 morning on Monday begins. This is Stink Tech, I'm Jay Fidel. This is Brett Obergaard next to me. He's a professor at the program, the journalism program at the communications department U.H. Minoa. And he comes from time to time, not often enough, but he comes from time to time. Let me talk about media issues. And he was a player, a panelist in our morning media symposium, which was October 10th. And he answered a question that day, participated in one of the two panels. And we covered changes in the media, challenges to the media. We covered solutions to these problems, and we covered survival of the media economically and in our democracy, such as it is. Welcome to the show, Brett. Well, thank you for having me again. Well, let's talk about the trip you just made first. I went to Google. I mean, that's exciting. I would always like to go to Google. What did you go for? What did you learn? I went to a machine learning workshop at Google's San Francisco headquarters, not their Mountain View headquarters, so right downtown in San Francisco. Very nearby to where they just had a machine solve the Rubik's Cube for the first time. I don't know if you saw that in the news this week. It was almost like one building away from that. And it's kind of like the hub of AI in San Francisco and the world, essentially. So we were there to learn about how to make media more accessible to technologies. And it also brought to mind a lot of ideas about how news and journalism is going to change based on AI as well. Yeah. I mean, it's an irresistible possibility that technology is moving so fast, especially technology around info technology and social media technology, that it will affect, it is affecting the media and journalism especially, and that in turn affects our democracy. So this is really mainstream stuff, actually. And I just wonder... Well, accessibility, too, because... Accessibility, of course. If a piece of media is not accessible, then it might as well not exist. You imagine if you go to another country and you be assigned in a different language and you can't read it, it basically offers you no help. And there are a lot of people, for a lot of different reasons, can't access media in the country. They're blind, visually impaired, hard of hearing, whatever the situation, dyslexic. And you start parsing those groups off and suddenly you're into the millions and millions of people who are disenfranchised from public discourse. Yeah. And participation in whatever government they have. And in the community conversation, which is always valuable, I mean, I think we need to have community conversations. We also need to have smaller conversations. Right. You know, what comes to mind is I saw an article recently about machines that you can buy that you and I can buy, which translate language from one to any number of 80, 90 languages in the world. And it comes in, you know, it's like on your cell phone. And that's changing things. So you can travel, travel is so much more important. Or you can communicate on telecommunications. But there's really no barrier about language if you have that. There's also no barrier between somebody who can't see but can hear, somebody who can hear, but not see. Did I get that backward? Somebody can not hear but see. And all these translations. Yeah. At the workshop I was at, I was sitting next to a person who was deaf from birth. And he was watching a live transcription. So Google has a program called Live Transcribe, which is free. You can download it. And it not only translates a speaker, but it'll translate into 70 languages instantaneously. So as a person's talking, you can put your phone up and it'll transcribe it right on your phone with the person saying it into different languages. That's a high degree of accuracy, I'm sure. Pretty high degree of accuracy and very, very fast. It's just, as soon as a person says something, you know, because a lot of times, particularly people who are deaf or hard of hearing, they're in a situation where they're, say, reading lips or whatever. It's very hard to have a socially not awkward conversation because there's pausing and things that we're not used to in ordinary conversation. And this allows that to be minimized. It's not completely eliminated, but minimized. Well, that's really at the cutting edge for journalism. So, you know, as a journalism professor, one would assume that you're talking about, you know, reporting, articulating content, distributing content. This is a matter of distribution, isn't it? Well, translation, yeah. They also have a new app that's not quite out yet, but we've got a test stick called Google Recorder, which allows you to record and transcribe at the same time, say your interviews. So you'd be able to download this free app, do an interview, your transcript, it'd be immediately available and you could immediately email it to somebody or whatever to your editor. Is this available now? Not quite yet. It'll be the next couple of months. It's available on the Google Nexus phone, but not available on all androids yet. Oh, wow. That will change things. It's one of those programs that we've been looking for in journalism. It'll help tremendously in terms of efficiency. Because normally when you do an interview, you have to go back and transcribe it yourself or you pay somebody to transcribe it just to make sure you get the quotes right and everything. And this will do it for automatically. And it's also time-coded with the audio. If you're like, oh, what was that quote on such and such? You type in a search term, it'll go right to the audio and it'll allow you to grab that clip out. It'll change things. Yeah. It'll