 Broadcasting live via Think Tech Hawaii Studios in downtown Honolulu. Welcome to Top of the Live. I'm your host, Ben Lau. Aloha and thank you for tuning in. My guest today is my guest from our last episode, Bruce Crumley. As I covered more extensively before, Bruce has had a career spanning decades as a writer and journalist. He has written and covered the news for a number of leading publications, and he's a renowned expert on the subject of terrorism, European politics, and society. We pick up where we left off with Bruce, the last time, who joins us once again from France. Aloha, Bruce. Aloha, Ben. Bonsoir. Bonsoir. Bruce, let's dive right back in. Let's pick up where we left off on the question I asked you relating to the changes in journalism profession and the media space. Doing some research for this. Harvard Business Review published last year in an essay entitled, Journalism's Market Failure is a Crisis for Democracy. The stuff I've read, it's a sorry state of affairs, Bruce. Yours is a dying profession, probably something you know. Literally, journalists are being killed off around the world. According to Statistica, 62 were killed in 2020 alone, 53 the year before that, and in previous years, 87, 74, 81, 114, 110, 143, 147. They're not just getting killed off, their jobs are too. One quarter of all US newspapers died in the past 15 years, according to UNC Chapel Hill. 1,800 communities in the United States that had local news outlets in 2004 were with zero this year, zero. You're familiar with the term news deserts. We have them growing here in the States. Newspaper newsroom employment in the US has fallen 57% since 2008 to 2020. That's a loss of 40,000 jobs. There have been some gains, certainly in digital media, but net net, there's still 30,000 job losses overall. Since the last talk, however, there's been some positive news, some good news for journalists, at least two of them. On December 10th, we had the news of two journalists, a Filipino and a Russian, who have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Chairman of the Nobel said something very nice about your profession and about these recipients. Quote, they are representatives of all journalists who stand up for the idea, democracy and freedom of the press face increasingly adverse conditions. In a war where the written word is their weapon, where truth is their goal and every exposure of misuse of power is a victory. As it relates to just those two Nobel Laureates, one lost six colleagues who worked for him, he's their editor, and as to the other 89 have been killed in her country along the Philippines. She faces prison time and charges and plenty more, and hundreds of journalists, in addition to the ones who have been killed, are prisoners behind bars in countries around the world. Ruth, over your career, journalism and news coverage went from being seen by many, if not most people, as a safeguard of sorts, part of the solution to a lot of the problems. And today, these are, by contrast, considered a big chunk of the problem and considered by people on both sides, opposite sides of social and political debate. How did reporters go from the heroes of Bernstein and Woodward of Pentagon Papers, the story that gave rise to the film spotlight, becoming everyone's favorite scapegoat for pretty much everything? Well, it's obviously a complex question, but I think one thing directing is proximity. The internet has made the world a much smaller place. And as a result, the distance that is perceived, and sometimes even real, between the reader or the consumer of news and the person writing it or producing it, has gotten a lot shorter. And because of that, there's a feeling that the professional gap there has narrowed also. And the upshot is, I think on the public side, there's a view that, well, I can read news, I can post reactions to news, I can write my own blog, I can post on readers' comments, I can do other things. And so therefore, I can speak with the same kind of authority in the same forum, sometimes and even on the same media platform as this journalist with whom I usually don't agree, otherwise I would bug me writing my retort. So I think that's part of it. The other part of it, I think, is that the news media itself has undergone something that I think has accelerated the divisions within the U.S. society. And that's the, I think you once called the market segment, segmentation, and a lot of journalists called the silo effect where, you know, Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes targeted a demographic that they could see out there, identify out there that they wanted to communicate a certain kind of news to. And they wouldn't be receptive to a, say, a CNN or New York Times audience. So that's who they broadcast to. And New York Times broadcasts to their audience in CNN, blah, blah, blah. And in the end, you have these mutually exclusive polls of information where consumers are not only not taking other polls seriously, but actually looking at them with the same disregard and even with a lot of dislike. So there's all that. But on the other side, the media is also sold its credibility down the river, frankly. It was one of the most vision-free management leaderships on the history of Earth. And they met the, by and large, leaders of media, traditional media, met the internet challenge by basically doing nothing. And then once realizing that it was too late to do anything, they'd been swamped, they essentially put their head in a noose and tried to sell papers by hanging themselves. You're