 We got another exciting show for you today. As you know, I love to talk politics from time to time. Can't help it. But you know, anybody can give you the content of what's happening, what's the latest bill that passed and so forth. What we show you here are the inner workings of what's happening. And today's session is about the state of our nation, the state of our nation. And really, the state of our nation and one of our most precious rights, the First Amendment, or the Free Speech Amendment, the ability to speak freely in your mind. So my guest today is a person that I record, you know, I have the greatest respect for. He is my former communications director, a lifetime friend. And my former telecom—I mean, communications director, who is now a special adviser to Senator Brian Schott, which makes him one of the big high muck-a-mucks in this world. So he can—well, you know, he can tell us everything. His name is Chuck Freeman. Welcome, Chuck. Hello. It's always a pleasure to see you. Hello, Governor. Good to see you. You know, this show spun out of a lunch that we recently had. And you and I were talking about the state of the political affairs in the country and in the state. And one of the most intriguing things that's happening to our nation is the relationship between what we call the media and government. And I don't only mean that in terms of likes and dislikes, I mean in terms of medium as well. What are some of your thoughts about where we are on the state of the media and government and what's happening with the First Amendment? Well, I think it was Arthur Miller once said that a great newspaper is a nation communicating to itself. What a great line. It is a great line, and that was probably, like, 50 or 60 years ago. And it really doesn't work anymore. The notion that there is sort of a single system news media through which the truth will flow, I think you'd have to go somewhere far into the fields to find a Van Winkle who believes that's true anymore. So the challenges we have today are with a multiferous set of media that do all kinds of things where life is more and more like a chat room where you find information that kind of substantiates it. But the trouble with chat rooms is that those chats are not necessarily verifiable. Right. And so how is truth deciphered from? Yeah. I think that's the fundamental question. And there's a term called confirmation bias where there are stories written or things said to substantiate the feelings of whoever the audience is as opposed to telling the audience both sides of the story and letting them kind of figure out what the truth is. We seem to have lost the capacity to do that, not entirely, but largely. Well, you know, but I always was suspicious, you know, suspicious about this desire to tell both sides of the story, let's say, you know, say we do both tell both sides and the people decide and so forth when obviously, you know, one side is bogus. So how do you make, if you as a reporter, as a media source, anyone out there know absolutely that one side of the discussion is bogus, you know, isn't propping that side up to look like 50% of an argument in a sense bias? Two things on that. One, I think with most issues that really are two sides and what a good reporter's job is to fairly flesh out either and come out with the best version, the most appropriate version of the facts. But there is, you know, also a problem with false equivalency. That's the term I, you know, we're… Good term. This is an educational… Sorry, these are big words on the former governor. You know, pretty good. It's a big word itself. But no shame of false equivalency, where let's take something like climate change where there are 97% of the scientists in the world and everybody's got an informed opinion has identified that climate change is… Even Putin. Even Putin has identified that climate change is real but there are few people who are somehow trying to say that the earth is flat on that issue. Well, you really don't need to report both sides of the story very much. It can be an assumed fact that climate change is real—what you want to do about it, how you want to manage it, how much you want to put into it—those are all real issues. But for some people who want to deny that climate change is real, there are news operations which will tell them stories that falsely equalize or make a false equivalent out of the notion that there is no such thing as climate change and there is climate change. And that's another tool that we sort of tripped into in this modern age. Where have you gone, Walter Cronkite, is what I am. Yeah, well, but, you know, OK, so we've got all these people covering all these things. And we have the president that's calling people who bring up an issue that either he doesn't agree with or that he doesn't believe that particular side of an argument and says that all of this is fake news. So what's, you know, how does the fifth estate, the great protector of the American free speech, you know, what we grew up being told that this is our way to know the facts? How do you survive in an era when whatever you say is being characterized as fake news? Yeah, a very serious challenge. Obviously, I have a democratic leaning, so I should declare my prejudices such as they are. But I think we're in real trouble there. I think that what has happened is I think that the news media as a totality wrestled with all this during the primary campaigns, when lots of stuff was flying out there, a lot of invective and ad hominem and kind of not factually based information during the primary. And the news media was trying to figure out how to deal with all that, and they sort of leaned toward the entertainment value of it all. And everything got, like, fox-fired out. Well, dust has settled down a lot. I understand the term fox-fired. Fox-fired, a lot of—brush-fired, you know, just a lot—everything sort of