be a really, it'll be a really good, it'll be a really important tool. Tools like that. I'm not just saying Google's tool, but tools like that are going to change the way we report. It just came back, no? Yeah. Got to do that. You know, got to stay up at the cutting edge. So let's talk about the program, Morning Media Symposium. It's about media. There were a lot of people from the media there who were very interested in the media. And you spoke, what did you speak about? You had a specific topic, a question that you had to deal with. What was it? The primarily was how would you allocate resources if you had 20 newsroom staffers, no worries about advertising, no worries about, you know, furniture in the newsroom in terms of like the things that you have to do. Just like what would you do with 20 people and no budget concerns? And what I really wanted us to focus on in journalism, and that's what I try to do with my students, is you focus on a couple of things. Your story is identify new problems and then offer solutions to new problems. I think one of the most frustrating things for me as a reader or listener or a watcher of journalism is people give me problems that I already know about and then they don't tell me how to solve them. It's just like a kind of constant irritant. So if it's a problem I already know about or, you know, anybody would know about. It's been going on for decades or whatever. There's no point in just kind of needling somebody, hey, it's still a problem. What I think journalists really need to do is find the solutions and present them to people. And then if there's some power structure that's not pursuing those solutions, then hold those people accountable. Well, you know, one could argue, not me, but one could argue that that's opinion. When you identify options that would solve the problem, isn't that opinion, and therefore not to be included with a fact-based journalistic story? Well, the journalism umbrella is very large. It includes, of course, opinions, editorials, where the festivals are, they're called service journalism. Journalism is a very wide umbrella. I would say providing potential solutions is a core of what journalism does as a fact-based enterprise. It's not outside of that in any way. And it's also, I wouldn't consider it opinion. It's simply a matter of, you know, here's the problem. Here are some ways we've identified to fix it, which one of these are we're going to try. Because journalism is really about the conversation with the community. It's not about, you know, necessarily chronicling all of humanity. I mean, there's millions of things that are not in a journalistic discourse every day. There are billions, trillions, I don't know, an infinite number of things that aren't included in there. So it's already filtering it down. And what we have left is, you know, in my mind, if you have the local robbery and it takes up, you know, 90 seconds of your newscast, and it's only 30-minute newscast, then, you know, what's left out? You only have that much resource to put in there. And what's going to be solved by showing that that robbery happened, you know, the robber's been caught. It's an isolated incident, robberies happen all the time. You know, I'm going to say it's not a value, but let's talk about robberies across the city. How can we stop that or something bigger? And I think too much of our journalism is just filling the holes. And that's, to me, why we've lost the market to social media because journalism became more entertainment than information. And then as it became more entertainment, it became more dispensable. Yeah, I'm with you all the way on that. So, I mean, for example, homelessness or climate change, those are major problems in our world that both affect us like it or not. And I think a lot of stories that you see are the poor homeless, but they don't give you the options. They don't weigh and balance the options. They don't give you a path on which option, what collection of options would be appropriate to solve or deal with the problem. And that's the real story, or what agency or person or, you know, altruist is working on what option. That's the real story. The same thing with climate change. I had a panel one time, another program, another group and said to my panel, I'd like to hear action points. Yeah, I don't want to hear that there's a problem with climate change. We know that. Okay, and they went through all of them and each one in turn said, there's a big problem with climate change and nobody could bring himself or herself, you know, to actually deal with action points. And I mean, I'm refreshed to hear you say that's part of journalism to talk about the action points, whether this is a question I put to you, whether the action point has been in discussion in that community discussion before, or whether you the journalists have just thought of it. Well, yeah, or some experts proposing it or whatever they're I mean, they're going to be a laundry list like climate change is so huge, there are millions of solutions. We have decided where what priority are we going to put on these and there's not going to be a silver bullet that's going to solve it all. One example I thought was very inspiring was in India, they took a day off of school and gave it each child in all of India a tree to plant and they planted I think like 13 million or 30 million trees in one day. And when we're talking about the changes to the atmosphere and how we could solve it, I think the number is set at like say 300 million trees have to be planted to get us back to where we were. I'm thinking, well, it is 13 million in one day. So I think we could 30 million