with much of the information that we use to monitor employment in newsrooms. in fact, if it wasn't for the work of unity and its member organizations, we would know far less about the decline of journalism employment than we do. so they've been terrific players and we value them a great deal. we also value all the other sponsors. i want to thank folks for joining us on the panel. we also want to thank you for coming out tonight and i want to tell you as we traveled around the country, we've had a wonderful experience of discovering that there really are a tremendous number of people -- are you going to help me out with this thing. thank you. >> all right. a wonderful experience of discovering that there are a tremendous number of people who care about these issues. and from packed rooms in seattle and portland and san francisco and western mass and boston, new york city, the one reality that

we've come back to again and again and again is that while people may differ with regard to what they want to see done about this crisis, there is less and less debate about the fact of the crisis. and that is an essential understanding, one we have to keep conscious of because this is not a crisis that will be solved by journalists talking to other journalists. it is not a crisis of newspaper editors talking to other newspaper editors, media conglomerates talking to other media conglomerates. no solutions will come from that. this is not -- we're having real microphone problems for you. i hope it's working for you. this is not a debate about journalism, newspapers or media. ...

>> against the monarch was that it was all about information, because king george and his minions gathered information into themselves. they controlled information, and they constrained the debate with the purpose. to maintain their power. jefferson, madison, washington,

all of the founders of the american experiment. understood one thing. if we were to begin the march toward democracy, we would have to be armed with information. and so they became passionate about that concept, about how we created, not just the promise of freedom of speech and freedom of the press, but the reality of free speech, and a flourishing, vibrant, diverse, challenging and the sending free press that would in form the great mass of americans about the issues of the day that would tell them about the affairs of their community, their colony or states. ultimately, their nation and the world itself. this was the central if people were to be their own governors.

and it required fundamental new ways of thinking. we take, as our guiding points in this exploration of the issues that we're going to talk about, these issues of journalism and democracy, to quote. one, from james madison. essential author of our constitution. madison said, a popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. now is forever govern ignorance in people who need to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power that knowledge gives. and essential understanding that its citizens were to rule, not monarchs, not games. that citizens must have information. and it must be easily accessible through a free press. second quote from thomas jefferson. i hold that a little rebellion now and again is a good thing.

and is necessary in the political world as in the physical. when jefferson spoke of rebellion, he wasn't talking about getting pitchfork and running up to the capital. he might not have even been talking about tea parties. when jefferson spoke of rebellion, he was talking about re-examination about challenging that which you know to see if it was working, to see if the democratic experiment, the american experiment was functioning. jefferson invited us to come back on a regular basis every 20 years and ask, is this working? he wrote extensively about the structures of the experiment him about our democracy and set keep thinking about it, keep asking questions, don't be satisfied that it's working just because someone told you long ago that it was, or that it might. and so, let's take his challenge up. let's redouble against false assumptions.

let's redial against the price price at which a stem back everything will somehow work out. let's work our current circumstance and ask whether the people are being armed with the information, with the knowledge that would allow them to be their own governors. is our media system working? isn't functioning? well, television news as any television reporter will tell you is in crisis, insufficient funds, the collecting of newsrooms in many markets around the country into literally we accumulate around this country now where one newsroom goes out and gathers the news and then they sell the news to the other newsroom. we have insufficient as twice a we are repeating too little. and what are we repeating? a lot of whether in washington i realized what it is important. [laughter] >> but next week when it's all melted you're still going to get seven or eight minutes of

weather on a 22 minute newscast that they will tell you it's 50 degrees in northeast and 51 northwest. then they will tell you a lot about crime and then they will tell you that you're too fat and so here's some exercise tips. that's going to be your package of news for the evening. television news. now radio, the far more small the democratic medium, to communicate, it's so easily accessible. one company does on as many stations as it wants, including clear channel has about 1200 stations across the country of the smaller companies only hundreds of stations if we have seen a dramatic decline in the number of radio journalists in this country. literally losing in the tens of thousands of on air personalities over the past 15 years. a consolidation without an

improvement. so where does that leave us? there's to the newspaper newsroom, right? the newspaper will see us through, that great generator of news, the great collector of original information communicator of it. well, laster 140 newspapers across the united states closed down, stopped publishing. not small publication. major daily newspapers in seattle, albuquerque, tucson, denver, christian science monitor went on daily publication to a weekly publication, and a reasonably good online presence. most of the other papers that had disappeared have not made such, even that level of leap. and a great tragedy in the shuddering of newspapers is not the ones that have closed down. it's the ones that are still open. and that are rapidly degenerating. now when i say degenerating, i'm a journalist, baker was since i was 11 years old that i think a newspaper degenerates who has

fewer newspapers. every month newspapers have laid off more than 1000 employees every month for the last two years. we've lost roughly 30,000 newspaper employs in the last two years. the american society of newspaper editors tells us there's about 46,000 people working as newsroom to listen today. and that sounds like a pretty good number, if you're losing, every member not although the boys are charles, they provide support and distribution, but as we lose at those levels, there's not a lot of time. this is an urgent moment in this decline in newsroom presents. and i know someone will say the internet will set us free. maybe jane will say it in short order. and i want the internet, i've been blogging since 1999. i'm trying to serve as thing as far as i can take it, and bob is a blogger, too. and fortunately, as we say there's 46,000 newsroom employees working as journalistic there's about

roughly 2300 people are making a living today as online working journalists actually producing original content, doing any journalistic capacity. losing 1000 employees a month from newspapers, 2300 people making a living online, looks like every couple of months we're taking out the online presence. we are not filling the void. the board is opening. it's not be filled by nubia. just as the crisis was not created by new media,ve purely w media. and i want to close offer some of mine remarked on by saying i know these numbers can sound, they can sound like statistics, right? a lot of numbers thrown out. let's take it down to a real community. let's go to baltimore, maryland, just up the road. there's a new pew center study, they asked or depended on how to get our news in baltimore, maryland. where are our original stories developers you kind of look at

everyplace, look at all the different sources of informati information. and are pretty liberal in their definition. they look at newspapers, radio stations, television stations, twitter, blogs, online news sites. anything that might be generating some original news, they took a look at it. it wasn't a perfect study, that they did pretty good look at it. here's what they've done. the baltimore sun is the primary source of our regular news in the community, but the baltimore sun is producing 33% less news stories today than they did 10 years ago. 73% less than they did 20 years ago. so although bit of a void over here, but surely new media is filling that void. so they said was the breakdown there, how many stores are coming from old me, the newspaper many but also some radio, tv. they found 95 percent of the stories still being generated a by old media. not nubia. new media, great economy but not

so great about going out, because they're not getting the resources to go out and spend the time gathering news, speaking the truth and challenging it. so void opening, void not being filled. but where are we getting our original news from? news doesn't go away when you fire drill is. it's still out there. there's two ways that news come to us, right? news can come from the people, from a citizen saying maybe to a journalist you should go out and cover that story. we have a problem over here. there is a toxic waste dump and we think the kids are getting sick. the school is not doing a good job. you should cover a story on this. the journalist goes out and does a story and goes to corporation and ask questions, demand answers. and that's a journalism that bubbles up from the grassroots. i know the kind of news that we get something that comes from our. somebody at the top says here's the discussion i really like you do have. here's what i'd like you to be

talking about. how great i am, what a good governor i am, what a good ceo i am, what a great school system i'm really. and here's the parameters of the discourse. that's public relation to the, but they can be called ms. so how much of the news in this study by pew came from the grassroots, how much from power? cut to chase, 14 percent from the grassroots, 86 percent from power. 86 percent of look relations the telling us what we should talk about. isn't just baltimore's problem? it must just be baltimore. in the book as a win across the country we found a the same story city after city after city. today the ratio of public relations people to journalist, working journalists is about four to one. for public relations people for everyone working journalists. just 30 years ago, just 30 years

ago the ratio was one point he'll to one. so think about what's happening within this dramatic explosion in packages newscome in managed discussion, and managed debate as we have a dramatic decline in journalism. what do you end up with? you end up with something that would make george orwell hit his head and say, what's up tiger i was. i would 1984. i thought that big brother was watching you. i was wrong. it turns out you will be watching big brother. 24/7, round-the-clock news channels that feed you a packaged information that after a little journalism, a lot of weather, a lot of tips about how to be less that, a lot of crime stories may be, but not much in journalism. that's the crisis that we are in. and we would be remiss if we told you that crisis is always bad. of course, this country was founded by a journalist.