blew, but they went with it. Are you changing that description from fox-fired to— Fox-fired is actually a false—it's something you see at sea, right? Oh, I thought suddenly you say a lot of television channels. No. Oh. Ha, ha, ha. I don't know. I was not referring to Roger Ailes, what I was talking about, but I mean, the point is that—so, what we saw during the primary was the battle between entertainment value of news and sort of trying to draw an audience through the entertainment value and the challenge with— No, but what do you see when you see Sean Spencer, or Sean Spicer, whatever his name is, standing up there defending something that everybody in the room know isn't so. And then have his boss—like, this is the firing of James Comey's incident—and then have his boss come out a couple hours later— Say the opposite. Say the exact opposite. How does that—what does that do to our institutions? Well, I think it's—you know, it makes me think of the days—so, for five years, I was your communications director. And we lived in a world that seemed to be a lot more fair and balanced than the one we're living in now as far as reporters go. Yeah, I would think so. I think it was. But I always had—and I sometimes spoke for you, and I was in this—in situations like Sean Spicer, although you did a lot more of your own talking than Donald Trump seems to be doing. But I always had this moment in the back of my mind where you were in front of the media, and if somehow you just got off target and started saying things that weren't right, I was going to do my Fred Sanford imitation and collect my heart and go, It's the big one! It's the big one! Because there was no way out. When I look at Sean Spicer, almost every time I see him, I just want to say, It's the big one, Elizabeth! It's the big one! I mean, it's just—it is a—it's sad for anybody who's honestly tried to be in communications for a government agency or for business, for a non-profitor who tries their best to describe the policy and be on spot with the truth to watch the suffering every day that we see of that—of that—the White House press call. Well, you know, I read some plays, actually, recently that—and I think it was from one of the—well, it was from the statement. I can't remember exactly who it was from, but it was from a person who was the press person for the White House. I think it was for Obama, maybe Bush. And in his statement, he said, the most important element of this job is maintaining credibility. Yeah. I mean, did you find that to be true when you were doing it? I mean, it's— So we lived in a day when—and this is a Honolulu, where there were two daily newspapers. The downstairs of the state capitol, which is featured here in the picture, was filled with reporters, some better than others, but all of them basically trying to get to the truth. It was jam-packed with newsprint reporters, AP, Honolulu Advertisers' Star Bulletin, and then during the legislative session, another room packed with television reporters. It was a rare experience to find somebody who wasn't really trying to get the story and get the truth, and there was roughly the equivalent. You would occasionally find somebody who was a little bit avaricious. So are you saying it was a different age? I think it was a different age, and I think that it sort of policed itself to a very large extent it policed itself. What's happened now is that the technology has all changed. You know, when I was your communications director, I sat in a room that had a little machine called a teletype. When some kind of hot news from the mainland came through, if it was really hot, it would go ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, and a little printed piece would come out. What happens now is everybody knows this information before the communications director does. But everybody gets a tweet. Everybody gets a tweet. There's an Instagram. There's all of this stuff. You would have been a tweeter. Well, maybe, maybe not. I don't know, but I am now a Texer. So I don't know if I've graduated through tweeting. You know, that might be a little bit beyond me, but the fact of the matter is that there are more ways to communicate. And for politicians, it seems, at least it seems to be working, that one of the foundations of communication is like tweeting. It's less than, it's even less than a 30-second commercial, you know? And so you say something. I mean, the president of the United States goes out and he says, and this is what I don't understand. I mean, I don't understand how this all happens, all functions and still, you know, becomes the north of our country. He goes out there and he accuses the mayor of London for telling, for, with a falsehood. Yeah. With a falsehood. And is people knowing that that's a falsehood, which is immediately called to their attention? And he sort of gets away with it. Yeah, he gets away. No, he not sort of gets away with it. He gets away with it. Well, the question is, where is the sort of— So where is the media? Where is the media? And at what point do the lines cross between entertainment and real information and real journalism? And at what point to do the newsrooms and the people who are writing the news realize that we're in a paradigm now that's way outside anything anybody ever imagined? And it is a challenge to the First Amendment. And it's, you know, to me it's personally a very frightening thing. But I think the day of reckoning is already here. Well, we're going to come back—we're going to take a break right now—but we're going to come back and talk about the First Amendment and what is freedom of speech. We're also going to talk about media as a business and whether it can survive in this type of situation. So everyone, we're going to take a short break. We've got a great show coming up for you. More discussion. And here we are. Talk story with John Wahee. We've got an