or whatever the number was. I'm saying like this is a tangible practical solution. Plant trees, pick up garbage, you know, if there's some debris in the ocean, let's clean it out. These are these are also economic ideas. Like here's a job. The job is clean the oceans. The job is pick up junk on the beaches. A job. I mean, there's all these jobs out there that we could do and also make our environment better and fix climate change at the same time. And these are things that are not in the typical discussion in a lot of media circles. And that to me is as part of our weakness. It's not a mystery to me why we've lost that kind of cornerstone part in the democratic discourse is because we've lost our way and what we're doing in many respects. We forgot that we are the bully. We the media is the bully pulpit. We have leverage. And so the media has found that out. We set the agenda. That's part of what journalism does. It's agenda setting on action points. Two things come to mind that I read about recently. I'm interested in your reaction. Number one, David Lionheart, New York Times has a newsletter. He writes a lot. The New York Times said, you know, this is a time when the public should speak up on the question of impeachment. This is what the politicians are waiting for. They're waiting to see what the public reaction is. So if you want impeachment, now is the time to get out in the street. So that's an interesting kind of suggestion. I mean, his opinion is obviously not, you know, fact based journalism, but but but he was using the bully pulpit. He was saying he is saying, you know, if you if you want to make a difference, this is all kind of reverberation. If you want to make a difference, get out in the street with a sign and say you want impeachment, if that's what you want. I found that interesting. The other one, and this is more funny than anything else, is Bill Maher, one of my favorite publishing comedian commentators, has this thing going on about we should all send money to Trump and buy the presidency back. If 1000 multimillionaire billionaire people gave him $1 million each, that would be a billion dollars. Maybe he would take the money and just leave the presidency. I heard that one before. That's a pretty good idea. Save a lot of anguish. You know, it shows you and it's sort of on the continuum to my next question. It shows you that the press does have leverage because it is the pulpit. Because theoretically anyway, it reaches a lot of people or it has reached. They think that's changing now. And as you say, the press has lost its mojo in some way. And maybe it's not as much a bully pulpit as it used to be. But if I made outrageous, outrageous, but aggressive, strident statements, if I made calls to action, do you think that would improve circulation? I don't know if it improved circulation, but what I would think if we could put the important issues on the table every day and have people address them, as opposed to the whole filling mantra that I think we have. And that's across the media. It's in television, newspapers, websites, whatever. They fill the holes. And with protesting, I think these are, this is where say coverage of a protest could change minds. Like if we had every time there's a protest, you had extensive coverage of it in all the media, that would maybe make a difference as opposed to there's a there's a big rally and you don't even see a photograph when the star advertiser about it. So that's I think part of part of the disconnect that we have. And social media is changing that like with Monacaia, you have I think that that group's been very effective with social media to keep that issue at the forefront. And then the news media has sort of followed the social media instead of the other way around. And the protesters are looking for the cameras. Protesters are talking to the camera, they're looking at the cameras. And this is what I think all of us can do as part of building our democracy is try to get our message into the, you know, bigger discussion. It reminds me of that quote I found from from the comedian who has played for a long time and got off. It's a New York apartment. Yeah, I forget his name right now. And he came up with the notion that it's amazing. Is it not that the news in the news that the newspaper covers that, which is just there's just enough room in the newspaper to cover the news for that day. Yeah, just amazing, amazing fit. And what you know, with that, of course, the joke is that there's really much more news that they're not putting in the newspaper. And if there's less news, they have to expand it, then they're just filling, filling holes, did you say? Yeah, but the problem is, as the newsrooms have shrunk, there's less resources devoted to making news. And then that's where the filling comes in. And this is kind of a death circle, a death spiral, where you keep cutting journalists and you keep making them do more and more stories in a day, and you're going to get worse and worse stories. And then people are going to find those less and less valuable. So then they're going to turn to your channel less and less. And then eventually, they'll just find you completely irrelevant. Yeah. Jerry. Fine film. That was the guy. Yeah. Well, okay, let's let's go to the next part of this discussion, which is the article I found in the New York Times a day or two ago. And it reminded me of my own question that I put during the second panel, which I don't think I put it very well. But my question was something like, you know, the media has a problem in terms of business models, raising money, pay for the cost of all that reporting, pay those 20, 20 team