named tom payne. and tom paine wrote a great book called the crises. in which he argued that we ought not see a crisis as the end of our opportunity as the end of our ability that is everything would hope to it to be. we should see a crisis as a moment of opportunity. as a challenge, as a call to action. tom payne said we have it in our power to begin the world over again. we believe that americans still have power to begin the world over again but we have to do is recognize that our journalism is in crisis, it is collapsing, a void is opening, that void will be filled. the question is will it be filled by a new journalism as vibrant, as powerful, as small d. democrats it is in instinct and its values as we need or will be filled with public relations. and to answer that question let me about michael rutter, bob

mcchesney to the stage. thank you very much. [applause] >> well, thank you all very much for coming out tonight. it's a pleasure to be here. i think the way i would frame this real briefly is simply the crisis we have is not the crisis of journalism, the collapse of independent newsrooms, of the number of journalists and foreign bureaus and statehouse bureau's, the fact that communities across this country, really no one is covering them at all are really one or two people left or covering them at all. with an entire generation that is basically given up hope of having gainful employment in journalism. that's not the crisis. the crisis is our inability to address, to take the crisis, understand and address in a humane and sensible policymaker. how we think about this crisis is the real issue we have to address. that's why john and i wrote this

book. in the way i put it simply does that for most of us, and it is that everyone in this room, certainly myself it was taught that the freedom of the press tradition in the united states had won one fundamental component. that component was that government should never that's what freedom of the press is all about in the united states. that's true. jon and i believe that. jon and i believe strongly that we have to strengthen that core value. that's over half of the first amendment tradition in the united states freedom of the president the other half is report to the founders can equally important in the minds of the supreme court in its freedom of the press decisions, is this. that the first duty of a democratic state is a major you actually have a free press. the first duty of a democratic state is a major you have an independent state monitoring the government because if you don't have an independent for the state, freedom of the press is a hollow by. it's a hollow right so it won't be censored. the first duty of a free society

of our constitutional system is to make sure an independent freedom of press exist. and those two traditions in the united states history were not contradictory, but, in fact, for the first 75 years of american history were complementary. the same people were the strongest advocates of each of them simultaneously. now this history has been disguised the last 125 years in the united states because advertising came between 1865 and 1920, came virtually nowhere to become the primary form of supporting journalism in the tranny. it gave us the illusion -- okay. advertising gave us the illusion that the market would give his all the chosen we need. we might quibble about the quality but sony it would be covered. and news may receive bank anywhere from 60 to 100 percent of revenue for advertising. those days are ending. advertising will still remain but were going to have far less.

last year for the first time in its history the "new york times" had less money from advertising them from non-advertising sources. the newspaper that routinely get 75 to 80 percent of its revenues from advertising. those days are gone. and now we're back to the situation with market is going to provide our the journalism. it's just not going to happen. how do we think about journalism now? what did they do? i can say one thing they didn't do, they did say let's hope some rich guys make money. now we can have a democracy. if they don't do it roll up the carpet and see who wants to play games. that wasn't how they thought about. what they did is they regard as a public good. by public good is an economics term that didn't exist then, came in the 20 century but it captures how we should understand journalism. as something that society is will he needs and that people want but the market cannot generate successfully. the class a public good for

national defense, public education national park. and all these areas the government placed the role of making sure these things exist in the payment for them was done successfully. the founders and for the first 75, 100 years of american history institute extraordinary postal subsidies to create much richer press system. we have document these in the book. their extraordinary. is a history that most americans are very familiar with. but just to get some sense of it we went back and computers using postal records, the extent of the federal subsidy of journalism between 1840 in 1844. we said that the federal government today did the exact same percentage of gdp to subsidize journalism, how much would we have to spend? the figure was $30 billion. $30 billion that this was an enormous investment made by a federal government to create a press system that wouldn't have existed otherwise. when we we let all the u.s.

supreme court decisions, freedom of the press which we did for the book, there were probably seven or eight great decisions on the 1920s to the 1990s. and what freedom of the press means, what struck us in every decision was the relationship of the press at some that in 1945 to go by, potter stewart was what punishments of the first amendment as a structural demand on the, to make sure a fourth estate exist. we cannot monitor state power without independent fourth state. the government has to make sure it existed you can't hope you just get lucky. so we would argue, when i read those words the first time when i was in graduate school in the 1980s i didn't pay much attention to the. we had a press system. that was covered already. wall street, the business community is giving us all the journalism we need. we couldn't quibble with the quality. when you read the same words as we should journalism disintegrating around us, as we see huge sections of government,

live election not being covered at all, they jump off the page at you. if you believe potter stewart, hugo black, the first amendment not only condones government subsidies and policies to vote independent journalism, it requires them. and finally the last issue we have to do with is any subsidy the government might make to support independent journalism will invariably deteriorate. it will lead to problems. and oftentimes examples that come of our want to go down that slippery path you're very quickly going to be on the road to profit, the soviet union, to pol pot, cambodia, the most heinous governments in the world are dragged out. this is the only place you possibly go what you do down the treacherous path, like o'connor somehow successfully pulled off for the first 100 years of american history. we share the concerns about any government involvement with news me. if there were government censors of journalists and ideas, i am going down pretty fast.

i mean, i'm not going to survive norwell john on anyone on this been. so we are highly successive of that. but the relevant issue to us is why we're always looking at pol pot's cambodia and he i mean you can't do. why not look at all the other democracies that have constitution, election, civil liberties can have similar to us into what they're doing but maybe we could learn from germany and netherlands, britain, france, finland than we could learn from uganda and pol pot's cambodia. what we discover we look at those countries is that without exception almost every major democracy in east asia and in europe and north of us in canada devotes a much larger federal national government some subsidizing wiccan community media. a much larger sum. a factor from anywhere from 40 to 75 times. this is quite striking when we did it. but we also discovered was my

wife is a we can. we go there a lot. i had never seen any sicker please, no one had ever been beaten up by cops to my knowledge. it seemed like an incredibly free society. how can that be? why isn't it it like uganda? we look at the economist magazine that's rating of all the most democratic countries in the world. the economist magazine. in the sixth leading countries, the most democratic base of the most honest government, most civil liberties, most freedom, were the countries that had the heaviest rest subsidies in the world. denmark, sweden, norway, germany, britain, japan. we will way down the list below. may be that only is so because they have crushed all the private media that didn't exist anymore and they brainwash their people. in fact, what we discovered, we look at a group called freedom house. their whole job is to monitor government press and private commercial news media.

freedom house was set up during the cold war to monitor dictatorships ranks every government in the world and how free is private media are from government harassment. freedom house, we went to the rankings through last year and guess what? the sixth free as a private meeting in the world are in the same six countries that have heavy suppressive cities, denmark, norway, sweden. they have the least amount. even the united states is ranked 21st there. our point is that when we did this research it became clear that this is a solvable problem. we don't have to imitate him or imitate our ancestors, that united states to solid. a clue we can come up with subsidies that can give as an independent, news media, news is with journalist competing with each other, working together on great stories to cover all the beats we need to have covered if we're going to have a credible systematic functioning democracy with elections that mean something where people are held accountable for what they do. we can't do it.

that's what we have to get the debate very quickly. we wrote this book basically to get the entire debate to that point and open the debate, what are those policies? how can we solve it? we understand it was about the way for technology or some billionaires to bail us out is going to be a long wait. and maybe we don't know, maybe 20, 30, 40 or so that a technology will bail us out. maybe there will be a new magical system of financing journalism online that no one knows now that will give us what we hundreds of thousand of working journalists cover in our communities. maybe that will happen but we do know this. it will not happen very soon. and we don't really have it, 15, 20 years to kill without any journalism, sort of take no journalism so i'm waiting for someone to figure that out. that's not an option. we have to move quickly and rapidly, come up with policies to create journalism, great independent journalism and we don't have a moment to waste. thank you. [applause]

>> all right. so we will do a little panel discussion here, which i will be the a moderate in my moderate way. jane, let's talk about this notion of subsidies. i'm curious, subsidies are something that comes up quite a bit in the book and talk about how to structure them is one of the things that bob and john are saying. i'm saying if there are places, you are running a private enterprise, that is expanding as i understandit, in both readership and labor force, if successful. in that respect. can you imagine a scenario in which there are things that are high fixed cost for you that you can imagine some kind of subsidy structure that would until you or is it something you think you

would want to be a part of? >> i worry about subsidies is that not the subsidies in general, but they tend to be fashioned to reinforce weak existing structures. one of the real problems that we're having right now is that, you know, there is a funding crisis. as the model changes from print journalism or television journalism to online journalism. and the revenue stream for one doesn't translate exactly to the other, and we haven't quite figured it out. we've got advertising that used to work in print that is trying to be adapted online, and it just doesn't work. it just doesn't fit. and people haven't figured out what the news dream is. so if you start subsidizing the wrong thing, you freeze the innovation in that model and you sort of baked into the concrete the old way of doing things. i mean, one of the things that, you know, i always talk about is