exciting guest today, my former communications director and current special advisor to Senator Schatz, Mr. Chuck Friedman, who by the way is well-known in the Hawaii media circles. So if there are any of his colleagues out there listening to this show, which you do from time to time, this is our phone now, hotline number 415-871-2474. Give us a call. Chuck will be really happy to answer it. Now, you know, one of the problems with what's happening on the national scene is this tendency. It seems like. What you have are these news channels out there all trying to get a story and so forth. And then you have the president of the United States handpicking his favorite. And in a sense, what, you know, what he, what, what happens is they get stories. They get stories. They get told, I'm going to do something. I'm going to say something or whatever, which is tremendous advantage. I had a time, it seems, or at least they get the explanation. They get the exclusive. Yeah, which brought up the question. And I, and I had, well, earlier, guess what, we discussed this whole issue. And I said, you know, what that does is that at some point, your media outlet, whatever it is, NBC, ABC, whatever it is, survives as an economic entity because it, it has the news. It gets things out there. And when you have a president, in a sense, supporting somebody else's business, how long can you survive without succumbing to the temptation of being friends with it? He also likes to wave his bony finger at the New York Times and other outlets and say, saying, basically, your ratings are down, your, your sales are down, your, your, your destiny is marked. So it's kind of a. What's interesting, and this is just, I read for a second, is that the New York Times and Washington Post have actually seemed to me gain credibility because of their stridentness. They're, they're acting like the old warriors of the First Amendment. They are picking up the banner, whether that, you know, in the long term, whether that strengthens them or not as a business, we don't know because for sure there is a business for the rest of America that cares not. What the New York Times has to say, or the Washington Post has to say, that's all way far east of them. But what's interesting is that their stories seem to be the lead for the media outlets that are not in the favored, you know, favored status from the executive branch. In other words, they're not from Fox News at all. Fox has some portions of their news where they're actually reporting news. Most of it is editorial and some of it is mixed in. You know, unfortunately, I think a lot of the media outlets are mixing editorial opinion, news, content, and it's become so jumbled up that it's understandable the American public would start to get confused about what's a story and what's an opinion. But Fox has made chop suey out of it all for sure. But, and they're, you know, not to make ratings the end of everything, but from a business standpoint, ratings determine, especially, well, for television, it's ratings and for newspapers, it's circulation. It determines, you know, do you have a viable business or not? Right, absolutely. So there's a lot of string pulling there and where it all ends up, you know, you can say it's about the newsrooms. To some extent, it's going to be about the American public and whether they decide at some point that they want the truth. Does the president's, OK, does the president, favoring one particular news outlet, actually affect the economics of the business? I believe it does. It has for a while with Fox, but their ratings are starting to slip. So, there may be a point is that, like, you know, for every action, there's equal and opposite reaction. There are some refractory stuff going on here that we don't really know about, just like we didn't really know when the primary started, that the entertainment aspect of news was going to dominate so much that we would have a hard time coming back to the truth and to facts. And we are still having a hard time doing that. Do we have faith in the American public? What H.L. Maykin say, nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American people? You know, maybe not. Maybe this is the end of it. The questioner said that Trump called Republicans stupid. And he said they don't believe anything he says. Yeah, and that you could shoot somebody in the middle of New York. Yeah. So, I mean, is that what we're saying? Is that our public's dead back? Yeah. I don't believe so. But I'm not as fervent in my ideology as I was in the past. Some awful things have happened in the last couple of years. And I'm not to bemoan it. It's going to be up to the newsroom. There is a new day. You said there was going to be a new day. There better be. There better be. Yeah. Well, I'll tell you why. OK, look, look. You know, our own little history in Hawaii. We had a mayor called Frank Fosse, right? That's right. And what he did was, in one of his early press conferences, he got really irritated by a reporter called Richard Borreka. Throw him out. Which, by the way, you know, has very understandable. For those of us who know Richard, we commend the emotional aspect of it. But not the action itself. Yeah. OK. And that went through our courts. Yeah. And the Hawaii Supreme Court says you can't do that. You cannot exclude. You cannot decide which news outlets you feed your news to. You think there's any hope that we'll get to that situation in the United States? You know, that is a good question. Will there be at some point a real fulcrum kind of challenge as we teeter-totter our way through the idiocy of this? Will there be some point where this is something that can be very dramatically challenged in court, in a court or in the court of public opinion in some dramatic, real way? The only way we're going to find that out is if the journalists stick to their knitting. Stick to their guns. And