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>> you didn't get to play with your brothers erector set or blogs. you got to play with dolls. when you went on to high school, you weren't allowed to take electronics, mechanics, automotive shop. you got to take cooking, and in my case, sewing. now, the object, i seek knotting faces or, the object of our sewing class was to make a jumper that we actually had to wear the last day of school. and we were all pretty excited about this. except if you're like me. i grew three and a half inches by seven great year. therefore, by the time june rolls around, my jumper was so short on me i was not allowed to wear it to the classroom.

when you graduated from high school, if there wasn't enough money in the family for boats, both boys and girls who want to college, most likely you would have to stay home while your brother went on to college. and that was considered okay, because after all, your only goal in life was to get married and have children. but let's say that didn't happen immediately. and you had to work. and you are perhaps good in math, against all odds. and the reason i say against all odds, was because back then, the mantra was, girls couldn't do math. in the same way that girls couldn't be good athletes, could be good friends, couldn't drive cars. but suppose you were -- had somebody who really, you were someone who really, really had studied math. well, you could only find a job under the female only part of

the want ads section. there were female jobs and there were male jobs. so you might have to find a job as a bookkeeper, but you would never be able to find a job as a financial manager, as an auditor, as a treasurer. it was a time when, if you were single, you were refused a credit card in your own name. you would be refused a mortgage in your own name. you could even be refused service in a restaurant, if you are dining alone. but you could never, never refuse to have sex with a husband. a diseased husband, an alcoholic husband, with any husband. that was a time when it was said when asked to get raped, and need a good slap. now since that time, our commitment and conversation and

connection to the whole issue of sexism has whacked and waned in the american psyche. we saw how, during the 2008 primary and presidential election, it became a hot topic. only to disappear again. and actually, what we saw during that period of time was only a small, small outcropping, from a solid bedrock of misogyny in this country. now, i think it's fair to say that for the past 30 years, we have been considered to be a post-feminist society. but let me ask you something. what is post-feminist about a society, where a doctor who happens to perform late-term abortion, is murdered in cold blood in his church on a sunday with his whole family present? what is post-feminist about a

society where before this last election, one in four schoolchildren thought it was illegal, illegal, for a woman to be president of the united states? what is post-feminist a better society where are ads and television commercials are demeaning to women, such as one for a very popular chainstore that chose an adolescent girl lying on a target with the bowls i write between her legs. what is post-feminist i got a society with a subprime mortgage debacle go with particular hardship on poor women and women of color? these were women who were struggling to have a piece of the american dream. some were single moms, some were elderly mom's. and when they started out, their mortgage rates were raised that

they could afford, only to see them adjusted and adjusted and adjusted upward until they had to forfeit their homes. anita hill, who is a law professor, brandeis university, has just completed a study in which she found that all women, no matter what their background, were charged more than men. even men in the same, differently -- comparable, i should say, financial situation. what is post-feminist about a society where movies, g. rated movies, the ones that we think are most appropriate for our young people, have 75 percent of the characters, male, and overwhelmingly, even more than 75 percent of these characters have the speaking parts. now one of these, i guess i

could call it mixed blessings of doing this research, is that i got to watch a lot of+'gg÷ telen and movies that i wouldn't ordinarily have seen. so one of them was the movie be stored, a very popular g. rated movie. in this movie, barry is the star and he has always a very large speaking part. there are only two female characters who speak. one of them is barry's mom was kind of a stereo typical intrusive helicopter mom, and of course she is a bee she can hover over barry. the other character is vanessa blue. she's a human being, and the flowers. now you would think because she's a human being and she married a bee that should be more capable. but not so. vanessa is always getting into trouble, and barry has to bail her out. their mission, the plot of the movie, revolves around barry and

vanessa trying to save the world from the extinction of all the flowers. and to accomplish this, they commandeer an airplane. now neither one of them has ever piloted an airplane before. so vanessa is sitting in the pilots seat trying to figure out how to do it, and barry is giving her directions. she gets increasingly flustered until he slaps her on the face. and a fight ensues. what are our children learning from this i'm sure very, very unintended message? that women are ornamental, unknowing, irritating. and then when they get out of line, they need a good slap. so, post-feminist, no, not really. and maybe it's not been such a surprise that in the global gender index, the united states

