oh, this news service is biased, that the New York Times or the CNN is too liberal, I think, well, just ask Bill Clinton back when he was president whether they should have covered Monica Lewinsky. I mean, the press gives it as good as it can to just about whoever is in office. Well, hopefully that'll continue, you know, and I didn't think I would actually be saying this, but we desperately need a free press. Unfortunately, we're running out of time. I was hoping to take this home and, you know, find out how free is the free press in Hawaii. But at this point in time, I want to thank you. Thank you very much for being on the program, talking about a very important subject.