members that you were talking about. And then you have the down spiral. At the same time, social media is making tons of money, and the news is not necessarily accurate. It comes from all sources. Some of them are bad sources. And this is the most troubling part of all is that I can, I can disseminate news to a huge number of people through Facebook, or some of the others, by paying them for ads. And they will deal with me. They actually had people embedded in the Trump campaign in 2016, advising him how to do this. And I'm sure they're doing exactly the same thing. Hillary Clinton wasn't doing that. She didn't have that advantage. And Brad Parsquale, the guy who was the social media manager for Trump in 2016, is now Trump's overall campaign manager. And Trump is spending like $50 million recently on all the social media on its messaging and its news that isn't necessarily true. And somebody is paying him to put it there. It's, ad is the wrong word. It's much broader than ad. It's what they do. And of course, this has a lot to do with Analytica, Cambridge Analytica, and how they made a living and how they affected elections, not only in the US, they affected the election in Brexit and in other countries around the world, a collection of them, and they were getting really good at it by the time of the American election in 2016. So bottom line is there's a living to be made. There's money to be made in fooling with social media. And social media is making oodles of money. And, you know, Google is one of them. Facebook is, of course, Twitter. And so what I see is sort of a, it's a competition. And social media is winning the competition, but the public is losing it. What are your thoughts about it? Well, more than half of American adults get news from social media. So the channel is very robust. There's nothing really that can compare to Facebook right now in terms of news dissemination. Yet, Zuckerberg and Facebook take no responsibility for what they publish, which to me is just ridiculous on its face. It's aberrant. It's, you know, this is something where the government has to step in and solve this problem after regulating. Isn't it trouble you to say that the government has to step in? No, it doesn't trouble me because this is a speech is regulated in lots of ways. We have free speech, but we don't have free speech to threaten people with bodily harm. We don't have free speech. You'll fire in a movie theater. There are things you just, it's free to an extent or doesn't impact other people. In this case, spreading propaganda, which is what I would call what most of what appears on on Facebook, and that's not just for Trump, it's lots of people do it, is something that needs some regulation, just like it's been regulated in all the other publishing houses. So everybody else that publishes information is regulated to have, you know, either factual information or, you know, discourse of benefits of public in general or whatever. There's some kind of public good that it entails. For example, if you broadcast over the airwaves, you have an FCC license that requires you to serve the public, not just, you know, tell things. And this is something that social media doesn't have, and to me it's something I think the government needs to come in and clean up. This is, I'm not talking about infringing on free speech. What I'm talking about is regulating the type of speech that this particular channel can use. And that is, that's to me like a fundamental step we have to take and basically just call Facebook and Twitter publishers. That's what I would do. And then have them follow the guidelines we already have in place for every other publisher in the world. So somebody has to set the standards though. You know, you go black on a Supreme Court years ago and say, yeah, you can say anything you want in the First Amendment, but don't call fire. You cannot call fire in a crowded movie theater because that's going to, you predictably, you know, create, create injury and death. Yeah, and the antidote to bad speech, hate speech is more speech, not less speech. I fully support that. But what I'd say is when you're creating a system that elevates massive amounts of propaganda, that needs regulation. It's not, not free speech in the sense that people, ordinary people, want to have their say. It's propaganda, but through fire hose. And that to me is very, very dangerous. There are some people listen to it. That's, that's a problem of education. Millions of people listen to it. Yeah. So the question, the question I put to you was just, can we take a moment and drill down on that? Alright. Can we talk, as you suggested earlier, about options? Okay. So, okay, I go to Congress. So let's assume Congress is healthy at the moment we go to Congress because it is dysfunctional now and you can't get anything through it. So what, what's the bill? What does it say? You can't do propaganda. Social media platforms operate under publisher laws. You have to be a publisher. They're a publisher. But you're not going to require them to register or anything. Just, just do some things. They have to, within a definition of publisher. Right. And this is, this would be like, you know, I could make a newsletter at FedEx and print it up and say whatever I want. That's free speech. But as soon as what I put on that newsletter is inciting like violence or whatever or doing something against basic humanity, that's when I'm responsible for it. I think not only you turn the social media folks into publishers, everybody who publishes on social media needs to be responsible for what they publish. And that's the only way to root out this system. I heard