that, you know, part of what's happening is the notion of what news is is changing. and anybody who works online all day long understands that. in the old days, you have to have somebody who physically was at the civic center or at the state courthouse in order to be able to do things. but today, when everybody's got a flip cam and everybody can write their impressions of what's going on in their own backyard, and sometimes what we do is channel the flow of the conversation and channel the flow of data, more than classic me speak, you listen to listen. the best example is what beagle did in with the rights were happening in iran. and they had thrown all journalists out of the country and all the '70s twitter streams came streaming through. and he sort of sat there as sorted through them and his knowledge of what was going on in the country and provide the data that just about every

journalist worked off a. they cite it, what he believed provided that. and that was a whole new model for how information gets out. in pre-twitter world, there wouldn't have been that information. without him, other people who were classically trained journalist would have thrown their hands up, twitter. you know, there is more information and are sometimes jealous become who sort through it and you know, figure out what's going on in new ways, and i do worry about, you know, there's something in the sort of libertarian model of letting the market have its way that rewards people are successful for that, rather than other systems. they are all sort of frozen in the 1998, cuba, can be world. so i think they have to be carefully thought out and i can't tell you one thing that i could think of that would kind

of work around that. los. . it depends how many people they have to sort out. what i see with journalists those who need money right away

will have to work at whatever they need to work at it. and some of the skills that you have as a journalist translate easily into public relations but they translate into other things. to education and writing and to a whole bunch of other different things. writing for corporations. not just necessarily journalism. but at the same time on the side they may do journalism. whether they're being paid for it or not and that's the big issue right now. you can continue to -- you can reinvent yourself as a journalist. you can -- one of the things that journalists struggle with when all of a sudden they don't have a job -- meaning if they're used to being in a mainstream newsroom they are struggling because they don't have a job. one of the things this crisis does it forces those of us who have been in mainstream newsrooms forever to really accept the fact that you don't necessarily need the trappings of a newsroom to be a journalist

and do journalism and even accept the fact does journalist you should be involved in and understand media policy and the implications that that has on journalism and democracy. and on your own job. that's something i think that many people are still struggling with. at our convention, for example, our annual convention we basically said enough. we're focused on the multimedia skills 'cause everybody needs them to just land a job. so we paid $30,000. we wified the whole convention center and we told everybody to bring their laptops and 500 people showed up and they sat down for four days and did all kinds of training because that's what they needed to do. >> right, right. john, i want to sort of play devil's advocate on a few things here. so one is the notion that when you said dissentgration as a journalist is less journalist. so it's conceivable that, you know, it takes a lot fewer people to build a car now than it did before. and that's the product of some

technological innovation that you need just less person hours per car. same is true in the 1980s with steel. it seems plausible that there's some account of less journalists that's tackling and the other thing i guess i'm wondering of is this question of professionalism. what are the -- what are the virtues of -- what unique virtues do -- does professionalism confer over and above time? there's two distinct questions about what's happened. one is that no one is paying someone -- fewer and fewer people are being paid full-time to do journalism. more people are doing essentially amateur journalism. what do you see as the value that we need to sort of preserve in terms of professionalism? >> sure. >> i've never accepted the term professional journalist.

they should have their freedom to act as citizens, period. we happen to be citizens who have maybe have the time and the resources to spend our day going out and asking questions but that's what we are. we're not some sort of elite class or special class. and i don't want us ever to be that. i think that's one of the most destructive ways to think about. so everybody can be a journalist. there's no question of that. the question is whether people have that time and the energy to go out and do what needs to be done. and i listened to jaime comments with great respect because i know that the media i worked for is never going to be subsidized. i've always worked in private media for privately held companies and i probably always will. but i also know that i tend to cover national politics. and that is a zone where

there's -- there's still a lot of energy and a lot of resources that go to it. where i worry about is at the grassroots. where i worry about is the communities in this country that have very little journalism taking place. be it professional or citizen or otherwise. because the newspapers have abandoned them and there's whole stretches of this country that have been genuinely abandoned by tv, radio and newspapers particularly and it's hardly surprised, low-incomed neighborhoods, rural stretches of this country. and there are absolutely folks who are trying to fill the void. no question. but it is unreasonable to suggest that, you know, a single mom with two kids and two jobs ought to, you know, after, you know, 11:00 tonight start covering her community. this is not a reasonable demand to make on that person. and the expectation doesn't work. and i think the way that it

ultimately we measure this is to ask ourselves, you know, how is it going? how is it working? in chicago, illinois, it's a pretty big city, and chris you know your way around chicago. a town that has a pretty good journalistic tradition but has had a tremendous loss of journalism jobs in recent years and a real decline, they just had an election a couple of weeks ago. and they had an election for governor and for u.s. senate. and they elected some others, statewide powerful offices, the lieutenant governor's job and they nominated a guy who the day after the election journalists figured out had been accused of beating his wife and holding a knife to his prostitute girlfriend or some such -- pretty bad enough and then a lot of money going out in bad places and he turned out maybe not the most outstanding model citizen. and the interesting thing is it's not me saying this. it's the journalists -- the

remaining journalists in chicago one after another saying -- this is a crisis of journalism. not of politics that we -- we were covering fluff, weather, crime, you know, news you can use, my shoe size. we didn't have enough people to cover the downed ballot races. we made assumptions the blogosphere would do the job. we had a real world example there of what happens when we just accept back and don't fill the void. this is not to say -- and i don't want to ever assault innovation and i don't want to ever do anything -- i don't want to do anything that slows down anybody from going and practicing journalism any way they want and doing it in the best way they possibly can but i'm just saying as somebody who's been practicing journalism where way or another since itself an 11-year-old kid that the resources are not there in too many communities in this country. and we're seeing the pathologies of that play out in our politics and in our, i think, our

economic life and in other places. >> we do have -- we do have the experience where a lot of people who have the ability to do so continue doing journalism while they're either teaching or going to school or deciding -- figuring out how they can make their own business, have their own website, et cetera, et cetera. we do have a focus now on what we call entrepreneurial journalism. and that, i think, is very healthy because what it does it makes journalists think differently about their role and the role of journalism in society and so what we would like to have is more of james and more of the other people who, you know -- so that we don't have in the blogosphere and on the internet -- we want replicate the same mistakes the mainstream media has made for the lack of diversity and the lack of perspectives of voices at the table and we're trying to avoid that, too. >> i think one of the things was

worried about helping somebody and it reflects the interests of the powers that be more than journalism of color, myself, progressives, you know, and people who are not part of the sort of elite power structure and then we wind up operating at a competitive disadvantage to them because they're subsidized and we're not. and again it tends to, you know, prop up something that isn't necessarily working and keep something else that might be working from getting financed. one of the interesting thing on the online ad revenue side, local online ad revenues are actually much higher. they found, you know, fewer -- the mattress center or whatever it is in your neighborhood gets more bang for their buck out of online advertising than a national advertiser running a national campaign so, you know, slowly there's sort of a lot of the alt weeklies, "the village voice," the boston phoenix --

these entities are starting to build out an online financial model within communities that largely gets overlooked because people who are evaluating journalism don't feel they're journalists in the first place. so, you know -- and they do a lot of food journalism. you know, sustainability stuff and, you know, what they do is journalism, too. so, you know, i guess -- if i had to say that there was someplace tos)ut money, it would be building out broadband and making sure everybody gets access because i don't think that that mother should have to work all day and then come back and practice journalism at night. but in an ideal world, if she wanted to, she could do that and she could be reimbursed for it. people -- you know, more people who want to do more and be able to finance it more than entities made up of elites that tend to siphon off money when it's being given.

>> well, this is -- i quite agree with a lot of the comments made so far. john and i have a very inclusive view of journalism and what they should do. i think very much like jane we're in a moment of flux and this will have to be determined through practice and we shouldn't try to force it into a fox ahead of time. -- box ahead of time. i think we're5v going to ultimately have a situation where there will be a range of journalisms of different styles of journalism that will emerge but where i'm concerned and the basis of our critique is that even in the best case scenario and we studied these i think charitably because many of these products we advised -- we were on the advisory boards for online products we do themselves and we don't see the numbers adding up where they need to be and it's making it easy for

these ventures to survive. i think the policies favoring one political party over another is the first thing you have to be concerned with. but i do want to emphasize when we look at the relevant pool that we're working with it's amazing several countries they figured it out and they actually got -- these are nonpolice state societies, you know, with news and information and journalism. and one of the things we do we say let's have subsidies like the founders have. that was the subsidies that made the abolitionist movement possible. it was the movement half in the united states couldn't. it was battling for the postal subsidy but that subsidies went to proslavery papers. every paper qualified. we're interested in subs diswhere there's no one in government saying well, you

qualify and you don't.osm÷ there's objective criteria if you meet them you qualify and you can do that. that's not impossible. it's been done. i think we've been so deflated by our politics in our country we lost sight of the fact that you can have a government that works for you. we've given up hope and democracy. it's ironic in a constitution. we can't govern ourselves it's hopeless. we can't solve this problem with that belief. and then one other point i would add is we're big believers in libertarian solutions. if you look in chapter four we go through several of the ideas. they're about ways of funneling public money with nonprofit ventures online where people get to decide whether they give the money or not. and they're locked in. it's voluntary choice. it's vouchers we call them and they can go to anyone and you have to keep winning them. so we're not locking in some bureaucracy that gets built in. who kisses up some crony party.

