>> in his book, william argues that the "new york times" has a liberal agenda that tarnished its reputation. mr. mcgowan, a contributor to the "wall street journal" and former editor of "washington monthly" was at an event and two yearslittle more than an ago talked about journalism as dead. newspapers were in terrible shape. we've gone through a stretch here. you probably saw this morning that aol acquired the huntington post. >> [inaudible] >> what did i say? huntington? >> huffington. >> the huffington post.

last thursday or friday, merdoch announced the daily was going to appear only on the ipad as a daily newspaper. a few months ago, the daily beast absorbed news week or it was the other way around, and we've seen situation in which there's now some original content that occurs only online. i mention two sources. the fiscal times for those of you who want to follow fiscal issues and those who want to follow new york issues a site called the city pragmatist. something exciting has happened. one the good things that happened is the web page of the "new york times" and it had a rocky start, but caught stride in the last six to eight months with a lot of good content. the title of tonight's discussion. is the "new york times" good for democracy?

a better question would be on balance is the "new york times" good for democracy, and to that question, we can give yes, but and no, but answers with a lot of variations in between. with that, let me introduce the two speakers. mike is author of quarterly journal based in washington. [applause] deserve a bit of applause. [applause] he's also the american editor at large for the british guardian where he writes a blog, and he'll give you the address of his blog of the it's too complicated for me. i have it earmarked. he's also a frequent critter to the new york review of books, editor of the american prospect from 2003 to 2006, before that a columnist at a magazine. author of hillary's turn and

left for dead. he's appeared in "new york times," harpers, the nation, and the new republic. both of these gentlemen are high-end journalists who have wide range experiences. bill mcgowan is author of only man is vile, the tragedy of sri lanka which won a prestige award that i neglected to note, and colors l news, how political correctness corrupted the news. a former editor at the washington monthly, reported for newsweek, bbc, new york times magazine, the "washington post," new republic, and columbia journal review and a variety of others on and offline. he's been a frequented on fox news, msnbc and npr.

he's been a media fellow at the social philosophy and policy center and lives in new york city which is why he was almost late today. [applause] our format is simple. each -- mike will go first -- no, excuse me, bill goes first. bill will go first. in part, this presentation is based on his new book, gray lady down about the new york times. he goes first, mike responds for 0 minutes, we have 15 minutes of rebuttal and sir rebuttal, and then open the floor to you. a strong request, when you ask a question, make it a question, no speeches, quite a few yourself, who you are, are you with an organization in particular that you want to be identified with and then ask a question. let's begin.

>> all right, i'd first like to say thank you to fred for organizing this and to frank for lending us this lovely space. it's nice to be back in the burrow of my birth, burrow of my parent's birth and my brother, a retired police sergeant. nice to see michael who i knew somewhat in the 90s, and so let's get going. i think the best way to start -- i'd like to take you all back on a little trip in time. we're heading back to the year 1972. the u.s. was involved in a devicive and somewhat disappointing military intervention overseas, and there was a culture war at home, red state versus blue state, hippies versus hard hats, or hard hats

versus hippy and william f. bucley's national review and in september of 1972, national review published an article about the times with the headline of is it true what they say about the times? it was co-written by john and patrick, one a former reporter at the new york world telegram, another an assistant at the national review. at that time, they were against the establishment press and the bobs of negativity. richard nixon was limited over the pentagon papers and conservatives everywhere and democrats too were upset by the looming endorsement of george mcgovern. the focus of the national review article charges left leaning bias. conservatives long dismissed the

times as a hot bed of liberalism, bias beyond redemption, but the national review asked to what extent was this impression based? it examined five issues that they said fell along a left-right cleft. they were senator james buckley's 1970 run for his senate seat, the antiballistic senate treaty volt in 1979, failed supreme court nomination of federal appellate judge, and president nickon's decision to mime north vietnam's region. the national review concluded surprisingly that were the new standards of the times more broadly emulated by news magazines and broadcast networks, the nation would be far better informed and more honorably served. this was a tribe butte to the journalism practiced and upheld