ranked 27th in the world, behind cuba and lithuania. now let me just tell you a moment what this index is. it's a study of 160 countries that hold 90 percent of the world population. and they compare countries on the basis of education, employment, how much representation we have in government, and survival. let's just are with education. in education, title ix has been chipped away and chipped away and chipped away, depleted of its funding. even though, even though every study has shown that when young women engage in sports, they are not likely to drink, to do drugs, to become teenage mothers, or develop eating disorders, either way, either obesity or become too thin. and he do better in school.

sexual-harassment. guidelines have disappeared from our federal website, even though the most recent study details about 90 percent of all school students say they have been harassed, sexily, at one time or another by either their classmates or their teachers. starting in 2005, the educational equity act began to be defunded, and the bush administration, using a small unknown loophole in the no child left behind act gave a broad latitude, broad latitude, the public schools to create separate classrooms and schools for girls and boys. now, we know historically that separate is not equal.

and under this new ordinance, they don't even have to be separate and equal. they have to be separate and substantially equal. and this is giving way to school administrators, principals, deans, all across the country, returning the use of gender stereotypes in the classroom. so that if one woman said, this allows boys to be boys and girls to be girls that i actually sometimes think it's much, much better to reach growth by using things that they understand, like examples from shopping and examples from cooking. at present, 34 percent of female high school students have said that they have been dissuaded from going on and math classes by their teachers. and i heard story after story after story of young women, like rachel, who is a tag is math student. she was so good in math that she decided to take the highest

class offered interschool, which was cactus. there were four girls, 10 boys. she said the boys all sat on one side of the room. the teacher would sit on his desk and he talked to the boys. the examples he would choose were always about football. and he called on the boys proportionally more than he called on the girl's. two of them dropped out after the first week. the other two try to stick it out. they went to their dean. when their dean spoke to the teacher, things got worse. slowly, one left, and then rachel left. and she told me when i spoke to her, that the experience was so bad that she doubts that she will continue with math in college. the nea has just written a study that talks about the crying need to get more young women and what they call the stem class is. science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

but how are we going to get more young women to take computer and technology classes when 71 percent of teachers interviewed said that the boys do well because of their aptitude, and girls do well, because they really, really really work hard and because it's good luck. and every study has pointed out that unless young people become computer savvy by the time they're 12 years old, they are really going to be frozen at the workplace. now, let's look at the workplace. another area where the united states did pretty well. gender discrimination abounds but whether it is the gender pay gap that starts incidentally right after college and increases over the course of a lifetime, whether it's discrimination against older women in the workforce, or whether it's the fact that 2005,

the bureau of labor statistics stop collecting data on women workers. making it almost impossible for journalists, research, a sociologist to track trends in women's employment. what are their needs, what are the wages? we simply, simply don't know. at present, let's look for a moment at world of academia. considered a good area for women. women make up 50 percent of instructors and assistant professors, but only 27 percent of tenured faculty in for your college is. when the american association of university women try to investigate this, they came up with very, very interesting information in a report that they have published called tenure denied, they found that one of the most recent additions

to why women are denied tenure is lack of congeniality. what is lack of congeniality, they say? well, the women professors didn't want to take notes at the faculty meetings. they didn't want to be the ones who went to the coffee machine and got the coffee. in other words, lack of congeniality, according to this report, translated into women not wanting to play over and over and over again this subservient role. business world is much the same. at present, women again make 50 percent of managers and professionals of the fortune 500 companies. but only 15 percent of the officers, and 2 percent of the ceos. now i want you all to close your eyes for a minute and picture a leader. okay, you can open the. if you pictured a man, then you are like over 90 percent of

people in america who automatically respond is think later, think man. this was the result of three different studies done by catalyst, in which they discovered that americans default setting on leadership is male. and at any time a woman acts in ways that are a little more assertive, a little more demanding in the business world, she's considered an unnatural leader because she's a woman. but if she tries to be more collaborative, if she tries to be softer and gentler, well, forget it. she's too wishy-washy to be a leader. it's a real real double-blind. and we see the same thing in the arts. we see it in dance, we see in music. in fact, a woman architect said you know, i'm beginning to think that something like the bermuda triangle of that is happening to my coworkers. there were plenty of them in the pipeline, and from the 1970s