that's not our only option and that's not the only place we have to go. along those lines john sent me a note. if you read our book -- if someone listening to this discussion, boy, nichols mcchesney like the local media system and these guys have been thinking commercial media has been hitting it out of the park for 30 years and we got to give them some resources so they can get back up to the plate and take more cuts we have done a very bad job of explaining our view. we think the commercial media systems are in deep crisis of its own doing and the commercial corporate control of journalism is one of the key reasons journalism is in the deep crisis far more than the technology of the internet. and we have no plans for any subsidies to go to any commercial enterprise whatsoever. we make that quite clear in our book. although as i say that, we are in debates with friends of ours who think they should. we think that's a debatable issue. we don't think that shouldn't be discussed. we have good friends who believe strongly that we need government subsidies who make the case that some of these should go to commercial enterprises.

let's have that debate but that's where the debate should be in my opinion. we aren't trying to close it down. we're trying to open it up. >> can we talk about advertising for a second. one of the most interesting ideas is the notion that the revenue model that we have come to accept as sort of an immutable law of gravity, that's how you pay for journalism has just evaporated and maybe in the long sweep of history turns out this was kind of a weird contingent accident. that this was this one period -- one of the things -- i can never figure out where all the advertising money went. no, seriously. like why is it the case that, a, as jane will attest to, ad revenue rates online are just paltry fractions of what they are on print? and, b, there's been this decline across media platforms and advertising. i just don't get where that money went. >> i'll take a quick shot. there's a great book that people should read. it's called "the death and life of american journalism." [laughter]

>> that actually goes into this to some extent and there's a fine book called "chaos" i believe by bob garfield that does on the media and also one of the great writers on advertising. he goes into this in great detail but to cut to the chase advertising never was interested in journalism. i mean, it wasn't like, you know, people said, you know, i got this business and i got a whole bunch of money. yeah, i could pocket it and maybe build a condo or go on a vacation but i think i'll do some advertising so i can employ journalists. that was never the concept. and advertising saw a vehicle. a platform that worked. and so it jumped on board. and historically, it was an accident. it happened to sustain journalism and that was great. you opened up your newspaper and you were reading about, you know, franklin roosevelt or

la guardia or the lindbergh kidnapping, oh, i could buy some underwear. that's cool. and you go to the next page. television came along. equally great. you're sitting there, wow, i could walk into the kitchen and do something else but i don't really want to get up so i'll watch this ad and it continued on. when you got -- when the internet came along, when the digital age came -- remember, we always say many of the declines in newspapers in journalism came -- started long before. but it accelerated the crisis for journalism because advertising found new ways to get to people and the interesting thing -- i have bad news for you, jane, i don't think it's -- i don't think it's going to be hunting to support journalists online either. in fact, as garfield writes this brilliantly. they found it's so much to get straight to you. and let me give you one quick way to understand this. remember on the newspaper reading about la guardia and roosevelt and, oh, some underwear.

if you happen -- if somebody buys an ad on the nation's website or firedog and they go and they go, wow, you know, i'm living what jane hamsher wrote and there's the underwear ad up there, i'm going to click on that. it will take you off the site to another site and when you get to that other site the job of the person who designed the place you went to is to so engage you, so intrigue you that you will never go back to where you came from. and so the end result is we've created a place where advertising lives someplace else. and it encourages you to come visit there. it does not encourage you to go back. it's not going to come back. in doing the book we interviewed -- we spent a lot of time with some of the top news websites in the world. i interviewed the people who do the guardian's went in england which is a terrific website. so good that americans are among the top readers of it because they would actually get some news. and so the guardian is doing a

terrific job. and they said to the guy who was the editor, wow, you are doing such great work. this site is full of, you know, news from around the world and culture and commentary and great food reporting and everything you could -- it's so fabulous. and you guys must be just like trucking the money to the bank. and he said well, you know, last year we only lost 30 million pounds. and i said well, that's kind of a bummer. you must have a plan. and he said you know what? every year we hire a new guy. [laughter] >> to give us a plan for how we're going to make money online. >> it's the best job in media. >> he said for years i would hire the guy or the woman who came along with what sounded like the best idea. and at the end of the year well, i'm sorry it didn't work. and now i won't hire anybody who says they have an idea. for how to make money online because nobody does. >> i'm curious without getting

too much of the details of the business side of firedog, my sense is advertising is not supporting what you're doing there? is that correct? >> it's not. we are -- you know, a lot of our activities are supported by donations, by online support for our readers for, you know, what we do. and the online advertising model i don't think is going to get any better. you're looking at a situation where google has a virtual monopoly on my advertising akin to, you know -- when you were growing up there was one billboard in town and now everybody has got a billboard. it used to cost you 100 bucks and now, you know, you can have five for a dollar. it's just -- you know, and as the sort of advertising gets more technologically sophisticated, as you can reach

your target audience, you know, 14 to 16-year-old girls who, you know, on valentine's day, you know -- as that becomes -- the ability to target them is greater, advertising revenues may turn around but i have a feeling it's not going to be the 250 by 300 flash box that we're used to seeing right now because as john is saying, it doesn't have the same -- it doesn't drive your attention in the same way that, you know, opening up "vogue" magazine and seeing, you know, this gorgeous christian dior gown, keep going back to that. but you're still in "vogue" magazine. it's a different phenomenon. it doesn't quite work. so, you know, people are expecting -- experimenting with different models and, you know, one of the interesting things that people have talked about is for p.r. people, for one journalist. well, i don't have times a p.r. person -- if you think about them a little bit more, as a model a little bit more globally, you know, they're basically someone who is

packaging content. and doing research. and putting it out there and getting it journalists who have to put up three or four stories a day online. as modern journalists do. and a lot of times what you're finding is that people who can -- organizations entities, they nonprofits and foundations, that they corporations or whoever can be the resource and information and be the receptacle for what that information source is. as an example. i was on a panel with a couple of guys with the "huffington post" and they asked us what blogs did we read. we answered the exact same. we don't really read blogs. we're at open secrets.com. it has all the campaign finance data and that's their business. they just have tons of campaign finance data. they have every report ever filed. and they've got it sliced and diced and apis and so when i go to write a story about evan bahy

i can go over how much money he's taken from the pharmaceutical industry last year. $149,000. >> a lot more from the banks. >> a lot more from the banks and in the past 10 years to do that. i can have a story or a line on a story 5 seconds that would have taken somebody a month to research 10 years ago. so, you know, the ability to -- if you think -- again, if you have an organization and you want to get that message out there, your ability to be a warehouse for data that makes people like ourselves, you know, have access to that data quickly and efficiently can do more to get your story out than, you know, having 100 journalists working on it. again, people sort of need to start thinking about information in different ways and how it gets sliced and diced and passed from one person to the other. the old model of i speak, you

listen just doesn't -- you know, doesn't -- doesn't really cut it anymore. >> i don't disagree but i don't really think that's at issue here. the issue is not one way flow, top-down and then just taking away people having an income that everyone is poor so we just talk to each other back and forth and rely on public relations and new data sets -- i think, you know -- i envision journalism evolving and i suspect you might, too. i think the difference would be is that to me the new ability to get really good material online quickly and easily for someone who doesn't have a job, who isn't getting paid which i agree is wonderful. and i think it's something we want to encourage. >> i actually don't. i think that we have to find a way to pay people. >> but i think -- i think what we could see evolving is rather

than a role of just professional journalists who are paid and professionalism in terms of payment and not the nature of what they do in newsrooms what i would like to see eventually and what we write in the world where people who are covering beats and covering are the rhythm section lay down the rhythm and the melody and people can use that who aren't being paid but they can critique it and push papers along online and so together you can make beautiful music but you need both parts and then we can take it to a much higher quality than we've had but again that's johnny one note. if you don't have your rhythm section you're going to have a lot of noise. >> well, look at like what propublica does. they do investigative work with newspapers who can't afford having reporters covering everything.

they have the ability to do the investigative research and then use those, you know, brand names and vehicles as a way to get that information out there to the public and it's been very helpful, you know, on both -- on both sides of it. you knows journalists are employed by propublica and they have the solid reporting that i've seen change, you know, several big stories in the past year. so it's sort of a different way of thinking of things. >> let ivan go. >> part of this -- one of the things that concerns me, though, i understand somebody who was a journalist in the mainstream newsroom for 20 years -- and although i don't tweet yet people follow me but i don't tweet. i don't know why that is. to me it's also about the conversation. i'm very concerned about local news. and i'm very concerned about the

fact that even when we had advertising basically bankrolling media you still had -- you had large, huge, huge latino communities all over texas, for example, that didn't get coverage at all, right? ....