by abe rosenthal, then editor of the "new york times" and executive editor from 1989 to scene of this accident. it was -- 1996. it was a journalism based on detachment as much as possible, partiality, and he was determined to keep the paper straight. he once said that it was important to keep a firm right hand on the pillar because the newsroom would naturally drift to the left. he believed there should be no needles in which reporters used their perm political opinions to go after anybody. he believed there should be no to quotes that were unattributed or made somebody look bad that was not fair. he was patriotic and weary of the counterculture and weary of conflicts of interests amongst his reporters. when he found out a woman he hired had an affair with a

politician in philadelphia, he fired her and said, and i'll pay deference to the fact this is a catholic institution, i don't care if my reporters bleep the elephants, but if they don't, they can't cover the sir cues. -- circus. [laughter] let's move forward a little bit. it's 2003. tv comedians are having a field day. david letterman said you know the old slogan of the new york new york, well, there's a new one, they changed it. it's we make it up. in the summer of 2004, daniel, the paper's first public editor or reader's advocate, office created in response to the jason blare scandal. he answered that question in his lead with of course, it is.

if you think the times play it down the middle, you are reading the paper with your eyes closed. up deed in october of 2004, a few months after that column, jay of the national review echoing conservatives wrote a repudiation of that pro-new york times 1972 article advocating going timeless. this is a far cry from the 72 article and the off stated assertion that doing without the times is like going without arms and legs. there's a lot of other controversial issues in 2005 and 2006. there were charges that the times was a treason organization for publishing scoops on the national security agencies electronic surveillance of terrorists and terrorism suspects both at home and abroad. there were demonstrations outside the times that called

the new york new times the al-jazeera times. in 2010 we had wikileaks and the dump the state department diplomatic cables. again, there were accusations of treason, denouncements, prosecutions from officials probably blowing smoke for public assumption. i don't advocate going timeless in the least. i don't think it's treason, but i don't think there's a sense of post-national patriotism is the same as traditional notions of patriotism. we'll get into that later. i certainly p don't think it should be bombed. i read the times as a kid. i was proud early in my career to be published prom innocently in it. i consider the times an

important national resource all be it in danger one, and i confess to being a new yorker referring to it as the paper. i wandered down to the newsstand if i was out of town because i got withdrawal systems, but sadly, those days of that young man and that "new york times" are gone. the generations of the time was considered the gold standard of american journalism, and the institution was considered central to the public discourse and policy dates at the core of our democracy, and our shared civic life, yet i don't think for this generation the times can be called what dwight mcdonald said what it was for his generation, the principle point of contact with the real world nor is it seen as necessary proof of the world's existence, a barometer of its pressure and sanity. indeed, some may not care.

some think the times are relevant in the choice, but it's more necessary than ever because much of the new media don't have the resources, money, or talent that the times has or the authority, and that might be changes, nor can they provide the common narrative we need as a nation in the form of establishing what's true and what's not. these times still might demand the times, but they certainly demand a much better times than we're getting. a lot of people focus on the decline of the times by citing some of the big ticket scandals, financial blunders, and financial problems. i'd rather focus on the every day reporting. i think to be sure the times still can produce impressive journalism and it can serve democracy quite well. it was excellent on the bp oil spill.

i think it served democracy quite well by showing some of the diplomatic and strategic blunders of the bush administration in the first couple years of iraq intervention. i think it's been pretty good on the plight of ordinary people during this recession. i don't think it's been particularly god on obama's solutions to the recession, but i think it's humanized and brought home the suffering and or deal that a lot of people are going through. unfortunately, the tide of left liberal politically correct outer douxy -- orthodoxy caused the paper to drift with social information to that as a partisan cheerleader. the editorial page always followed its own agenda. the problem is the respectives in the editorial page bled over into the news report and are spread between the lines of news reporting. phil said that the times'