Zuckerberg's speech the other day about his claim to, you know, want to protect the First Amendment, blah, blah, blah. He really wants to protect his business. He wants to, because his business is going to fail otherwise. He's a, he's a publisher. Uber's a taxi service. Airbnb is a hotel. All these things they just, they want to, they're using loopholes in the law to, um, him off as much money as they can before people figure out the game. It's really aggravating to hear him talk about the First Amendment. Oh, it's ridiculous. Yeah. I mean, to say that he wants a free speech and all that when he really is about taking our free speech and, and turning it into capital and then selling it. Okay. I mean, there are problems with this legislation because you have definitional things. What is propaganda? What is hate speech? I wouldn't go into that. I would say a publisher, you only have to publish one thing to be a publisher. Like, I publish one piece of paper. I'm a publisher. That's the standard. That's the standard we've used throughout history before social media. It wasn't a matter of a newspaper published 100 copies a day or a million copies a day. They are still publishers. There's a huge amount of law on this. There's a huge amount of law and legal precedent, libel laws, et cetera, that are all have been established over decades of court cases that really clearly share communal values. And right now they're superseding that. So what would you outlook? Propaganda, hard to define. Bigotry, hard to define hate speech. Bigotry, hard to define. And inciting to violence. That actually is easier. Well, I wouldn't, I wouldn't want to outlaw any speech in particular. But what I'd say is whatever laws we have in place for publishers, that's what each individual should be responsible for. And then the platform in a larger level should be responsible for. Including defamation. Yeah, libel's defamation. That's elegant. Well, it's easy. It's simple. It would, it would make so much sense. I was recently in an Uber talking to the driver about the situation with Uber. Uber essentially makes changes of rules every day on this driver. Changes how much money they get every day. They change the way they were. In California, the state legislature came in and said, you know what, Uber? You're doing this wrong. We're going to change the rules and we're going to set them. You're going to be just like a taxi now, essentially. You're going to operate like the taxis do. Because the taxis were set up not because they wanted to punish taxi companies, it's because they had certain things that we wanted to make sure happen. You wanted to have a safe ride. You want to have a regulated ride, like with costs. You wanted to make sure your driver was insured and all that. It's all these basic things that we agreed would be good for that kind of service. Uber came in and went through a loophole and made a lot of money. Well, good for them, but the gig is up. So has California actually changed that? Yeah. Oh, that's good. It's the same kind of elegant solution. Yeah. As far as I know, I'm getting this from the Uber driver, but essentially they're going to restrict the way Uber operates in the city of San Francisco. This is a statewide thing as well. So last point, Brett, and this is really an important one. And as a journalism professor, somebody who thinks about this at really all levels all the time for a career, I'm sure this would be central for you, is that how important is this whole discussion? How important is the media? How important is the competition between the conventional media and social media? And all this, you know, the problems that we discussed at the symposium about changes in the media, challenges to the media, solutions to these problems, and survival of the media. How important is it to democracy? I mean, if you looked at the Constitution, you'd get the idea that they thought it was really important. Well, not until the first amendment. You know, it was not in the basic Constitution. It was the first amendment. Well, first part, but how important is it as things work right now? The continuation, which is not guaranteed. You know, Ben Franklin said, it's a Republic, madam, but only if you can keep it. And query, can we keep it? And how important is the first amendment and the media to keeping it? Well, I think there are a lot of conflated issues in this where people inherently are arguing for business models as opposed to journalism. I hear this all the time when I go to journalism type events where newspapers are dying. This is so terrible. Our TV stations, all their viewers are older or whatever it is. And what they're really arguing is for the continuation of their business as opposed to protecting journalism and the future of journalism. What I would say is, you know, that we should get away from that kind of protectionism and move toward a refocus on what journalism does. And that's what you were talking about is it boosts and strengthens democracy. It's not about making money. It's not about, you know, having all the power or whatever these situations are set up like. Now, of course, this is very painful. They've had roughly 30,000 newspaper jobs lost in the last 10 years. And they've had roughly 13,000 digital media jobs that have come back in that place. Less jobs. But what people don't talk about is, well, what jobs were lost. You know, these, to me, this is where the evolution and refinement of journalism is happening. And it's not inherently a bad thing that we're losing those jobs. It's it's inherently a bad thing if the new jobs that replace it are worse at journalism. And that may be happening too. I'm not