>> made a little more deeply. the problem that we've got in america is bad we have a lot of this country that isn't being covered well or thoroughly. and in the book we really spent a lot of time on this. are there in the foundations to step in and do in every town in east saint louis, detroit, cleveland, and everyplace across this country. there are. the resources to begin to be there. are the others nonprofit models, the fact of the matter is we have looked and looked and looked for some source of revenue to come riding to the rescue. and for the communities that i would argue, to have any kind of real democratic experiment in this country, most need

journalism and information. those are the places where the conversation is, as i think you are suggesting, is. most squeezed. and i think that this is what we really have to do is make a break. so many conversations about journalism, and i say this, someone who critiques critiques of journalism a lot, really are how do we cover barack obama, right? and i'm tired, i am bored with barack obama. i'm sorry come he's a very good rhetoric and all that. and i can't think -- do a thing would be more boring if mitch mcconnell becomes the senate leader. these are dull people who live in a narrow zone. i want to hear about all of america. and what you a lot more about the world. and that's some fundamental level that's going to take resources and is going to take commitment and it will take new ways of doing it. and if we simply say we're covering it, we are getting the job done because somebody

creates a new website that covers all the more federal policy, we are lying to ourselves. we are not. we are not giving america the journalism it had even 25 years ago. two people want to open the floor of two questions? there are microphones. i will call and you. you ask and i will repeat it for the c-span watching audience. >> i ran into my colleague and i said i'm going to see robert mcchesney and john, a nasa what you think of them? he said the going to talk about government subsidy.

they went out and organized. in addition, you can see pr specialist going up. you are seeing organizers and communities and more pr specialist. the one challenge here today is we can create a new government subsidy or you can fund your little newspaper or online magazine in louisville, kentucky, or marietta, georgia or something like that. should we be pushing for subsidies or both or what? >> i will start because you mentioned the populace. as a state would have it, this

is something we were interested in, too, so the leading historian has written a history of the post office and done a lot of the great archival work of the subject that i said to them, it looks like these subsidy petered out after the civil war. he said i want to the polls archives and spent a lot of time and there was room after room their of stuff from the populist demand lower postal rates in the late 19th century. this seemed to be like their major organizing issue. so the populist, they were working both sides of the street literally. and organizing outside but they understood if they didn't get the low postal rates, that was going to hurt their ability of existing as a move. it depends on the ability to commit with others. that was imperative for the. so they were working both sides of the street. i think that answers your question in my view. you work both sides of the street simultaneously because you rise and fall together.

you don't win one fight and win the next one. you win them both simultaneously because they are mutually reinforcing, in my opinion. >> there in the back. >> yes. we all know that in many with a government subsidized newspapers in the 1960s with the postal subsidy. benjamin franklin made his fortune. that was very important. but you have not been specific about the subsidies that occur in the european countries for the subsidies you're advocating. can you be more specific about the subsidies that you favor now in the 21st century? >> so the question is, what are the subsidies, what our modern incarnation subsidies or the other subsidies in europe for the 21st century? >> well, we did mention the european was because the primary

one in europe that universal is support for public and committee and radio and television. how that stood in europe depends on each country. some countries have state systems. it does vary. and i think the united states, if you increase spending, would have to reform its complete structure. that would be part of increasing funding which i would strongly recommend and i think that's one of the proposals we make is a reform of public broadcasting and a tremendous increase in revenues, money going to public and community broadcasting. and what we argue in the book is that no more than we will be satisfied with a single commercial newsroom in a community is the monopoly, we should be satisfied with a single noncommercial newsroom. we should have competing public nonprofit media newsrooms, public media.

even multiple resources for it, so that's what the things we talk about. we can learn from europe some of the alternatives. we go through a battery sort of emergency things. the reason why we don't emphasize in focus, we just want to get the discussion going because we just came up with these things sitting on a barstool. justice to people, 300 people as country haven't thought about this issue. but i will give you a couple that i think for emergency measures, in addition to public increasing for public integrity broadcast, money go to local chosen, one thing that we are very keen on in the near term is we're about to lose a generation of young people who are going to get jobs and get paid as journalists. i think it's great, a bunch of kids are going to be like dancers used to be or actors and actresses were your working day jobs and you're honing her craft on the side. there are a lot of kids who love journalism but that will not

work in the local. i think we need to expand to give jobs to these 20, 25,000 young people for year or two to go out to underserved committees to feature was in right for blogs, for nonprofit media, we can debate who gets them. but get a generation of kids producing journalism and make them force us to keep, have a system so they can keep doing it and let them beat the great innovators. but we can't afford to lose this generation. one final thing i will mention, i don't want to get to walking. but ultimately i think john are very interested in how can we recognize the nature, the markets have isn't going to do it. advertising was an anomaly. that we have to face, stand naked before the truth like our founders did and like other countries have. and i think what we have to do is say what can we do to understand the public good

nature of journalism, understand the revolutionary technologies of the digital realm, rather than follow the corporate model of trying to put barbwire all of the internet and prevent people from going to one side or another, defeat the genius of the digital world. what we have to do is come up with a system that pays people up front that makes everything free and accessiblaccessible online. that's a rational use of the technology and understand the public domain nature, the public good nature of journalism. and come up with a couple proposals, one, our favorite is by an economist who lives here in town who many of you might get away with the came up with is a decade ago and we have and ballasted. other people have walked our proposal similar to them. there's lots of ways you can spend on it. and his ideas and put it to be able to drop $200 of federal money to any nonprofit noncommercial media of his choice. this would be a large online and

i'm a huge public subsidy to become would have no control over and be purely voluntary. and low for all sorts of competition. if you live in the town that had lousy coverage right now, you live in a neighborhood, you had 1000 other names who gave $200 soda you can hire for five people to work for you. if they do a great job you can get more people call you. if they do itcomes job somewhat can get a voucher next you. it's highly competitive. it's libertarian and brings the genius of internet. everyone has access to it for free. that's to me, that's where this discussion has got to be going to embracing the technology, and bracing to public journalism. if you don't policy that protect our core binaries and promote democracy. >> i agree with a lot of the things you have said about the flop of the money.

[inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible]

[inaudible] >> my concern about the npr and public broadcasting it is essentially media. as the divide between consumers and producers of news is sort of leveling out, you become we thought a tremendous digital divide. and i would prefer to see that digital divide close to make sure that everybody has access to broadband. i find that once people, you know, if you plug into the internet, you know, on a dial-up, you will look at news. but once you have broadband, you are a participant in a. you consume, you produce. you know, you get your hands and it. and among young people, that digital divide is closing, but among adults, that is still pretty broad. and so i think one of the more

egalitarian things that we can do is make sure that all communities have broadband access. that's an infrastructure. that's at a gala terry and infrastructure spend. that lets everybody participate rather, you know, again, elite media you know, that a few people decide is what people need to be consuming. >> so we will concede that point a great place to start. let's do that. and if that fills the void, if it works, fabulous. if it doesn't, let's not wait too long to get some resources out to people so they can actually cover their communities. >> i'm not against getting resources to people. again, i worry about the ways in which they get implemented, because it's difficult enough for us to have to compete with the "washington post," having to compete with an online pbs that

suddenly gets tremendous funding in order to be able to do something that we're doing better. you know, that's our because right now what's happening in our world is that you've got, for years, companies like cnn and even the "new york times" who said oh, we can't make any money online so we're just not going to compete. and that's were myself, the nation, you know, went out and filled it out, that boy. and all of a sudden, the "new york times" woke up and went we've got to do something here. cnn, and they came in with a bunch of money and they're able to develop the tricks and the gadgets and the stuff in order to be able to take it technologically to where we're going to have a hard time competing. so we're playing catch-up. we don't need somebody else and there in that game, you know, basically coming in and knocking us out because they are suddenly getting money to do the things. >> this is where i'm going to really disagree, jane. i think you do need it. and i think that mainstream media has done such a lousy job

online. >> you think i need the competition by people are much funded by makes because i think you will be do. i have confidence in you. [laughter] >> i'm glad. >> and i will tell you that it relates you're doing research in the book, we talk to a lot of european news websites. how come you are so good? how come you guys are so packed with information, so innovative, so far ahead of what american online is doing? and you agreed there are doing tremendous work out. >> would go to europe and is like a third world nation compared to what we do. >> i would disagree on both the consumption, especially in northern europe on the consumption and quality. but here's the interesting thing. when you do talk about the amount of journalism they're doing and all this, they say we have to because we are competing with the bbc online. and we are competing with, cuba, a lot of well researched, strong

operations. if we don't do a great job, if we don't do a thorough job, if we don't really give people something that is good or better, we will get beach. in fact, i think that what we're talking about here is a competition to quality and a competition towards strength. not dystocia which is going to wait in the wilderness and see a bike in great something that's going to be good. that's not going to work. the better model is to make sure that there's a lot resources spread to a lot of places so that people really can compete on a basis of equality. >> these people who want to can be, are the also getting subsidies? >> well, not commercial. we would like to see subsidy -- would like to see this as a of noncommercial media and public media. >> so the competition between -- okay. >> excuse me. >> that goes to the point that jane was talking about.