practices, journalism of verification and i say it practices a journalism that values protection and bias, there's no other word for it created a journalism at odds with its historical mission of reppedderring the news impartially without fear or favor. it's also created journalism at odds with the liberal democratic values it's long stood for so even if you do support a more partisan times, and there are those that do believe news organizations should take up ideological codulls like that do in europe, but even if you support a more partisan times and the ideologically committed journalists in the room who do so, there's still cause for concern because of the law of unintended consequences, the liberal values that these progressives generally stand for are often very ill-served by the very paper that embodies them or

said to embody them. john duey, the great professor, educator, and my philosopher is credited for finding the vital hates of the democracy -- the ability to follow an argument, grasp the point of view of another, grasp the values of understanding, and abate the alternative purposes of what might be pursued, and yet, i don't think the times measures up do this standard. i think instead of expanding the boundaries of understanding, the times narrowed them. i don't think it gives enough sense of the alternative pursuits, and i think in raising the tone of public discourse and make it more intellectually sophisticated, the times journalism often oversimplifies it and in some cases dumbs it down wanting the public faculty for reason to debate. i think that here i'd like to go

into a couple of the issues where i think the times faulty journalism and its ideological biases have not enhanced, but impaired our democratic culture, our democratic processes, and democratic policymaking. this material, as fred mentioned, was taken from my latest book, "gray lady down" and it's the shortest of my books, so by necessity, i have to skim the tree tops here to meet the time limit. if you want deeper detail in the q q&a, feel free, but i'll try to stay out of the weeds. the issues are first of all race and affirmative action. secondly, immigration and diversity. third will be the war on terror. these are the three issues in the book that i think are as presented age are also the three issues that bear on our

democratic life in the most important way. if i have time, i'll get into the effect of the times' journalism on the tone of our civil culture, the seed of the democracy and its reflection. trying to raise affirmative action, i lead that chapter with a story the former executive editor of the times told of being of philadelphia and mississippi in 1966 watching a group of activists singing we shall overcome. he felt it was inappropriate and didn't join in. that sense of personal detachment is a product of the institutional culture drilled into every reporter during the rosenthal years has not endured. when it's race, the times is front and center singing with the choir.

an orthodoxy of racial engagement and diversity now governs the personnel policies of the newsroom, but the political sensibility of the coverage. i think we see that in stories that involve historical racism, in justices and atrocities of the pages. some are news newsworthy. things concerning the trial of emmet till or the retrial of the murder of course is newsworthy, but others seem more to stoke racial guilt, and they seem to be, you know, printed in pursuit of emotional reparations. there's a certain script that the times will report on which involves white oppression and black racial victimization. we see that in the report of profiling. it's a hobby course where they get a hold of some report usually by a liberal think tank and goes to town three to four

times in the space of a couple weeks and report there's more black kids being stopped and frisked than white kids in certain neighborhoods. we also have victimology in the coverage of the cay -- katrina catastrophe. this was a hoax committed on a reporter who used a self-described victim of the katrina cay tas trough fee to present herself as a victim of the bureaucratic inertia that had her in a flee bag hotel in queens and she had to go to the hospital, her children all living together with her. in fact, she had never been anywhere near katrina when it struck. she said she was from blux sigh. she didn't have custody of the kids she said she had, and she

never went to the hospital, and in fact she was wanted for check fraud. she was arrested shortly after the times piece ran, and shortly after that, the times standard editor issued a memo saying to the reporters we'll have no more single source story. the reporter essentially took her at her word and never checked any of the public records available to check. we have the awful story of the duke rape case which stewart taylor, a journalist at the national review wrote a great book about calling it a fable of evil rich men running amuck abusing poor black women. it was a story too good to be true, too delicious. he said the times should have a billboard in times square and apologize, but they never did, and there was never an editorial note to readers or anything acknowledges just how bad the