saying it's not because I find a lot of web content is very poor as well. Now, you look at somewhere like Civil Beat where they do a really good job at what they're doing and they're kind of bringing back new journalism jobs that are as good or better than what the old newspaper jobs were. Without a printed copy. Without a printed copy. And most people want their news on their mobile devices. They don't want, you know, I personally get a printed newspaper every day and I enjoy reading it over breakfast. But I understand that most people don't do that and won't want to do that in the future. So I accept it. You know, that's just my personal preference. And me to try to hold on to that because I like it, you know, that's not really fair to what the journalism is. Are you ready to give it up? Well, I'm just I'm just ready for what will bring about a better democracy. And the better democracy is clearly going to come through digital tools and and more direct access for all sorts of people. And that's, you know, that's where this change is going. So a lot of historians in journalism look back at the changes in the business models and they don't really fret about what's happening now because they've seen it before in lots of different circumstances. And if you think of, say, the rise of, you know, the yellow journalism era or, you know, the post-watergate era or whatever, there's always these surges and kind of cutting off the chaff and getting rid of the bad stuff and getting back to the good stuff. And I think that's what we're doing here. And, you know, eventually people will, I think, find that valuable. But, of course, it doesn't really help the person lay it off from a job. Well, you know, it goes to my very, very last question, which is, which is this, you know, you, you, you infer that professionalism is at the high point of the sine curve that you described between good journalism, periods of good journalism and not so good. And professionalism seems to me it comes from, it definitely could come, should come, probably is coming from schools like the journalism program at the communications department at UH Manoa. But how important are those schools to the future of journalism and therefore our democracy? And how, and what would you, what would you, how, you know, it doesn't pay very well these days. You can't stand up there at the head of the class and say, you guys are going to do really well here. You can't say that. They're not going to do that. I can, because I do. But you do say that. I do say that. I don't, I think it's a false argument. Okay. I studied journalism in college and was employed as a journalist for most of my life. And I never had a problem paying the bills. I did have friends who had public assistance at some of the small newspapers they worked at when they started, but eventually they moved into jobs that were family wage, middle-class jobs. You're not going to be rich in journalism unless you're Wolf Blitzer or somebody like that. Of course, those people make lots of money. So I find it somewhat false on its, on its basis to say that this isn't a good occupational job compared to, look at all the other liberal art degrees. Okay, you're going to be a sociology major. You're going to go out and make millions of dollars. You're going to have a job for sure. You're going to be a psychology major. You're, I mean, which one of the English major? Where are you going to be on this list? That you're, what degree are you going to get a big job? And then really importantly, in the STEM fields, this has been something that's argued so much. I just read a really interesting evaluation of the STEM fields in terms of how those degrees translate into careers. And what they found was that STEM degrees are really good at the first part of your career. And then your skills get outdated within, say, 10 years or so. And most, a lot of those people plateau. As opposed to a journalism major, an English major, sociology major, a psychology major, whatever, they learn these broader skills that allow them to become managers or, executives or whatever. And their careers actually, in the long term, can be more lucrative or more stable than the STEM fields. So this is somewhat based on a faulty premise. And also I think about like, what do you want to do for a job? You know, what do you want to do? You want to get up every day and be curious about the world and go out and ask questions and find out about it and then tell people what you learned and what better job could you have than that? So that's my argument back on it. Yeah, no argument. You learn how to write well. You learn how to communicate well. You learn how to produce media. You learn how to be active in a democracy and know how it works. You know, you can learn it from the inside, going to council meetings, interviewing public officials. It's really a rich job. And yes, not everybody becomes a journalist at the end of it, but our graduates become government spokespeople, corporate spokespeople. They become lawyers. They become teachers. All sorts of things. And then that's where the argument for a journalism degree comes into play. And it gives you a consciousness about the country. It connects you with the news, the community, and the sea changes. So that it makes you, it gives you a rich life. And arguably, it saves our democracy. Well, it's a true-seeking ideology. That's what I call it. So you seek truth. We teach you how to seek truth and find it. And then what you do with that truth is up to you. Thank you, Brett. Brett Overgaard. Thank you. Professor of journalism. Thank you so much for coming today. Yeah, thanks again for inviting me.