there shortly said the. but they disappear when it comes to hire positions. there's so much discrimination against mothers in the workplace that it's actually even earned its own name, the maternal wall. we are one of only two industrialized nations that doesn't offer paid maternity leave. and when women take maternity leave, they come back to a very different world. one woman who was in advertising told me about how she had worked 60 hours a week over and over and over again to train the temporary male employee to take her place. when she came back after her maternity leave, he had her desk and her office. she was down the hall. about two or three months later, she was told there wasn't enough work for both of them, and she was fired. another woman came back from her maternity leave, and she was

given so little responsibility, she was so devoted, that she finally exclaimed, i had a baby, not a lobotomy. now, for women who look for childcare, we are very, very remiss. childcare funding has again been chipped away and chipped away, and we have no federal standards regulating the number of children who can be indicators of any one provider. and when i visited childcare centers in this country country, i saw such a vast disparity between those that were wonderful and good, kids were learning an engaged and active, and those that were so dirty and smelly. honestly, none of us would've wanted to leave our pets there, let alone our children. but these are sometimes the options, the only options, that working women have. because we know in this country, the majority of women still work

in service positions with very, very few options. think about this. sheila, a woman who loves trucks in california was getting ready for work. her three year old game gagging, gag. he couldn't catch his breath. she rushed into the emergency room. he had to undergo emergency surgery. to have a quarter that was stuck in his throat removed. she called the trucking company as soon as she got him into the doctor. but this was not the first time that family emergency had interfered with her work. because we know, even in 2009, it is still women who deal with family crises, either our children or our aging parents. they let her come back on probation. the next time it happened, she was fired. unlike some 145 other countries that mandate paid leave for workers when they are sick, or

paid leave for workers when their children are sick, we do not. so what does this mean? it means either we bring our children to daycare when they're sick, which is really not good for the child or for the other people. or, in many women have told me, we say that we are the ones who are sick and we stay home with our children, and then we go to work with are sick. and even though, and i will talk about this later, we have an appallingly high infant mortality rate in this country. unlike 107 countries, we do not mandate and protect the rights for a world to express breast milk at work, even though the american pediatric association recommends strongly that babies be fed breast milk for the first six butts of their lives to increase their immunity. that was the good news. now on for the worst, the area we don't do so well in.

we don't do very well and representation in government. in fact, before the election, but in 2008, we were 54th in the world. now maybe we can understand why. it's a hard thing for a woman to put herself out there, and to try to run for office. we've seen what's happened to women who have done this. we all know what happened in many ways to the remarks about hillary clinton. the same is true for nancy pelosi, but it is not only democratic women who get attacked. condoleezza rice, for example, when she was visiting germany happened to have been wearing a long coat and boots. a reporter gushed over those booths, said that she looked so sexy in them that she looked like a dominatrix. and harriet miers, who was a possible supreme court nominee, was so ridiculed for her appearance, her bangs, or too

dark eyeshadow, the buttons on her suit which were in, quote, the size of cappuccino cups. you would think honestly, if you read this, that the recent harriet miers was not appointed to the supreme court was not because she lacked experience, but because she was a fashion faux pas. when reporters talk about a woman's appearance rather than the quality of their work and their experience, when they do this, it is a way of demeaning them and putting them down. now, the next category we also do not well in. and that is health and survival. where undreamt we're only 37 in the world. i will table a health and survival. this is a category that looks at the comparative hears that men and women might live, taking out years at short by illness, by

malnutrition and violence. violence against women reigns supreme in american culture. whether it's our popular culture in which pornography is increasingly graphic and available. for example, a friend of mine who teaches at the service academies said that the cadets are so comfortable with pornography that when she goes over to them in the library, they don't even bother to switch off the screen. and she's a department chair. they think it's just fine. or the lives of our popular rappers, like eminem and it's all just the two of us, where he gives his son instructions to help him bury mom in the bottom of the lake after the father has slipped the mother's throat. or the very popular videos