times reporting had been, how much it slandered the lacrosse players in question and how much it needed to take intoing the of what it had done. i look at black politicians and their treatment of malcolm x. when he was assassinated, the times said he was a twisted man turning many gifts to evil purposes and decried his ruthless and fanatical belief in violence, but in 2004 in relation to a hair leal exhibition, it referred to him as a civil rights giant. there's al sharpton -- >> [inaudible] >> al sharpton has more lives than a cat when you think of just what kind of racial arson and agitation this man is responsible for to want to browl the riots and crown heights, and

i think one of the worst was his role of the massacre of freddy's market on 125 #th street in harlem where eight people were killed. was that the case? seven or eight people were killed. sharpton got on the radio and said we will not stand by and allow them, meaning white landlords, in fact, the landlords were black, will not allow him to move this brother so a white can move his business to 125th street. one bright commentator, one of the sharpest pencils in the box, wrote one time that the memory hole into which freddy's disappeared fits the pattern of mr. sharpton's political career. after each major outrage, sharpton draws in the press and referring to the times, and assures them he's really reformed. the first new sharpton complete

with new profiles in the new york times magazine and the new yorker. i would mention that after the freddy's massacre, there was a story in the times i remember very vividly with the headline, "sharpton buoyant in the storm." we have jesse jackson's love child. the double standards there are pretty vivid. i think if ralph reed had fathered a child out of wedlock and used his organization's funds to support her, that would probably be bannered on the front page of the paper much instead jackson's similar transgression and actions were buried on page 27 in a single column. obama -- the times in bed with him since the beginning.

they delayed for a year stories about his relationship with the reverend jeremiah wright. abc news had a video of wright and after that a chicago reporter wrote what she should have been writing from the get-go about what wright was all about. they also allowed obama to get away with minimizing his relationship with the former terrorist, and he was said it was somebody he knew from the neighborhood. they had a relationship over ten years in several different venues and foundations. they were closer. i would like to switch now to immigration and just look at just how much imgracious has been seen as a state of plea. there's real amazing article

that said it seems when you look at mass imgages, it's reverted to a policy of mass immigration without ever making a decision to do so. i don't have this in the book, but i did do a paper on it about the 1965 immigration reform agents lifting the racialistic national origin quotas. at the time both the democratic party and the times said it would not swell the roles of immigrant -- wouldn't change the demographic character of the country nor would there be millions of people lining up. in fact, both have happened. whether the demographic change is good or bad makes no difference to me, but what is important is that this was a huge pivot, a pivotal period -- privatal moment in immigration

history, and the times was completely at a loss to understand it. since then, the times followed a very pro-immigration script. this goes particularly in areas like alien criminality. there was one case where the el salvador gang, ms13, sent an assassin to new york to get an agent who was good of breaking up rings on long island. they got the guy before he was able to go after him, but the times never did the story. one of my immigration activist friends. in washington said what it's going to take for them to pay attention. the beheading of a federal judge? another way they treated immigrations somewhat glibly and without the gravity they really should, the issue of sanctuary

cities which came up in the 2008 republican presidential primaries, sanctuary cities being places where immigrants are allowed to live without having to worry about their documents being checked or any kind of ramifications from crimes committed that are not serious felonies. gail coal lips said sanctuary cities were just a right wing buzz word for freaking out red state voters. next time you hear political rapting about a sanctuary city say isn't that where reeves was trying to get to in "the matrix"? the times has been extremely if not absolutely silent on dual citizenship. give me a minute, and i'll wrap up. these are issues we're facing now with 93 different countries offering that dual citizenship leading to dual loyalties. it's been extremely soft on

islamic immigration and doesn't go anywhere near issues of the different customs and values and attitudes that are, i think, profoundly anti-democratic involving the submission of women, female genital mutilation, involving polygamy, and the issue of honor killings which is an issue around the issue, but you wouldn't know it from the times. i'd also get to the idea that the times has been very soft on the ideological nature of islam in terms of the emaums they featured. they feature them as a moderate voice and authorities knew at the time in san diego he gave harbor to two of the terrorists and two of them could have prayed at the mosque in brooklyn. he's been the major jihaddi