>> and i think that our view is that commercial made of wool prosper, including yours in that environment. that commercial meet with benefit by sort of a score to desert their working and no one else's resources are available. ivr works that way if there is a bountiful realm of resources and journalism in the nonprofit noncommercial sector that will benefit the commercial. because i think that's a lesson of northern europe. commercial media are doing better and no way than the are here. they're doing better in sweden, much better in germany. and they're doing better because as long as though still take advertising away, you've got all the media directly into the advertising. they are free to do what they want. but they'll raising the bar in generating that wouldn't be there otherwise. so i think it's not in conflict that it's a complementary relationship. >> right here.

>> with the suggestions about vouchers and broadband and subsidies with this a spending freeze that might be coming down the pipe, it sounds like two or three of wars will have to and before any of this happens. comment? >> sounds good. [laughter] >> this is a problem? >> so it's okay. know, one of the things i'm you're talking about a lot of money. there's no doubt about it. we don't deny that. in fact, i love our friends at why did you use the word subsidy? that's a no windward. people don't like the word subsidy. it doesn't sound right. we stay because we want to be honest with you. want to be up front in saying this is what we're talking about. we're talking up spending money, substantial amount. but to let's say in our wildest imagination, let's say we spend at the rate today that we spent

in the days of the founders. let's say that we rival that postal subsidy amount in the founding moment that something in the range of 20, $25 billion. that's billion with a be. big number. well, that's pretty scary. that's what we spend in 12, 14 weeks in iraq. it's about three or 4 percent of the first bank bailout. you know, the only thing is when you start to realize what a tiny portion it is of always been on these other things, the fact of the matter is we going to to audiences outside washington, which is obsessed with this. you've got to talk to america and commuters across this country and say my to be intrigued by the notion of getting enough information so that maybe we could avoid the next war and the next big bank bailout? they don't think of it necessarily as that huge of an

investment. and that's one of the message that i think has to be delivered, that when we started this dialogue as would have here, and this is what we want, we want people to disagree and to challenge and to push. would resort to have this dialogue, we start to realize, i think i'm have very important that information is. and going to look at different ways to get and people will line up on different sides of these issues. but the bottom line is that if we're saying is very, very important that the american people have sufficient information to govern themselves, to really do so, and be easily accessible, then we will start to talk about a whole bunch of ideas. and spending some money, and will be the popular will to do that. but if we don't have the dialogue, if we just assume that we're going to let things evolved, we will not get there. and what we will evolve to is what i spoke out in the open remarks is where we have an immense amount of packaged information, but very little information that goes out and does challenge power to do the

right thing. >> i think it's a good conversation, to have as long as you link this discussion of subsidies to the earlier point about structural demand. one of bob's earlier quote, there was an essay that points out we already subsidized a broadcast media to the point of hundreds of billions of dollars in this country by giving away public assets, for free, without any demand in return. and i think until we've raised that structural demand, then you get into, you get boxed into a corner by people who are arguing that deficit are arguing that you are adding more to a larger deficit. if we restructured the media and

the way as public goods like that and don't assume welfare, that maybe will actually make money. >> that's a really good question, and and i would would like to give, we would go to sleep and would sell any books. but you know as a rule i would say john and i are not big fans of policies that put the government in the business of judging content of media. so that's why we're not huge fans of the fairness doctrine. we've never thought that. that was a way you dealt with a fundamentally flawed system. you try to insert a policy on top of it to get it to do good think that it was built to do bad things, like you were saying. and we think the point that we've had enormous subsidies to support commercial media, that's what we started free press. that's what it exists is because there was a giveaway of the

spectrum, giveaway of monopoly licenses to telephone and cable companies that they could build these up. had nothing to do with the free market. the whole idea of freedom press was to bring in for public purchase a patient, shine the light of these and get people involved in these debates to stop this. and so i quite agree with you on that. i think that is where -- just to grab the point that has been made a couple of times by jane that i think is so important. i should raise it up one more time because he gets to this corruption of the process. the battle for a ubiquitous broadband that's inexpensive and that is uncensored by the phone and cable companies at the bottom is essentially. without that everything else we're talking about will not take place. and it's necessary but not

sufficient. but it is absolutely necessary. in this fight, that's going on right now you get on free press, media access project, a number of groups in this town are working, despite we're going up against, the lobbyist we are fighting for the cable companies, you become a their whole business model isn't buying off politicians that is not in satisfy consumers. consumers would've been out of business 50 years ago. bare headed. but the own politicians. but this is a crucial fight because the vast majority of americans, the vast majority of businesses in america, it's not businesses hate privatization of internet as well. they benefit, but we are really facing a full-court press by these very small number of monopolists to take over in effect make it there private plaything. and benefit. and we need all hands on deck for that fight. we have to win that fight that

help everyone is aware with a fight and working on it because that is every right on that. >> i would just add to that, that media consolidation is an enormous problem. you wind up with these two big event institutions that wind up channeling the money that they get into lobbyists who allowed them to sort cannibalize more of the public sphere and be able to then drive revenues that allowed them to take that money and buy lobbyists to get more and more and more. and so, you know, the fight that they're talking about for the freedom of the internet, from the telecoms who want to cannibalize that space from the media companies that do is absolutely and essential prerequisite. i mean, you know, for, you know, people that live and eat and breathe and need to be on the internet just to be able to

perform their days of functions and live in society as a functioning, you know, productive person, that is the prerequisite for everything. and i can't emphasize enough of how important it is what they are talking about. >> and hj has been criticizing a bid for the last eight years. and we have seen what's happened as a result of that. that is why convincing journalists be involved in the policy was a key for us. because for so long journalism basically were, i guess you'd say, taught that they shouldn't be involved. and something that was to record affecting them. i see the fight over the internet as right now the biggest fight against media consolidation because we already see what's happened in the past. we have many mainstream

companies have collapsed because the overleveraged their debt, because about all these newspapers. it goes on and on and on a. fighting against for companies that basically want to control the internet in this country, to me, is the fight that we must have now for the future. >> and if i could just throw in, i would probably put a little bit of energy into preventing comcast and nbc from merging as well. is picking of media consolidation. >> okay. let's to the last question right here. >> kind of an optimistic note on something. >> thank you. [laughter] [inaudible] >> is hard copy media. but with all the subsidies we haven't bank recover, let's face

it. it's fortune-telling and debt. the u.s. is bankrupt. so if you would take a massive romanization, reprioritize its budget, but putting that aside, i think grassroots media is really the way to go to fight, not just to prevent the mergers and all that at the top. but to really rigorously pursue grassroots media in a realistic way. and that's one way is you can create a magazine or paper and adapt that can sell ads locally. it can have some of the same stories locally. there's just a lot that can be done for the average person. you have digital photography. >> that's a good place to bring us around because it is talking about making new media and making more journalism. and that's really what we want to see. we want to see people come up with all sorts of innovative ideas and new ways to do it. and online most and probably

most will be digital and we think that's great. but the one thing that i would come back to as we circle around here, is the notion that that innovation, that experimentation is going to require resources at some level, and advertising is not going to be there. we're going to say a lot of really foolish ideas put forward in the next few years as this crisis accelerates. people are going to say well, you know, we're going to to wall off the internet and put up some balls and make this, have barbwire if you want to link from one lake to another. the "new york times" will take us down that road for a couple of years and we will all examine with it. but at some fundamental level the one thing we have to get back to is the notion that, that if we want america a small d. democrats that really does confront the question of a

bankrupt government and a government that has been priorities. we are going to have to remember how we did in the past. the greatest bankruptcy in this country was founded on the original sin of human bondage. that was a horrible thing, and for the first seven years of the american experiment that congress did not debate slavery. in the presidential candidates didn't debate slavery. it was sort of off the front burner. but because of the postal subsidies, because of resources coming from the government, the abolitionist press went out in force that debate at the local level and communities across this country. we write about in the book about the post offices were burned because they were delivering abolitionist newspapers. and the fact of the matter is that in our history we have an example of how, with support of

a broad diverse and dissenting in media in this country, we have been able to confront the most challenging, the most overwhelming problems that we have faced. we think we're at another founding moment. we think that tom paine was right. we always have it in our power to begin the world over again. and what we are suggesting is that all of these ideas and of the proposals that have been put forth tonight should be part of this dialogue and we are to have no limits on what we think we can achieve. and no limits on what we hope for and what we demand in the journalism of a 21st century that doesn't re-create the mistakes of the past, but actually goes forward and gives us a better, richer, more small d. democratic journalism that we have ever had before. >> i just want to thank all of our panelists. is a speal want to thank chris