called hunting bambi, in which bambi is actually a naked woman, except for running shoes, and the men hunting for where combat clothing and writing jeeps. and hunt her with paint ball guns with the idea of shooting her, and then she becomes theirs. our most popular form of entertainment, television, is filled with violence against women. so much so that a tv critic in florida said that we should really call a lot of modern television series guy women dissector when they want to sell the series, they always put the woman in chains. and the same is true of our second most popular form of entertainment, electronic gaming. whether it custer's revenge,

mortal kombat, road rash iii there are new and different ways of slaughtering women. and these are ways in which the player, the gamer advances. the worst games, according to the american psychological association, are what are called first person shooter games. take duke of newcomb, the gamer, duke, actually shoots women as a way of getting ahead. he enters strip clubs, he enters theaters what he sees women tied up on poles, naked women, saying duke, kill me, kill me. and he does. are the very, very popular game, grand theft auto, now in its fourth edition. again, gamer advances by murdering women. there has been so much work now on the power relation between violence and entertainment and real life violence that it's really not even disputable.

but electronic gaming, according to the american psychiatric association, is really the worst. because you are totally engaged in the game. the graphics are real. music is real. the gamers have said that they really don't appreciate where the fantasy ends and the reality begins. and you know, we have had numerous examples of real-life violence in this country directed against women. whether it was a shooting in the amish schoolhouses a few years ago, or more recently, the killing in the sports club in pittsburgh. women were absolutely targeted and executed. bob herbert was a rare mainstream journalist to write about this in an op-ed piece, the first 20 did and he did a second one. the first one was called why aren't we shocked? and what mr. herbert said was that if it were any other group,

if it had been black people or white people or jewish people or christian people or muslim people, separated out and slaughtered, we would have been in an uproar. but we weren't shocked. nobody noticed. do you know why? because we are so accustomed to violence against women in this country. every year between four and 6 million women are assaulted by their domestic partners. and unless you are a celebrity, like the late swimsuit model jasmine fiori who was murdered by her husband, we don't hear about the three women every single day who were killed in america. and to violence is spreading to teen relationships also. does not just an up tick, according to steve fraser from

saint paul minneapolis who works with the family violence unit. we are seeing an uptick that is off the chart. now a lot of people who work with domestic violence victims, blame the recession. and recession has a lot to do with it. they talk about the fact that you would be abuser is home to much more. and i really now only talking about male to female domestic violence, although we all know it does go the other way as well. to would be abuser is home or, andy would be victim has fewer places to escape. shelters are closing, there are no hotlines available the way they used to be. and so of course we are seeing a spike in domestic violence. but there's another reason as well. because actually if you follow the numbers, domestic violence has been increasing in this country for many, many years. it's not just product of the 2008 recession.

and a lot has to do with the threat that's been posed to masculinity in this country from a variety of factors. the sneak, devastating, terrorist attack on our soil. a seemingly endless and unwinnable wars in afghanistan. the tarnished american image abroad, and of course, the recession have all threatened men had and manliness in america. and historically, whenever we see a threat to masculinity, we see a greater rollback of women's rights and have subjugation of women. now women are dying as a result of gender discrimination in this country in less dramatic ways in the ways i have just outlined. for the first time since 1918, women's life expectancy is shortening.

not one state in the entire union received a passing grade in the woman's report card issued by the national women's law center. not one state in the union, and the united states as a whole received a failing grade. and our infant mortality rate, if i mentioned before, is appalling. we are 29th and the world, and those are not the most current numbers. if you talk to researchers from the cdc, they will trade that they think when new numbers come out, we're going to slip to 34th place. how could this be? how could this be, the richest nation in the world? in our nations capital, african-american babies are dying at four times the rate of caucasian babies. now, i actually lost a baby at birth. and i can tell you that it was

