Ladies and gentlemen, today on the rise together podcast, we have David Dozier with us and David is an awesome guest and that he is the author of the California killing field and an internationally recognized expert and speaker on mask communication,

and a communications management expert. He is professor of art at the School of Journalism and Media Studies at San Diego State University and the co author of over 100 books, book chapters, articles and scholarly papers and his works have been cited by more than 4,000 humans over time.

We received a doctorate in communications from Stanford University and he is here today to talk to us about all the things that are happening inside of the news world that we live inside of specifically what the heck is going on with fake news.

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome David Dozier to the rise together podcast.

What would the world look like if we all pushed ourselves to have candid conversations with people who didn't look like us, think like us or live like us? I'm Dave Hollis and I'm on a mission to learn more about this world by meeting more of the people who live here.

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This isn't just a podcast, it's a community and when we raise each other up, we all rise together.

I appreciate you being here. We're living in such crazy times as much as I gave just a little bit of an overview of who you are.

That's a little high level. I'm wondering if you might in your own words tell listeners how you think of yourself and the work that you do.

Well, I see myself now that I'm retired as having the opportunity to step back and look at the training of journalists, which I did for almost 40 years as well as training public relations practice and also part of that 40 year package.

I worked on a student newspaper at UC Berkeley and also for a weekly newspaper for several years.

I sort of had a chance to look at it from the public relation, the journalism side, look at it as well as the journalism PR practitioner.

I think that gives me an opportunity to kind of look at it from a number of different perspectives. And I think maybe provide some insights as to how people can navigate this much more cluttered environment news environment that everybody finds themselves in.

I think any of us as humans are consumers of information and disinformation as a part of that has become just something that happens in our every single day world, whether we want to acknowledge it or not.

How did the issue of disinformation become a focus of your work?

Well, in my novel, the California killing field, I do a deep dive on fake news and disinformation campaigns and how you can bundle that together to manipulate public opinion.

My interest, frankly, has been spurred by a lot of the current political dialogue and we're seeing a lot of information that's being passed about as if it were true. And the difficulty for the average consumer is that we also prefer information bias.

I tend to be a Bernie Sanders Democrat, you know, maybe a little bit to the left of Bernie on some issues a little bit to the right on some other issues.

And so I'm looking at the world to that particular prism and that's called confirmation bias. So I read the LA Times and the Washington Post and the New York Times, which, you know, left of center publications, at least in terms of the editorial policy.

But I also subscribe and read the Wall Street Journal, which is very conservative and reason magazine, which is a libertarian publication, which gives you a still different perspective on what's going on in the world.

And I think here's my my basic take on it.

When you live in a democracy, when you're a citizen of democracy, it's work. You got to step up to the plate. If we lived in North Korea and we had no choice and we didn't have to make decisions in a matter whether it's fake news or real news doesn't matter because our opinions wouldn't matter in our country.

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