propgandist and is on the u.s. hit list. the times invokes demagoguery. when people called into capitol hill against the immigration vote, their columnist called it that they were just robots during what their party leaders told them to do, and then they invoke the nativism that it's just what is part of our history, this nativism. on the war on terror i'll close by saying that soft on islam approach when it comes to imgracious is projected into the war on terror. the war op terror -- the tools used are seen as more dangerous to american political life than the threat that american jihaddism represents. i think this comes from a set of

ideas about the nature of militant islam. it didn't want to admit it. i think the europerps probably -- europeans could probably teach us a lesson on that. there's too much likening of crack down on muslim suspects and those who might give them suffer to the pom raids that took place in world war i and the entournament of the japanese. these are completely different historical occurrences, but the times tends to lump them all together. in summary, i would say -- i'd like to get into some of what e cant do right now in the rebuttal, but i just want to pose a question. one of thomas jefferson's most famous quips was that he'd rather live in a nation without a government than a nation without newspapers, and i wonder if he was reading the times

right now, whether he'd say the same thing. thanks very much. [applause] >> okay? >> yes. well, i'm in a slightly odd position here i think because i don't work for the "new york times" and i'm paid by the newspaper that is probably in terms of world audience and looking to the future with web overtaking print as it will someday, i work for the paper with the greatest english world competitor. yeah, maybe i should denounce the time and read the guardian. i'm not a spokesman for the paper. i have my criticisms of it. we'll get into some of those. i think bill makes fair

criticisms in the book which i read, and, you know, the times has certainly made its share of errors in recent years. i think the, you know, the duke-lacrosse coverage was bad. no question about that. actually, this is an interesting point too. i don't know many people outside the new york times which defended institutionally, but i don't know many liberals who continue to defend that particular coverage. i think that the times as bill mentioned a story the times did during the campaign if you remember a story about a had with a female lobbyist, wink, wink implying the things that you think were being implied. i heard the rumors as i'm sure you heard the rumors with advance of that story being

published with what the times had and didn't have and so on and so forth. there's no question in my mind based what was on the page, they should not have gone with that story. it didn't seem like a very good judgment to put it politely. certainly they've made some mistakes. jason blare episode obviously a black eye. i think there's probably something in general to bill's sense of the paper's natural institutional biases. i want to be careful here about how i phrase this, and i think one the reasons i was asked to do this, and by the way, thank you, fred, for asking me and frank and thank you, it's nice to see you, and thanks to st. francis college. i think one of the reasons that i was asked to do this is i am -- well, i'm certainly a liberal, no question about that, and if you read my stuff, you know i'm a liberal, but i'm a

critic to some extent of liberalism as well over the years. i have been critical to some extent of multiculturism, identity politics on the left. my first book was -- there it is. just show it. it's an old book now. i actually -- i don't really agree with 100% of it anymore. >> i played a role on shaping his ideas. >> i'm sure he'll quote me against me in his rebuttal, and that's find. i have been critical of multiculturism from a liberal perspective, that perspective being in a nutshell that when we emphasize differences to such a great extent, we can forget about the things we have in common, and we can lose a sense of a common society, in which we fight for and argue for a common good, and i become in things

i've written, not just in that book, butceps in the american prospect, i've become kind of associated with that view, and i've been attacked quite harshly by some on the left who disagree with my views, so i think that's one of the reasons that i'm here, but i will say that i do disagree with bill about the imperative of diversity and of large institutions deals with diversity and trying to come to terms with it in this united states, in this new york, in this city. it is, after all, the new york times. it's not the, you know, kansas times. bill harkens back to what he calls the golden age of the "new york times" and there's no question that the rosenthal era was a good one for the paper and

one which the paper has much to be proud of, and there's much to respect, but i'm respectful of golden ages. upon inspection, they were not that golden for everybody. i don't want to sound like a politically correct uncle, but some of these things are just true, folks. some of these things are just true. in the great glory days that bill invokes, the fact is that if you'd walk around the new york times newsroom in those days in 1967 or something, it was 98% men, and it was 98% white. now, all right, that's how it was, but that wasn't appropriate for the world as it changed, as it progressed. it just wasn't appropriate. i don't think anybody could seriously defend that now.