one of the most devastating experiences of my life. probably the most devastating expense of my life. it's a scar that stays with you forever. but i was fortunate, because i was able to go to another doctor. i had insurance. i was able to afford a test that could tell me what happened so that i could try again, successfully. but what about these women who face malnutrition, who have premature births, who can't afford prenatal care, who don't have insurance? what hope is there for them? a starkly new study has shown that women in this country pay hundreds of dollars more for insurance than men. and i know we talked about the so-called passionate people have talked about the so-called benign gender wage gap, and we know that it's true. that women don't have the same

work record as men, but they don't have the same opportunities, for advancement in that they don't have the same ability to be promoted, but even a woman who works full-time her entire life will make, on average, $700,000 less than a man. and for women of color, the number is even higher. that's a lot of money that could have gone a very long way to purchase insurance, better health care, and better nutrition. women still are not included as important subjects of research, and medical schools. and we're still hardly include in clinical trials. now why does this matter? it matters because for many, many diseases, women present

with symptoms different from men. cardiovascular disease, many cancers, hiv-aids. and the treatments and medications that we have our different for men. women in this country died more cash like i should put more. more women in this country died from heart disease and stroke than men. according to the american heart association. and only 8 percent of primary care doctors in this country know that. my friend, paula, was going to a doctor who was an internist with specialty in cardiology. both her parents had died young of heart disease. her brother at 46, only a few years older than she was, had already had a quadruple bypass. pollock began to feel ill. she didn't have just made but she had some discomfort, nausea,

dizziness. she kept calling this a doctor. nothing is wrong with you. is just stress. and i so couldn't remember her telling me, the only reason i'm stressed is because i don't feel well. finally, and this is what the doctor thinks satyr life, her husband happened to be late one morning when she was going, before going to work, and he came out of the bathroom to find pollock collapse on the floor. she was rushed to the hospital. she spent two weeks in the icu. and they performed a quadruple bypass. but still, her doctor was insistent, your symptoms aren't worried typical, he said. that's right. they were typical of a man. phillis greenberger, who's the president of the society of women's health research, told be that they had been trying for years to get minorities and women included in clinical

trials, and then having results analyzed. because for too long, women might have been included in the trials, but then the results were thrown out. and what she said is that amounts to, that women's health in this country is really, really getting short shrift. so, here we are in 2009. young women routinely are getting fired when they become pregnant, in stark violation of the law. and they don't do anything about it. for two reasons. one, because they don't know it's against the law because the law is not enforced. and two, because they are afraid if they make a fuss about it, they will be blacklisted in the industries. one in every four adolescent girls have some form of sexually transmitted disease. our teenage pregnancy rate is soaring. we have the highest end of the western world.

we have a popular culture that denigrate women, that would rather have me via manipulated mommy wars with fights rather than engage in a serious dialogue, national conversation about advancing women's rights. take something that may seem so silly, and word housewife. it was a word that feminists really tried to abolish from our vocabulary. a woman married to her house. i remember being very, very happy when my daughter was invited to a halloween party, and there were many things that she could go as. and they listed them. and one of them was housewife. and she came to me and she said mommy, what is a housewife? and i thought, yes. but now, the term housewife is back. we see the "real housewives of atlanta."

real housewives of new york. and the women they show are competitive and crafting and argued over the most inane things. and so real stay-at-home moms really have only this on their mind. we are a society where 500 women, servicewomen in iraq and afghanistan, have reported being sexually or physically abused in one year. and don't forget that number that is under what it probably is, because when i say reported, most of these women, according to the foundation, are put back in the units where they were attacked. and there's a real fear about retribution. 800,000 returning female veterans in america are homeless. this is payback.

because we don't have appropriate treatment for posttraumatic shock syndrome that many of them come back with. we don't have housing facilities for them and their children. and we don't have child care for them. and then this last number, i'm sure you will find its devastating as ideal, the twin 14 and 16 million families in america, experienced some kind of food insecurity. that the euphemistic term for hunger. and 60 percent of these families are headed by women. can you imagine what it would be like if you constantly have to think about buying food for her children? are you going to try to work and use money for gasoline, or are you going to put food on the table? are you going to buy high blood pressure medicine that you need,

