{"id":13339,"date":"2019-01-31T05:04:52","date_gmt":"2019-01-31T15:04:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/workable-level.flywheelsites.com\/?p=13339"},"modified":"2019-02-12T10:29:53","modified_gmt":"2019-02-12T20:29:53","slug":"pulitzer-prize-winning-journalist-discusses-alternatives-media-role","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kapionews.com\/index.php\/2019\/01\/31\/pulitzer-prize-winning-journalist-discusses-alternatives-media-role\/","title":{"rendered":"Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist Discusses Alternatives, Media Role"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By <\/strong>Katlin Cilliers<\/strong><\/a> | Staff Writer<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

During Ellis Henican\u2019s first interaction with Donald Trump in the ’90s, the then businessman held up two framed photos \u2013 one of Ivana Trump and one of Marla Maples, who would soon become his wife.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSo \u2026 which one is hotter?” Henican recalled Trump asking. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

To Henican \u2013 who was then a news reporter for Newsday, now a political analyst and news pundit for cable news channels such as Fox News and CNN \u2013 the man behind the question asked 30 years ago hasn\u2019t changed in essence. What did change is that he moved from the 26th<\/sup> floor of the Trump Tower in New York City, to the Oval Office in Washington, D.C. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trump also moved from deliberating about female beauty with strangers to engaging in war against news media that reports on him. Such conflict was the key point in Henican\u2019s lecture Wednesday at the University of Hawai\u02bbi at M\u0101noa\u2019s architecture building.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“When you get your head around [the Trump administration], when you’re expected to cover everything, you start to notice the themes,” Henican said. “And the themes become especially powerful when they involve things that affect each and every one of us individually.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n

About a hundred people attended the talk, titled \u201cMedia in the Age of Trump,\u201d that discussed the president deeming the news media \u201cthe enemy of the people\u201d and how that stance challenges journalism itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Henican began by speaking about Trump\u2019s personality and how it appeals to his supporters, entices endless media coverage, and what can be done at a press and individual level to make consuming news less of a bleak experience.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a sit-down interview a few hours before his lecture, Henican also spoke about the demographics and general profile of Trump supporters: factory and field workers from \u201cthe middle parts of the country\u201d that may feel alienated and, due to their own hardships, found an echo in what Trump had to offer to the table a little more than two years ago as a candidate. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201c[These people] feel very alienated, from politics, and government, and from their own futures, and opportunities, you know?\u201d Henican said. \u201c[People] who feel like \u2026 their dreams are getting harder for them to realize. \u2026 And their opportunities, their incomes, their futures, have kind of gotten a little dim. And so I think they were very open to a message like the one that came from Trump.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite the current scenario, Henican says there\u2019s hope things will change for the <\/strong>better. To him, America\u2019s history is built upon righting its wrongs and \u201cself-correcting\u201d whenever it\u2019s headed to less-than-ideal circumstances. This, however, takes time and lots of moving back and forth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

” \u2026 Unfortunately it\u2019s not a straight slope up, you know? We dip, we come up, we take a step, we take two steps back. \u2026 But in the long sweep, I am pretty cheerful. I think we\u2019ll come to our senses.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Henican offered his thoughts on a post-Trump America, one that will have moved away from divisiveness and hostility. To him, Hawai\u2018i is in the vanguard of this trend. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s only going to get more so [diverse] and to me [Hawai\u02bbi] is one of the places, because of its unique history,\u201d he said. \u2026 \u201cHawai\u02bbi, seems to me, can be a real advance laboratory for that.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

To him, in post-Trump America the lesson that the most people will take is that \u201cwe don\u2019t want to be [divisive] like that,\u201d Henican said. \u201cWe\u2019re better than that. That in the long run, we do better by having allies around the world. We do better by different groups in America finding ways to cooperate and be open to each other. That, you know, progress comes really not from hostility, but from finding smart ways to cooperate.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At an individual level, Henican urged\npeople to be willing to hear the other side of arguments. He suggested taking\nfive minutes a day to \u201chear things we\u2019re not usually inclined to hear,\u201d he\nsaid. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

To Eriza Bareng, a program assistant of the Better Tomorrow Speaker Series that brought Henican to UH, the talk was \u201ccompelling.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201c[People] had a lot of questions in terms\nof, like moving forward and how [the] journalism field would have to deal with\nthis kind of leadership,\u201d Bareng said. \u201cSo I thought that was really interesting,\nand I think that, like, for the laymen, it\u2019s also good to understand how to\ndeal with this kind of politics.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Katlin Cilliers | Staff Writer During Ellis Henican\u2019s first interaction with Donald Trump in the ’90s, the then businessman held up two framed photos \u2013 one of Ivana Trump and one of Marla Maples, who would soon become his wife. \u201cSo \u2026 which one is hotter?” Henican recalled Trump asking. To Henican \u2013 who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":13341,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"off","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","et-has-post-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kapionews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13339","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kapionews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kapionews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kapionews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kapionews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13339"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kapionews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13339\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kapionews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13341"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kapionews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kapionews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kapionews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}