the times had to embrace diversity. it had to embrace the idea that it needed to hire more women, more african-americans, la -- latinos, and so on. it had to do this. now, the young solburger emphasized this above any other value. maybe that was overemphasis or maybe too much of a zealot about it, maybe other values and standards should have got more attention from him. i don't know. on balance, he was certainly right no emphasize this, especially as i said before in this city as multihued as this

city is and as diverse this city is. the times had to make this change. i can tell you, and many of you in this audience will remember the metropolitan section of the times back in the 1960ings and 70s didn't bother to cover the black and latino communities very much at all, and this had to change, and it changed, and the change has come with some downside. all change comes with some downside. nothing in this world is all good or all bad, and there have been some excesses, and there have been mistakes the paper made, but they had to make this change, and on balance it's far better, far better that they make an attempt to cover these communities, not only here in new york, but nationally. i don't believe, you know, you read bill's book, and there's

example after example after example after example, and there's like # 00 examples -- 200 examples in the book of egregious things the paper did and you might finish the book and close it and think what a list of horrible sins. well, then, okay, step back and think for a second. okay, he's talking about 200 stories, something like that over a period of 20 years. twenty years during which the newspaper probably produced 365 editions, 50 by-line stories a day, that's 18,000 stories a year times 20 years,360,000 stories and subtract the business part and other things, but i don't think the idea bill produces is as big as an indictment as he suggests that

it is. the times is reflecting changes and arguments and tensions in society that not only the times is grappling with, but many, many institutions are grappling with and are grappling with, you know, tremendous difficulty. the country's changed. the culture has changed. i think a lot of this change has been for the good. i think most people think that most of this change has been for the good. there are people who think that most of this change has note been for the good. you have a section in the book, bill, where you discuss the times' coverage of gays, and you seem to criticize a story or a series of stories about gay adoption. i don't know. i don't think -- i'm asking this

rhetorically, you don't actually have to answer it. i don't think you're on the side of saying gay people are not equipped to be good parents or have the right to be parents. it seemed you were saying that in the book. well, that's a judgment that -- how should a newspaper, how should an objective news column handle that issue? should it give equal wait to both sides of that argument? i think that's a close call. i don't think it's absolutely clear you should give equal weight to both sides of that argument. was the times to give equal wait to bull connor in 1964? well, i don't know, you know. i'm not sure that that's the role of the newspaper. a newspaper has a civic role to

play. bill quoted dwight mcdonald. it was a good quote. what was it? the principle point of contact with the real world. >> from his generation represented the principle point of contact with the real world. >> he was light in the loafers? >> i knew him. he touched the ground with one toe. >> fred, tread on the ground lightly. >> fair enough. >> i think that the times probably was that in those days, but in those days, the times was occupied a much, much larger space in the journalistic universe, in the civic universe than it occupies today, and this is another point i'd make that's not necessarily direct rebuttal of bill, but is a point that i

think is very important to keep in mind as we have any discussion about the media in the united states today. there's no more oracle in our media culture. that's long gone. it's dispersed the power and influence is spread around. fred said, you know, huffington post is worth $315 million. the daily beast bought "newsweek," a two-year-old website bought "newsweek". there's no more walter cronkite who can say in 1958 he went to vietnam, saw it with his own eyes and decided it's an unwinnable war and public opinion in two weeks went from 65% in support of the war to

about 40% in support of the war because of one man, 25%. i looked at the numbers, and it's very stark. it's also around the time of the ted offense, but i think we can credit cronkite more than not. there's no more media culture like that so in a sense, the times is -- i wouldn't say one among many equals because i think it's still obviously the leading newspaper in the united states, but it has to share a lot more -- it has to share the atmosphere, the oxygen with a lot more outlets than it ever used to, and that oxygen is much more contested now, and the whole media landscape is much more embedded now. there was no such thing as a media critic in abe's age, or

most of his age editing the paper. critics popped up in the late 1970s and 80s. the times is attacked from the left and the right, nailed by everybody, all of its mistakes are exposed immediately. i think this is another important change. i don't assume that the times did not make mistakes in the 1950s and 60s. i assume rather that they were not exposed by endless numbers of bloggers and media critics, another point about the so-called golden age. speaking of criticisms of the times frts left; i can promise you that one could write a book, and people have written books like bill's that take the times to task with the liberal side with just as much fervor crieghting as many examples.