or give your children the next new. your sons asthma pump, are you going to the elderly, dependent dad, or are you going to use the money to feed your children? this is the reality for so many people in this country. this is another face of sexism in america. and it is alive and well and ruining our future. but we don't have to let it, because we know that the next chapter has yet to be written. and there's so many things that we can do. and what's wonderful today is that so many we can do without getting up from our computers. we can look at women's the news which is a wonderful, wonderful website and see the issues that they cover. or women's media center. we can sign up for alerts from now, for the feminist majority is google over, and if i could figure out how to do this, anybody can figure out to do

this. and they will send you updates, whatever issue you are interested in. gender discrimination, prenatal care, sexual-harassment. and they will send you weekly, daily, however often you want to see them, a large. you can sign petitions. you can write to your congress people are called on the phone. they really, really want to hear from you. you can ask local bookstores like barnes & noble to sponsor events where women can talk about their work. you can ask the local hospital to duke women's health day or your community centers. you can look at your children's school and see if women are really, really integrated into the curriculum. in women's history, if they are reading books about women, if they are reading books by women. if they hear about the contributions of women scientists, and not just marie curie. you can talk to your children. tell your daughters, especially, not to see one another, other

women, as adversaries, which is very much a media creation. but understand that the issues that unite women are far, far greater than the issues that divide them. we can use our powers as consumers. don't buy our children or our grandchildren dolls, for example. the only toy that was singled out by the american psychiatric association as harmful to girls development. don't let them buy t-shirts that say hooters in training, or lay ground pimp. use our power. let's not go to movies that demean women over exalt violence against them. protest. tell your friends to stay with. write letters to the producers that we are not going to see this anymore. we don't want this to continue. we can lobby in washington. we can run for office. there is not a thing that women can't do. we have a president who listens to us. women put him in power.

now i think we have to make our voices heard. but first, i think it's tremendously, tremendously important to know our rights. i hope that the truth will make us brave. but first, i hope it makes us fighting mad. thank you. [applause] >> i'll be happy to answer some questions, if anyone has questions. >> right over your shoulder is ronald reagan. would you talk a little bit about the legacy of the reagan years for women? >> the reagan years started a real backlash against women. tremendous cutbacks in funding, funding any width program, a real, almost war on women. the republican party became targeted. women feminist, anti-era, one of

the things that reagan did most americans was the fictionalized but often told story of the welfare queen whose race was never stated but nevertheless understood, this woman who had numerous husbands and drove around in cadillacs all the time, never existed but became a very, very popular figure. i think that reagan was really the start, however much he's been lauded, of a real anti-woman, and the start of an us against them at syndrome which we have seen carried over really through the second bush administration. yes? >> i'm not too clear about hate crimes, but i understand there is such a category, and i was wondering if anyone is pushing through congress, any legislation, any bill, so that crimes that are directed against women fall into the category of hate crimes? >> you know, i honestly don't

know if there's anything current, but i'll be glad, if you give me your card, i'll be glad to check it and i will definitely get back to you that i am not aware of anything that is putting women in the category. of course, there is the violence against women act that was written by joe biden and introduced, passed axa in 1994 bit but i don't know that women have been part of the, in terms of the hate crimes. >> when you look at the countries that are in advance of ours in terms of their policies and predicament of women, is it me or is it legislative? is it health driven? what is it that you see as a big distinction between those countries and the u.s.? all of them? anyone that stands out? >> that's a wonderful question.

well, i've often felt that sexism is america's default setting, and i think that we have worked very, very hard in this country to push back against that. i do know that that's true of so much in other countries. and i think we would have to delve into the history of america as opposed to the history of other countries like norway, sweden, finland, the philippines to bed and we do. many, many countries do better than we do, but i would say that is probably a mix of many issues, the media, the employment situation. health care is hugely complicated. but it is a lot that it would take me longer to explain that i think we can do here. yes? >> there's a front chairman tony? >> as well as going to say, most deftly. i i think there is that kind of cowboy, and kind of a