referring to the vision-free people as the hardcore journalists that just caught on wears by the internet? Is that who you're referring to? No, this is the managers, the publishers, the managers, the editors-in-chief of publications who, by and large, first saw the internet come up and said, well, this could be interesting for selling things. And then they said, oh, maybe it'd be good for us to, I don't know, get more advertising sideline to our print business. And then once they saw the blogs come in, they basically thought, well, these people are just a bunch of bozos with basically morons with digital traffic cones that they're shouting through to nobody out in the ether. And it turned out the blogs did quite well. And they did quite well using the reports that traditional media was putting out there free. So traditional media, rather than trying to rise that challenge, did the stupid thing and said, oh, you know what we're going to do? We're going to flood them with what they don't have. Original reported, we're going to open up our websites, make it all free and have everybody who's reading blogs come to us. Well, that didn't happen. And once you had the race horses out of the barn, people weren't going to come back and start paying for them anymore. And as a result, you had advertising in print editions go fall, you know, a lot because nobody was reading them anymore. And you didn't have that migrating to online. And when it did, it didn't pay anywhere near as much as his hard copy publication. So basically, I'll end on this note, credible, legacy media got itself into an existential problem on the one hand, because they did not rise the changes that digital presented. And then they found no way to meet the financial losses of, first of all, classified ad loss, which was a huge part of their revenue and also to advertising. Let's put a little bit more flesh on the bones of what you're saying, because viewers may not follow the references. I think you did mention the internet. And I think technology overall, not just the internet has, as it always has, had a major play in what we read, where we read it, when we read it. And then what's in that that we read, I mean, everything from, you know, the movable type printing press and the steam engine, which first gave it to us, the telegraph, the typewriter, telephone, teletype, as you told me in some of your stories, you galed me. And then the threat of radio. And then the ensuing threat of television, if you call it threat, the technological introductions and what the news had to do, the people who print the news, who fund the printing of the news. And then we have more recent technology, the digitalization, the cable TV. I want you to talk about that, what cable TV and satellites did to your business. I'll do this really fast. Obviously, we have to do everything kind of broad strokes. But as far as I'm concerned, as far as my career is concerned, one of the big changes started in 1974 with the advent of People Magazine, which a lot in the traditional media looked at as this kind of really bad taste innovation by time life, the time life, you know, public publications, to create this kind of really trashy looking into other people's business surrender to the kind of national inquire kind of mentality. And it turned out the magazine was the most profitable magazine, the most successful magazine, I think, in the history of publications. And as a result, everybody who had been nacing it before got in on it and created their own, you know, people pages and started doing celebrity news and what have you. And that's just blossomed off and created far more content that's fluffier, that's about that's personality driven. It's about the rich and famous. It's about, and it's led us to the era of the Kardashians, where basically people were with zero substance, but 100% visibility. That was one change, a qualitative that kind of started corrupting away from the hard news content. The second thing was, I think with a big turning point was the first Gulf War. You said you talked about satellite CNN found itself during the launch of the first Gulf War as the only network in Iraq, capable of beaming images of real life combat, real life bombs, real life people dying to homes around the world. And you had this one guy, Peter on that out there with his microphone, who was the only person capable of giving the world this thing that was going on, this death and massacre and warfare live. So if you're sitting in Peoria or you're sitting in Bakersfield, you're watching this, you're going, whoa, this is, I can't believe that I have to wait for the eight o'clock news and it's not recorded, it's coming out of my life. That changed the world forever because on the first hand, television news became not about informing yourself, it became a kind of sort of vicarious involvement in something that was going on elsewhere, live. And often that was not so much to, again, to educate yourself. It was as entertainment. And that followed on from the Rock War to the OJ trial. It later on followed through to the riots in LA. And it also, I saw it happen here in France in 2005 when the suburban housing projects blew up all around the country. And you had suddenly these news crews coming from all over the world who had never been to a suburban housing project in France ever. And we're all grouped there with their, with these live photos of cars burning or what have you. That also changed massively the way TV news worked. And because of that, that changed the way that everybody