there's samples in the book of how al reigns, and he quotes me accurately. the editorial page in the clinton years is an important example. this was not the times being a partisan democratic paper by any stretch of the imagination, folks. liberals were furious at the times. al was on some perm jihad against bigot and ran -- i did a count once, but i did a piece in the nation about this in 2000 -- i think it was late 1999. you can look it up if you want to, but far, far, far more editorials criticizing bill clinton than criticizing ken starr and his tactics. the paper broke the white water

story -- >> [inaudible] >> i'll finish in a pho minutes. it kept on clinton pretty hard throughout his time in office. the paper more recently, it broke the elliot spitzer story, another democrat they didn't go soft op. there's more examples than that. on the subject of the war, it's much more pugent criticism and they publish far more stories basically taking the administration's line through background quotes like the famous judy miller stories about the jews, but there's many, many more, than had ran critical of the administration's arguments

for war against iraq. bill cites this too, to his credit, a piece by michael in the new york review of books, so there's many, many criticisms to be made from the left of the new york noshing. what's it add up to in bill would say if we're attacked like this from both sides, maybe that tells us that we're, you know, if we're messing with both sides, maybe we're doing something right. i'll conclude by saying that i still think on balance whatever its errors, and it's excellent, excellent newspaper. has anybody in the room quit reading the times on principle? okay. all right. okay. we've got -- let the record show out of 80 people here there's about eight hands. all right, well, that's something, but by and large, i

don't think anybody quit reading the times after jason blair, i think few people quit reading the times after very many of these things. it's still a great paper. if you're trying to keep up with what's going on in cairo and not reading the times, you're missing something. their coverage is great. yes, it is excellent. it is very good for democracy. >> thanks, mike. [applause] >> 10-15 minutes now, you know, exchange rebuttal and sir rebuttal. >> yeah, i'd like to ask michael one question, and it involves the issue of double standards at the times. michael wops famously wrote an american prospect blog piece headline of which kellher must

go and also suggested arthur sulzburger, j.r., who says one should earn their nick name, he took his from his father, punch. you got both your books reviewed. you were the subject of a very glowing profile in 2006 about young liberals sort of fighting back. meanwhile, i've been blocked out twice in both of my books. the first time, the editor of the book review was add led enough to go on the record of the san fransisco chronicle saying the reason we're not reviewing the book because i'm not sure it's proper to review a book about a newspaper like this that so critical of a newspaper like this.

the second time i was promised a review, and then the editor invoked some kind of policy squabble he had with my publisher. i sense it's just to avoid the headaches with his boss. i think we'd have to say that in terms of ideological double standards and i go in this with the book review and media that the times fawns on left liberal journalists and media and authors and it either ignores or insults those coming from the right. i don't think i'm necessarily coming from the right, but the point of view of good journalism. michael said there's maybe 200 stories i pick out. this was a charge i went through last time with coloring the news, that i was cherry picking. one of the reasons why i decided to pile up example upon example

was that i wanted to show that they were representative. i did not do a quantitative study that would determine the recommendation, but i think people got the drift that when you pile these up more and more that this is the norm rather than the exception. as to this point that the times was at one point during its golden age all male and all white, it's probably true. i agree. there's always problems in nostalgiaizing. i wish i knew who said it, but nostalgia is the rust of memory. was it shakespeare? >> yes. >> thank you, google. [laughter] that being said, i think michael misses my point when i'm critical of diversity.