celebration of the go it alone mentality, a celebration of the man-to-man kind of rigor. that's what i said it would go a long. but i think that also came with reagan, the exultation, individualism. the other things i think you come back to your question, thinking about this now, part of what reagan did was make government be any. and i really think that that's unfortunate legacy, not only for women, but the entire country, because many of these remedies are remedies that really the government has to mandate. but i do think history is immensely important. i'm a history so that's always my first response. just? >> i don't know, probably in your reading you run across it, but there's a lot of philosophers, bg even, about

becoming an other feminist or not the making of women like men and making them more masculine, but the coming end of the feminine. and i'm noticing on the shelf here, books about 2012, that the world is going to end as we know it. and i really think that the coming end of the feminine and that, i haven't read that much about 2012 thing, but it is something, going back to the roman, that we may be at a halfway point in history. and will be the coming of the feminine that will be the difference, if i write. >> well, we'll have to wait and see. i have no way of responding other than her have to write. i don't know. thank you very, very much for coming. any other -- thank you. i'd be happy to sign some books then.

[applause] >> michael jason overstreet, is there a media buys against barack obama? >> i would say that it doesn't -- it's not born necessary from the media, but i think that there's a perception out there that the information start somewhere, and remedy believed from the media is generating so i don't know if it is a media per se, but i think, my book says that because i feel the place we can get our information from, there must be.

and so i think the answer, you know very long answer is yes. i believe that there is a media assault on about. i would say this, for the 71 days my book covers from the democratic convention to election day, i felt that there was in was information that was just out there that was completely unacceptable from him being possibly a domestic terrorist, document, i don't want to get into courting individual people from various networks, but there was just information about to float out there. and i absolutely think it did some damage. i think he won despite that, but had he not, maybe the book would be even bigger pic but i think they're still -- history will show there were a lot of things said during the 71 days that barack obama had to overcome a. >> what's an example of those things? >> i think one of the examples is, i'm a big fan of chris matthews. i like chris matthews. one particular day i was

watching, and he mentioned the word immigrant and obama in the same since. the story about an immigrant. i think the person on the panel ask is that no, obama was born in hawaii. he's not an immigrant. he said no, this is the story of an immigrant. well, he's not an immigrant. the casual viewer may take it information is a i'm not going to vote for obama, he's an immigrant. that's just lazy journalism. i think the question -- i think the concept of immigrant is not responsible. granted, most of us knew he wasn't, but i don't think it was a story about an immigrant. hawaii is a state. where did the word immigrant come from? is upright, his father wasn't an immigrant. he was an exchange student that he wasn't an immigrant, so it's the words that are used to perform to be the sole. is not in your face like fox news objet d'art and assault. that's it in your face barack obama is this, this and this. that casual subtle stuff like

maybe showing a republican ad that shows obama with a photo of children behind him, about a sex ed, some concept of a sex ed that went on in the election. and in cnn ran an actual ad. the republican party had a right to put out, i don't believe cnn or any of the other networks had a right. it's not responsible journalism. that add -- that bad to me showed obama looking like a pedophile. he stand there like this, there's children behind them and its barack obama, wants to teach children about sex education. well, fine. show that. if you're the republican party. by cnn, msnbc, fox, no, don't show that. and i think that was very damaging. >> you self published this book what was that process like? >> i had to self publish it because the idea came to me from watching gore debate george bush

actually. previously. and i watched the debate and it always think, well, george bush didn't do well. gore won that debate. he was very informative. and so at the end of the debate i would wait for the post debate coverage. sure enough they would say things like george bush was really funny, he did a good job on the debate. and i'm looking, going, did they just watched the same -- the media telling people that do as i get calls people's bank jason, i don't know, it looks like george bush won that debate. they're getting that information from the media. i got the idea then. but then once i saw obama at the convention give his speech back in 2004, i thought if he got a chance to run out be interested to see how the media tries to parse what he says and take them on. the book just wrote it so. from the first day of the democratic convention on. the first chapter in the book is called these people. every network i would check, i just get during that game, these people. who are these people?