hayes for doing such a great job of moderating. [applause] we're just aipac conference. can you tell me what was your favorite book to write? >> boy, that's a good question. i would say probably the first one hand that was a success, on

the face of ronald reagan because it was a shock. i started off writing a book on reagan and the cold war generally. and never intended to talk about his face. and as i start going through the primary sources, the latter is a handwritten speeches, interviewing people come in every people who knew him, i came to this really, really deep pervasive faith that i did not expect to have at all. a lot of people were suspicious as to whether reagan was a really even religious. including a lot of conservatives because nancy consulted us closer. ronald reagan didn't go to church on a regular basis. but as i read, as i went to the reagan library in a red speeches like the evil empire speech, and look at the actual document, i saw reagan's hand all over it. there was a big file in the reagan's library called the phf, presidential handwriting file, which is documented that has reagan's writing on it, not just signature. and that's where you can was a

presidents role, input. and i saw this speech, at least half of it was written by reagan, including the very theological presents. and i realize right there that i was doing with somebody much more substantive than the character, character suggested when he was president. so i ended up with a couple of chapters on reagan's faith in three or four chapters and have the book on reagan's faith. and certainly the manuscript among my colleagues, and they said you need to split it is off and do just a book on reagan's faith. so that became god of ronald reagan. and then later about three years after that, we released the crusader, ronald reagan and the fall of communism which is more generally about reagan's role in the cold war. and an outcome the the crusader was also surprised because i found out in reading soviet archives in soviet media archives that the soviets called him the crusader. and they called him that because

they knew that he wanted this crusade for freedom. crusade in this is about fdr used the word come and how eisenhower used the word. and so, you know, i would say that's one of my favorite books. and the other one would be probably the one on ronald reagan's closest adviser, the judge william p. clark, ronald reagan's top and. here somebody, you still live. he is 78 years old that he will be 79 history. he lives in california. has parkinson's disease, and he was, he was really reagan's, sounds to matter, but secret weapon, so to speak. he's the man who, for all of 1982 and 83, worked at reagan's national security council and laid out -- there's a paper trail of this -- very specific directives with the intention of peacefully taking down the soviet union and bringing democracy, or as they put in the

document, political pluralism, to eastern europe and the soviet union. so that was a joy, because myself, my family, we spent a couple of summers spending at clark's ranch in of event data, getting to know him and his family. and that's a case where it wasn't just a matter of looking at documents and looking at books and other things and that people have been, i actually got to know the figure is a lot of time with him. >> had you come to write about hillary clinton? >> yes, that's -- the god of ronald reagan books started a trend i guess. my editor at harpercollins, your next book onto the the faith of george w. bush that he was the current president. and at the time it had been any books. stephen mansfield books, book, david aikman's book, both on bush's faith. those hadn't come out yet. so i did that, and then a couple of years come and not long after that came out, cal morgan came

back and as they would like to do another god and the book. i said well, i don't want to spend my whole career writing god and the books, as you know, i'm very intrigued by the fate of the clintons. bill and hillary clinton. i sit here are two democrats, religious democrats, religious left, and i would like to remind people that, you know, the only christians out there aren't conservative christians to come in, there are liberal christians, and it would be really good to look at somebody from that point of view. and plus, i thought hillary clinton would be president, frankly. i really did. so that came out, "god and hillary clinton," and 2007. and that was fascinated i really enjoyed studying that as well. >> what your next project? >> i'm working on a cold war book, and it will be out this fall through isi books. intercollegiate studies institute. they are doing an amazing job.

they have really ramped up their offerings, and so that will be out. it's kind of a 20th century history book, looks at the long roll of congress movement in the united states, and in particular how the commonest movement tried to get non-communist liberals to support communist causes. >> and just remind us, the latest book on the shelf of yours is? >> i guess i'm the last one would have been 2007, the judge william p. clark, and the hillary clinton, "god and hillary clinton" also came out in 2007, which by the way was too much at once. i've got to slow down. i got five kids at home. >> what are you reading these days is? >> oh, boy. there's a book out by laurence rees calls world war ii, behind closed doors, which i'm reading. fascinated by that. clarence thomas' book, very

interesting. i'm always reading about a half a dozen different books at once. i went back and i'm digging into thomas merton's book, the seven story about which i think was published in 48 to 49. so that's a little bit old, but time is, great spiritual autobiography. right now basically those are the three books i am working through. >> thanks very much for your time.

>> we are here at this year's conservative political action conference talking to radio host jerry doyle to tell us about your new book. >> the title of the book is from like to standpoint, "have you seen my country lately?," and had you? and the others have you seen it, because it gives you i think a lot of people would like to go back there. it was kind of when i was writing it and it was hard to keep up with everything as fast as it was changing, and we hear about hope and change but i think at a certain point people go you know what? slow down. the book and i think a lot of talk we'll and what we are doing here is we are like the speed bumps unadjusted government to slow down. i don't care if you're republican or democrat, slow down as a so what you're doing and how you're doing it and forget what the unintended consequences of what you are doing might be. >> did you write it for your

radio audience, or is there a different audience you're trying to reach with the book? >> the real ideas is the book audience in the book is radio, and it's really just -- what you and i do, we're in the business of information. we had the luxury of spending our days reading and going through the trivia and the tidbits and all this stuff that most people don't. they are stuck on the freeway. they are commuting and packing kids lunch that's where the opportunity to take all this information at compressed into a book or a three-hour real show, or what you guys do on c-span. and our job is to just give it to the. say here's what i saw today. what you think? not how to think, but what do you think. when i was writing the book it was kind of like this catharsis i'm like wow, you know, you look at this modest bit of political insanity and you're like going, where's the middle? how do i get my hands on this? is just a way for people to kind of take a look at what we do

every day and maybe in 240 pages or whatever it is. just an idea of what is going on. and you're an actor as well so how did you get from acting to essentially political influence on the raiders to? >> i a tv series, babylon five, it was a science-fiction show. and the guy who syndicates my show is a huge science fiction fan. and he contacted me through another made a host about trying to buy series back on the air. and he was talking about talk we'll. and this is what you think? i said i love it, i listened to it all the time. he said you ever think about doing it? and i said no. the process of about three or four months we start talking about talk radio. and again a few and slot on a saturday night for one of his hosts. and he goes, three hours, you get to talk to america. i'm like okay, i'm going to do that i got to the studio, i was there two hours ahead of time. odyssey, you're the new guy. at 12:00 you're on.

i'm sitting there and i'm life. and i did my first love is in bloom, and a look at the clock and for me, and i had two hours and 40 minutes left and i have said everything i ever wanted to say about anything i started to panic. and he backed off when he goes, okay, you just did like five days radio. you might want to slow down, expand on that stuff a little bit. and it was -- i got done and i was like back in bed. i was in a fetal position. i was like the first puppy pulled from the litter. i loved it. when i was an actor, after you have had a therapist. so used to talk to a stranger about my problems and pay them every hour that i get paid every hour to talk to strangers about my problems. you know, if you can be that voice for the audience, you know, if you can be the validation of what they want to say but they don't have the opportunity to say, and i think

people like my show because i am an equal opportunity offender. it doesn't matter if it is republican or democratic if you do something right, culprit if you do something wrong with going to talk about it. people have a place to come by and be like, there's someone that's like watching out for me. someone that has my six. and it's interesting to kind of watch the media because it's very edge and eyes, whether it is fox or cnn or msnbc. you pretty much know what they're going to talk about and what they're going to say. on my program, when i try to give people is an opportunity to just have an exchange of ideas. if you can make it a day, cool. if you can't, i will be here tomorrow. and just kind of give people a little bit of insight into not necessarily what's happening but why it's happening. and what the ramifications of that will be. >> the obstacles that you met with you for start in radio, was there in december when he first

started writing the book? >> unit come with any publisher, simon & schuster, thankfully, they have their relationships and there are certain things that they don't want said. and in radio there are certain things they don't want said and on tv there are certain things they don't want said that they have to find away around it. and you have to kind of just do it in a way that's not obvious. but they were very cool. the print much gave me the option to write whatever i wanted to write about. and i have a whole new respect for writers, because i have a low table, the program with the books. and unlike you of the book, that school. that i would book and that's hard because when you talk, i can always the next it would annex our disco, you know what i said last our, i was ready wrong. i just got this information that changes whenever. but when is on the page it is therefore all time. so what i did was i had, i don't

know, three or 400 notes in the book and i chronicle where i took everything from. so you can dispute my fact that you can dispute my conclusion but you can't dispute the facts because they are what they are. >> do you want to write another one? >> not right now, no. not really. it's an interesting process. i think in writing the book i kind of didn't tweak my readers show based upon what i do in the book because you slow down a little bit. you go what was really all about? what is your show all about? and for me, it's about just trying to push the rock uphill a little bit more every day. you know, i'm not here to tear down or to prop up. i'm not a cheerleader that which unfortunate we see a lot of in books and in tv and in radio. everybody is like, you just off the football and in so.