else had to work. Because if you're a magazine like Time that I worked for about most of my career, you could not make a living telling people about last week's news. They know today's news right now. And they're calling their neighbor up and saying, did you see that? I did. You should be watching the same thing that I am. That's kind of a part of the big part of what became news, knowing first. CNN's headline still is, be the first to know. And that really is what it's about. It's about a lot of it is, again, celebrity news, personality driven news. Look at the anchors on CNN. Look at the anchors on Fox News. These are bad personalities more than their ideologies. Ideologies are there. And then also the content that's just gotten cheaper over time. And I think that is also weakened the reputation of the profession. I picked up on a few things you said, and I'm not going to be able to be sure that I can thread it through to a coherent question. So bear with me. You mentioned that the people when blogs came about that there were those higher up who kind of made derogatory comments, denigrating comments about it. You mentioned that the Kardashians came on TV and there's a lot of reports about how all of reality TV for the most part spiraled out of one family, the Kardashian family, which filed out of the OJ trial, which you mentioned, which became entertainment. But you also talked about kind of like you made a subjective comment that the Kardashians, whatever that is, they have visibility. Clearly they have more than visibility. They have appeal, not to me, maybe not to you, maybe for more females. But it's not something that I understand or get, but they draw a lot of eyeballs and they're able to do things with those eyeballs and that energy in those pocketbooks. It seems to me that we're also talking about CNN and it was noteworthy that a lot of the major networks when CNN came on and Ted Turner announced that he wanted to do this 24 seven network, everybody thought he was nuts. And when he went out and bought a satellite before anyone had one in preparation that he did not know, could not know about the Iraq war, the Iraq invasion, that he was sitting pretty, but everybody thought he was sitting pretty stupid. And I thought it was hilarious that the networks called him the chicken noodle network. That's what they thought CNN should stand for. It's always been derogatory. And now we talk about you're talking about some of these things with what happened in France and elsewhere with the handheld mobile phone. Apple only introduced the iPhone in 2007 and there were mobile phones before that, but they really shot off after that smartphones with everybody entering it. And it's almost too easy to throw negative comments or derogatory thoughts at these people who are using the technology in a way that who knows who envisioned it, but they're using it in creative ways and they're making large fortunes for themselves and large names for themselves becoming influencers and all this other stuff. But who's to make light of that? It may not be news in a hard course or a way, but they are entertaining others and they're making more money than a lot of these news network folks, you know, in the editorial positions, not the owners, but so there's there's there's there's a common thread with technology disruption and adaptation. But what's happened to the to the news itself? It's it's always a challenge. But how do you and there's a lot of things to thread as I'm trying to thread that story together and make some of these comments about what you're saying. I think I think there's a difference here, though, is what you're saying is correct. And again, I'm not saying Peter Annette and Ted Turner and CNN is responsible for everything that's gone wrong or in People Magazine is got is is directly responsible for the Kardashians and and what have you and in the dominance of reality TV, which is an oxymoron, there's nothing less real less more contrived than reality TV. But the the point, so I'm not trying to blame them, they innovated and the public reacted that the way it did. And you cannot say, you know, the public is wrong for doing that because the public reacts the way it chooses to and that's always been the way it is. And the big difference in news is in that I would never compare a reporter to somebody who has a jobs that are that are vital to forming lives and minds the way teachers do. But in a certain way, media has been a little bit like the educational profession in that you sometimes have to teach things and instruct things and talk about subject matter that the kids don't want to hear about because it bores them, it's not fun, etc, etc. But you need to do because it's good for them, they need to know it in order to be well informed and to and to and to be able to prepare for to interact with the world better and to a large degree up up until I would say about the early 1990s or maybe the mid mid mid 80s. Did journalism business that way also there was a implicit message mission that that there is something educational in this is not just going out and doing a job and writing your story and getting out of getting out of dodge. You were performing a kind of public public service that's a big term or educational that also is is rather haughty but there's something there to it and that really doesn't exist anymore at all not even close and and I don't think the public wants to do getting back to what you said I think one of the reasons people have gotten really soured on journalism because there's a