i said to myself, it will be interesting to see if the republican convention they will say who are these people, john ensign mccain, who are these people. but i never heard that. i heard it from judy woodruff say that. and i love judy woodruff, but i heard her use the words of these people. for african-americans, i myself am biracial. my father is black, my mother is white. i consider myself a black man, but to hear that word just, these people. i don't want to hear that. it definitely was a passionate project of mine. so when i woke up the morning of the democratic convention, i said this is the first day i will write and i will write for 71 straight days. i kind of help myself hostage because i had to write for 71 straight days. each chapter in the book is a day and they have a different theme. and other people will remember, you know, the lipstick on a pig is a theme for today. so is a very fascinating, interesting project. if i had not self published and

i don't think it would've gotten it out and i. most publishers want me to wait at least three months. >> explained that process for its. >> for me, it was -- i would say it's an easy process at first because i went through book search, which they were very good. they allowed me to really kind of be creative and then i would send off to them, the no, it's ettore. and then they would get back to me with information. that kind of process went back and forth after a month after i finished the book on election day. then after that i was able to go through and edit, editing process with my editor. we went through an editing process for about another month. all in all i was able to get the book out by late january early february on line at amazon.com. and slowly, there's just been this growing momentum for the book. people are very interested in the book. it in some local bookstores in l.a., but i think the more i hear people at the festival here, the more i realize this is

a hot button issue. people remember the specific days. like i remember that, i remember that. it's a history book and it's fantastic because you're somehow people will look back and go, you know what? maybe i should have said that. maybe tom brokaw should have said that. no one has ever taken on the media as far as i'm concerned. i'm not a member of the media, and if i work for cnn i doubt i would've written about cnn. i wrote about everyone. from the l.a. times writing an article that said, headline that said stars flock to see sarah palin. i opened up the l.a. times and i saw who went to see sarah palin? there was a jon voight and two others i did know. three people in an l.a. times article. and the headline is stars flock to see sarah palin. when is three people a flaw? that's misleading, the headline itself to i don't write about the stuff that fox news had that much because it's kind of easy to do. sean hannity is not a hard target.

let's be honest that i would love to go on his show and talk to him, so that was my self-publishing process that was very fun. i would say if there's anyone out there who wants to self publish, just be ready to do a lot of work because i've gained a lot of respect for publishers. if you can find any mistakes in my book, please let me know. it was probably six or seven editing process is. but i'd encourage anybody out there, go for. don't wait. >> help us out here a bit. you've got a booth at the l.a. times festival accu had to put this together did it cost a little bit. how much have you put into it? >> all in all, probably been a couple, two, 3000. to get to this point. i would say if i had to do it over again i would do exactly the same way. i think i would prefer to self publish this book. it's a little bit -- in the book i refer to myself as a political activist. self-publishing is part of the political activist process.

so i would encourage those out there, if you're passionate about it, you got to go for yourself. you can't wait. >> was a plague like this, in your view of? >> i think it's someone who stays involved in current events, and his boisterous about a. i have 20 people at a time coming up to my booth and a talk loud enough for the people around me to hear, to bring them in. they can disagree. that's fine. there's a book out called the slobbered love affair. i read the book. is a good book. it's about two or three chapters of my book. is about that dick. might book is this big. i talk about how the media loved obama one day but the next day, no. you've got to deal oocyte. for goldberg i would say you've done a great job on your book but there's much more detail than just the part where the media loves him. the american people loved him. i don't know so much if the media still love him. i think barack obama would argue that there's a certain members of the media that love them. i don't agree with that.

what do you do when you're not publishing books because i write screenplays that i live here in los angeles. my girlfriend, kathy, is someone who's very supportive of everything i want to do. and she's been someone who's really pushing for. she was a big part -- i was a part of the cell polishing process, having someone to support you in terms of emotionally, keep you going, that's a very important thing. so between my writing screenplays and now doing a book and hopefully doing a lot of talking on talk shows about my book. i'm very passionate about this book. that's my life. and i love it. >> if so is interested in purchasing your book, work and if i? >> amazon.com. actually it's really well. the local bookstore here in l.a. that i love, diesel it's called a bookstore. is probably going to be in books to. does our local bookstores. nationally, i haven't been able

to get in but i think that's going to change. i'm hoping. >> michael jason overstreet, "71 days: the media assault on obama," a self published book. . . to talk about andre schiffrin's new book