i think we need more of in the media is coaches. somebody's going to smack you upside the head and say that was not good. we just lost the game. but a lot of what we have ideologically is cheerleaders not challenging their own, and i think that's what the best of change of ideas take places in the coming to believe that, why? what about the financial summit that they're having with obama and his administration, i go, dude, let's have a meeting right now. i would do exactly what you need to do. stop spending. summit over. stop spending. we're going to get alan simpson and have six republicans and six democrats and they will get together and the cameras will be honored to look look at all these learned minds getting together to solve the deficit problem. stop spending. simple. and people go gap, because they've had to do it. you and i, we've had to be limited as other people go crazy in 2006, 2007, real estate. atm. i've always wanted an rv, always

were able. so what we have done in the last year is reduce our spending by about 28%. and people are going i have to do it. why don't they? you know, when i look at the government, signed $1.9 billion increase in the deficit to 14 points we trillion dollars, and i hit a bug talking what we're doing this for our children and our children's children. no, you're bankrupting the next generation. and i think we have a responsibility to make the campground and a bit nicer than the way we found. what we're doing right now, republican or democrat, everybody is like obama is doubling the national debt, bush did the same thing from five to 10 billion to pick i listen to these guys going you know, obama is spending. you did it. you did exactly the same thing. the guy is a compassionate conservatism, which is redundant. conservatism by nature in my opinion isn't compassion. when you throw compassion at conservatism is like we can spend a lot of money. the whole thing about helping

out religion and government at how to advance the agenda, i don't want to protect government from religion. i want to protect religion from government because whoever writes the checks make the agenda. and i think people right now are just like, you know what, commonsense. get back to just commonsense. stuff that we have to do every day and hopefully i can do some of that in my readers show and hopefully i got it in the book. >> thank you very much for your time. we appreciate it. >> thanks a lot. >> r. dwayne betts is the author of "a question of freedom." tell us what your story is. >> well, i guess the show version of the story is when i was 16 it carjacked someone, and then the next day i got locked up. -eight and a half years in prison. in the book is really about how the a and a half years in prison repaired me to be a poet, teacher, husband father. so it's that myself up for the

life i live now to back what change for your interest in? >> i think a lot of stuff change. i spent my formative years in prison, from 16 to 24. so maybe i took of a change is sort of me realizing that i had to work harder than i had worked before to accomplish goals that i had come if i had any shot of the publishing those goals. and before, before prison i thought i could coast by way through to a successful life and i thought i could make certain mistakes that i should've known what have known would affect me for ever and i just did realize they would affect me and follow me forever. >> how is it that you got to point were you carjacked summary at age 16? >> you know, i think that's the hardest question that people ask me. in a lot of ways is the easiest question to answer. think about the cities in which there's a lack of resources. i was young and you know i was intelligent i never talk to somebody who had gone to college that i never talk to somebody who had achieved some of the

things i wanted to achieve. and it's not to say that that alone is reason to carjacked somebody. but when you're looking for reason and to look for things to change the lives of others, i feel like if i would've been exposed exposed more it may have been able to make better decisions because it already board down to one day i had a gun in my hand, and it was just this opportunity to and it's a type of opportunity we hope no child has, but when we look around a society, and communities, we see that unfortunate in our kids are exposed to that violence just like lisa and outside of a jail. >> when did you start writing your book? >> again, that's a difficult question. i started writing include the moment i got locked up. because i started analyzing what it meant to be black and in prison. and be in prison and in 16 before i could drink, before i could try. before i was college aged. my process of thinking about those things will begin the

journey to write the book. but to actually put contract and me sitting down to write a book began summer of 2007. >> how long have you been out of prison at that point? >> at that point i was released on march 4, 2005. so at that point had been out of prison for two years. and really the book came about because i was teaching on the front page of the "washington post." the book was a consequence of my love and my commitment to literature. and it's a i tell people it seems about present in a lot of ways is is about prison but it really is about my love of literature and how my love for there to change me to a different person. >> r. dwayne betts, "a question of freedom."

>> speaking with professor daniel shapiro about his book, "is the welfare state justified?." so let's start at the end, if you will. is the welfare state justified? >> possibly not. but i should explain a little bit what i'm talking about. first, what i mean by the welfare state, by the welfare state i meant programs like national health insurance, social security, something that social insurance programs. and when i say probably not, what i do in the book which is kind of interesting i think is i look at the values and

principles of people defend the welfare state that i think their values, the reasons they give, so i'm in philosophy so temperate political philosophy there are various positions that support it. to skip technical terms i will say people, protecting the poor, and i argue that given their values, if you compare those institutions with feasible more market-based alternatives, that people supporting the welfare state should actually support the alternative, come out looking either better or at least as good, given their own values. okay. >> so what are the central principles or values that drive the creation of welfare programs? >> well, i think one i will talk about perhaps the most, the one i think is the notion of fairness. i think that's probably, if you ask people why do we need these programs, they will probably say because they are fair. if we let people try to have their health insurance on their

own or have pension plans, retirement on their own, they're left in it for themselves if they're poor, it's not going to be fair for the. so i think those are the central price. do you want me to talk about one of my arguments here? >> sure. >> since health care is in the news, let's talk about this. i wrote this, this came out in 2007 by cambridge university press. so it's not completely current with what's going on, but basically if you look at system of national health insurance which exist in all that, almost all the affluent democracies. we don't have one. we have medicare and medicaid about half of all government expenditures are paid for by the government. part b, half of all health care expenditures. if you look at those programs, basically to put it simply they involve massive subsidization of everybody. the government tries to subsidize everybody and keep the price below what they would pay in a market. what happens is sort of elementary. you subsidize something, you get

more of a. once you get more of what you get a big explosion of demand and eventually the government has to put a cap on that. and then you did government rationing. when that happens you get lines began who's going to the top of the line? i will do you go to the top of the line. we know this. people like me. people have connections, people are knowledgeable, people who can game the system. who will go to the bottom of the line? we are in west virginia. pour west virginia's. so if you want to be fair, this is not a fair system. now, to do this we would need to talk about what a feasible alternative, what a real market-based insurance would look like. do you want me to talk about that? >> yes, please. >> we have to compare because it's not fair to look at one system, just look at say it has a problem without looking at another. so my real market health insurance, i don't mean the united states. i mean this is where not the government is in control, not the insurance companies are in control. but your infantile as a

consumer. health savings accounts that you have an account, taxi, you can use it to stand for predictable routine expenses. we limit insurance to catastrophes. which is with what insurance is should be like that think about car insurance that doesn't pay for your tuneups? does it pay for oil and loops? you know the answer to that if they did it would be catastrophically, pardon the pun, catastrophically expensive. so if we have a system like this, everybody can be in control of their own health care dollars. it seems to be much fairer and we limit catastrophe. we don't have this ration, because in my system you would have tax incentives for almost every would have a would have a health savings account. we would leave just like with a really hard cases subsidies. and then you don't have rationing you don't get the lines and people being shunted to the bottom of the line. so argue if you want to favor, you want to be fair, have a system in which people are controlled their own health care dollars in which we don't get

this kind of rationing that we see a lot of national health care systems. >> in your opinion can welfare programs in general achieve social justice? >> well, it's the sort of depends, pardon to be a philosopher's answer, what do you mean by social justice. if you mean the value, something like fairness, a sense of community, protecting the poor, i think if you compare them, take it into social programs, social insurance programs, they do a worse job than these alternative. on welfare, government welfare i think is more but if you are just want to ask my opinion, yes, i would say they do a poor job. given again the guise of the people that defend them. >> who would you like to read this book? who will benefit the most from an? >> well, it is dedicated, i didn't mean this as a joke. it is dedicate to all supporters of the welfare state. it is dedicated to them.

i did what to insert my own views into. i want to say look, i'm going to take your views seriously and i want to convince you, rather than i want to convince you that the institutions you're supporting, which is poor alternatives, if you want it is a little bit about what motivates his book. would you like me to talk about that? as a philosopher i have seen these debates all gimmicks and people say libby is the most important. some people say paris is the most important subject as a community is the most important. and in a battle about principles. i will do the trick that is as a get anywhere. i've been seeing this for three years. no one's mind is change. why not say okay we start from different starting points. maybe if we start from different starting points we can converge on the same kind of institutions. so i try distinction between the principles and the institutions and i try to say maybe, despite all disagreements, this is like the measures of hope. re can converge on similar