feeling like who are these people telling us what to think and how that became to be perceived that way. I don't know. Matt Taibi who's a great you know former Rolling Stone writer who now writes for his own stories on on uh I'm blanking out. Sorry. He anyway I'm going to come back to me but he he writes frequently now about the way journalists just don't get how the public reads them very well and why they basically either hate them or ridicule them. Well you know I'm sorry. You know some of it Bruce is not we I started this off and maybe I'm to blame by framing it as about journalists. When I listen to you some of those criticisms or some of the tomatoes for lack of a better word they get thrown at at at journalists bullets too I mean the people are going to schools and shooting their classmates and their teachers but something that you said about you know journalism hard news reporting has been about education echoes with what I hear from friends who are teachers. A friend of mine just wrote an essay that I got to get to when I have some free time about education but they complain that students don't come to learn they don't want to learn and their parents are not necessarily the disciplinarians that support the learning process they bring their iPhones or the equivalents they're up to class they're distracted by I don't know if it's the Kardashians or they may not even be timely anymore I don't keep up with that stuff but whoever the equivalents the modern day equivalents today are maybe they're watching that instead of paying attention to it what's going on on the chalkboard of course we're in covid so there are less chalkboards or there are hybrid chalkboards but the point is that you know it's evident in the math scores and placement in the global competitions for math Olympiads and things like that that you know there's a little bit of a decline in uh uh scholastic or scholarly performance of our young and on the other hand there's also this trend and this again this doesn't just happen to journalists I mean talk to doctors today you know doctors will tell you that when patients come in they've read wikipedia they're they they think they know what's what's by ailing them and when the doctors don't know it's actually just you know take a few aspirin and actually lose some weight and get a better diet they say no no no that's not what it is I've read about this you know and and doctors getting pushed pushed back and you know these are doctors I mean you know there's Marcus Welby this is you know you don't you don't tell Marcus Welby what to do that's going to hate me a little bit but you know the point is you know ER you know you don't you don't tell the uh the doctors from ER uh what what to think you know they they're the experts and and it's going all around so I think this is something that you know as we said before the digital revolution has has changed a lot of things it's changed people it's been public it's changed professions and I think it's it's particularly been transformative of journalism and in ways that you know some people love and you know let's be honest the journalism never been perfect and I remember as I told you one time in the 19 late 1990s early 2000s I used to joke with um with my colleagues in the the london editorial office you know when we get some see some fluffy articles combined you know I tell them you know I'm gonna play the lottery and when I win I'm gonna use the the winnings the money to to to to to launch a news magazine it's gonna be a pure news magazine no movie reviews no celebrity stuff just news news news and I'm gonna call it spinach the subtitle is going to be you won't like this but it's good for you you know um some of what you say may may you know it seems to me some people in journalism have gotten it uh when I think of as you were speaking I thought immediately of those who thought okay well they're not gonna win the lottery they're not gonna start up your paper idea um one better way to do it is stars themselves uh this is wolf blitzer reporting from those streets beneath avengers tower this is anderson cooper seeing the guardians of the galaxy take over plan I they've made themselves personalities in a way and with all the information overloading gets to be really hard especially when you have these figures confusing the public as to who are they and what are they about are they serious men are they roleplayers um you also don't know what what I mean yeah the journalists because they're employed by cnn but what have they done I mean you know where can I see some of your reporting I mean I guess I guess um anderson cooper used to go to to um to you know the hady in places like that he used to chase around um disasters but that's exactly the kind of reporting I was talking about that I thought took journals off the rails it's chasing headline news so you can put your personality out there people are not not following the news anymore they're tuning into their favorite personality it's either tucker or anderson you know um again that's public taste um and it's also public taste being catered to by the media itself so who's you know it's a chicken egg thing who's who's right who's wrong I don't know but we got a handful of minutes I'm going to let your colleague in the professional of journalism say a few words just she was quoted this is maria resa who faces jail time in the Philippines and possibly death by two toward then um she's quoted as saying quote without facts you can't have truth without truth you can't have trust without