we may have, and you heard it first here, folks, we may have a Borreka too. Wait, let me have one. On the national level, right? Well, OK. I think we should send Richard to Washington for everybody a favor. Well, yes. No, no, no. He's mellowed, you know. He's very mellowed. But don't tell him I said that because he gets really irritated to hear it. But anyway. Right. What I do want to say is that what's interesting is at least NSNBC and CNN, they have these commercials. They're, we will not stop, you know, asking the questions. We uphold the First Amendment. But these are news media coming out and doing that. They're promoting themselves as truth sayers. I think that's good if they're establishing that as a value. Well, it's also good because if they, in fact, uphold the First Amendment. But there are problems with the way CNN and all the broadcast news stations are operating. They shoot themselves in their own foot. Oh, really? Yeah, definitely. Yeah, let's not, much as we believe in the rights of print press, I think that they have carried on with the entertainment value of journalism. Of themselves. The way too far themselves. And now they want to show that they're reported. You turn on CNN to get coverage of the news and you get people who are really stupider than your next door neighbor talking about things and not that you necessarily have a stupid next door neighbor. But I mean, you could get better information from talking to Ms. Fakuda across the fence than from some of these really. You mean the talking head type people? Yeah, panels of people who, Corey Lewandowski, who was fired as— Corey Lewandowski was Trump's campaign manager. He was fired. By Trump? By Trump. For being too aggressive. CNN hired him, even though he had—he was fired, but he had a clause in the hearing that didn't allow him to say anything negative. And CNN hired him as a commentator. Yeah, because they had to buy— Because it was entertainment and it was news. Okay. So now let's get to the— They shoot themselves in their own court. Let's get to the First Amendment before—because we've got only a few more minutes. And I do want to go to Portman. I want to go to Portman. I want to go to Washington State. I want us to—and the State of the First Amendment in this country. Now, when you and I were in the universities, there was this free speech coming out of Berkeley where the idea was the ability to say what you want. And yet, when—in this day and age, here we are talking about the First Amendment, the necessity for the media to exercise it. And this whole concept of what is free speech is— Who's allowed on campus? Who's allowed on campus? Who's allowed on campus? Who's allowed on campus? Yeah. Or, for example, the right wing, the outright— Yeah. In free speech. In—they have Trump. They have Trump-free speech rallies. And the idea is to go up front and call all the media corrupt and so forth and so on. And we have thousands of people saying, you can't say that. Yeah. So, where is this? That's not shouting fire in a crowded theater. It's—I think that's what's going on in some of the—in the academic institutions where they're shunning certain speakers, typically very conservative alt-right speakers. Yeah, speakers, though. It's a bad—it's a bad thing for America. It's the other side of what we're talking about, and we shouldn't just disdain it. But the people who are shunning these people are people who are pointing out that the people they are shunning are, in fact, you know, using vile words and doing things and standing for bad philosophies and the like. Now, so you—and yeah, that's exactly what many of us were accused of way back in the 1960s. There's a line you can't cross, but I think you and I would both agree that it's not the role of academia to protect students from alt-right thinking and ideology. That's—they shouldn't be protected from it. They shouldn't have the opportunity to be exposed to it. They shouldn't have to go and listen to it, but those speakers should not be shunned unless they are saying something that's flat. Well, let's say they're saying something that's awful, you know, maybe not fire in the crowd tape, but that's awful. And people don't like to hear it. Back—there was a time that the way that you would handle that kind of people is don't go. Yeah. You do like a personal boycott, you know? I don't want to hear that stuff. But today what we seem to want to do is confront it. And in a sense, it's like two groups of Nazis getting together. I don't even know if it's confronting it. It's—I don't even know if it's confrontation. It's actually denial, which may be worse. Just deny— Well, confrontation, you're right. Confrontation. Deny their right to speak. Gee, I'm spending a lot of time defending the alt-right here. But I think that just as important as everything else we've talked about today, is that that First Amendment shines through. Well, it's always easy to talk about the First Amendment when you're defending it, believe it or not, the star advertise. It's a little bit harder to defend the First Amendment when you're talking about the Hawaii Free Press, you know, who writes these articles that are, ooh, you know, you think they ought to be nuts or certified. But you know, Governor, your values don't mean anything till they're tested. Right. And we are being tested right now. We're being tested. And so if we really want an amendment to protect us against excesses like of Donald, of the executive branch, the other side of that coin is that we've got to be able to accept the fact that somebody else may have a different opinion. That's right. You know? Well, anyway, this has been an interesting show. I want to thank you so much for coming on. You are my major touchstone. And no one has taught me more about communications than you. So thank you, Chuck Friedman, Special Advisor to Senator Schatz. Thank you, Governor. You're welcome.