trust we have no shared reality no democracy and it becomes impossible to deal with our world's existential problems she goes on to say more but that's that's very heavy words this is all very kind of um dim it's not really bright news uh no pun intended let's let's use the last few minutes and and and and try to shift to something a little bit more bright you wrote a novel maca I stink I about hawaii what you love about the aina tell me about that yeah yeah I've spent a lot of time there um did when I was a kid uh with my parents and then they were there being fair being you spent a lot of time on the islands in the islands first of all mostly on oh who were first of all then and then primarily on the island of kawaii the north shore and um uh I was on the north shore just days before the floods hit that you know that just took out pretty much all of from honolay over over to uh the not poly coast and and having been there so recently but also just having seen the scenes of places I love and knowing that people uh I I know and I very very like very much like their lives have been swamped by that I I don't know it's it it moved me obviously per in a personal way but also set something off my head that I don't compare it to a an inverse big uh big boom um it just a bunch of stuff that had been floating in my mind for for the years just came together childhood recollections anecdotes my readings of history you know my knowledge such as it is of Hawaiian culture and language what have you and just came together and I just saw this story I said I know what I want to do and the story is somebody who uh loves Hawaii and it has his entire life and who managed just to get the money together to move there to buy a house and to fulfill his dream and integrate as much as he can into the local life and that sets up the central dilemma of what becomes you know in the end an existential challenge for him and that is an old kanaka maori man turns up on his lawn and says right after the the the the the coup the overthrow that that took away Hawaii's independence a plantation owner stole this land from my family and I'm asking you to do something that US courts have refused to do since give the land back I know you're an honorable man I know you understand Hawaii's history give the land back and my um protagonist who is um who's uh earnest earnest to uh to painfully earnest and as I as I say uh don't don't give the whole story away bruce you want to hand I want I want but but he's he's uh he's earnest uh to to the point of as I say it's kind of left to burny in his political dealings including um supporting the Hawaiian independence movement he's put in front of this dilemma which is I know what's right but what can I do if that means my own ruin and he spends the novel grappling with that question you know he has come to an island knowing what he feels the historical crimes have been and he's been put in a unique unique position of being able to uh to to rectify a single crime and forever put it right as he wishes would happen for the entire nation and he has he he he box so that's basically the whole the whole story and I just did it as I said because uh you know I I really love the place and um and I know the independence movement uh is is is one of uh a question of large debate and even for people who don't support independence the question of of of the way Hawaiians as statehood was lost um is a I think a historical crime that has yet to be to be to be to be answered well your love of the islands is evident and your description of its beauty and all of its um uh just a lore and its seduction I was seduced it's just it's phenomenal it's it's fantastic really so I highly recommend it Bruce we have to wrap um let me have you say a couple words and uh and then I'll make some closing statements um you know I just all I can say uh about the news business I know people probably watching are are are interested in news um nothing is irreversible I don't think we'll ever go back to the time when you know if reporters had inks and ink stained fingers and and uh and uh and we're in honestly you know sleuthing the truths or what they consider the truth um but but um it is it is worth repeating something that that Daniel Moynihan the senator used to say and that is world we're everybody's entitled to our own opinion we're not entitled to our own facts and let's all try to pursue the the world and our and our interpretation of the news with that with that constant mind thank you Bruce I thank you once again for for joining me today you have a birthday coming up fast approaching so I mean wish you a very merry one of that along also a way to start solving before before we go off camber I also want to take a moment uh as we wind down for uh the season on the show and express my heartfelt thanks to Haley Akita and Eric Calanda uh without whom uh none of these shows that I've done would have been possible uh as well as acknowledge Jay Fidel, Carol Maughan and the others at Think Tech Hawaii and the donors who built and support this platform um lastly I want to express my gratitude to my mentor and friend Mark Shlaw these past months have been an adventure and I have you to thank Mark viewers thank you for tuning in I want to take a moment and express appreciation for your support too I wish you a happy holidays good health good cheer and good news for god's sake good news of good times with your loved ones stay safe until next time for my home to yours for me and my family for me and Bruce for you and yours mahalo and aloha