i'm not as critical of diversity as a personnel policy as long as it's within the law. what i'm critical about diversity, two things, and fred used this phrase once, "mandated diversity" where the state comes in and says you have to have a certain quota, a certain number. i'm more concerned with diversity as an ideological policy where it bleeds out into the news coverage where it translates into a kind of solicit towards minorities translating into a kind of demographic triumph and endorses the politics, the proportionallism set aside quotas, university transmissions and translates into vilifying those trying to roll back

affirmative action programs like conner lee in california, prop 200? 209. copper lee was the subject of an extremely insulting and demeaning magazine story that just of which he wasn't black enough, and he was a self-hating black, and that's why he was leading the effort to roll back affirmative action in california. horrible, horrible story. the effort to raise standards in 1997 was interpreted by bob herbert, columnist at the times, as ethnic cleansing because it was felt minorities would not be able to qualify if open omissions was terminated, and standards were put in place that would make them have to attend

either remedial classes or community colleges first, so that's my truck with diversity. the other truck i have with diversity and as a progressive, michael should be concerned about this is the idea of community is very much a progressive value. it's also a conservative value as well. it cuts both ways. the community value in america doesn't have a red state blue state divide. it has pat bucanan and other successors on the other. it's interesting how robert putnam, the famous sociologist, had been working on a number of years of assessing the impact of diversity on civic engagement

and participation. he did not like the results he got. essentially he said that it places with the most diversity in america were those of the lowest levels of social trust, lowest levels of social engagement. people hunkered down, became couch potatoes and did not go to the local cake sale or join the rotary or knights of columbus, whatever have you. people tend to hunker down to escape the friction that develops in excessively diverse places, yet the times promotes diversity as an aggressive creed, and this is not just diversity as a personnel policy, but diversity as a demographic reality. charles, one of the columnist who says to the tray partyers, you want the country back, but

you won't get it. welcome to america, the remix. it's that demographic triumph of diversity and the cult of ethnicity that is not only bad for our democratic life, but it's bad for progressivism itself, and i could enumerate that, and i hope to write about this more. many progressives dead are actually regressive progressives, and when it comes to -- particularly when it comes to customs and practices dealing with islam. i'd like to say another thing about the gay adoption because i think it borders a little bit on a canard. i'm all for gay marriage. i grew up across the street from a gay couple. george and jim. at that time they had a woman living with them who turned out to be a bag lady they brought up

in suburban 1960s for cover. our teachers in the town i grew up in were gay. they were tired, ran up their rainbow jolly roominger flag, and nobody seemed to care. gay adoption, gay parenting, i don't think the research is affirmative enough yet. that's not to say i think kids should spend time in foster care or go without parenting, but the point -- michael should read it closer, my point is that the research is not as complete as it needs to be, and the stories that have been written about gay parenting and gay adoption are just doggeral, two stories that were impossible to get there and reflected the confusion that the issue generates itself.

.. so, you know, you may be lucky. it has for the profile, it wasn't really a profile -- well, yeah. okay. it was a sidebar. but i will tell you -- it had my

picture in it, that's true. it did have my picture and i have less gray hair. i just saw that picture recently. but look, i rode an essay in the american prospect. i was talking in my first remarks about the concept of the common good i rode this essay in the american prospect. i don't know why they decided to do this. i guess, you know, you have a hypothesis. you want to know for a fact you may be right but the road a piece that talked about what influence my essay was having around washington and that was objectively true. what i wrote was being talked about a lot so a piece about able sidebar. about my record with books isn't very good. what went on to say?

just to talk a little bit about the problem of diversity, i see the distinction between newsroom diversity as a policy and diversity as an ideological what ever you said. i do see that distinction and i guess sometimes to the times hot laps into a different direction on that point. but, we are in a period in this country seaside history where we are having to deeply, deeply contested battles on every front, not just in the pages of "the new york times," but everywhere about diversity as a value, and it does to some

extent -- it doesn't leave much room for nuance. i am one who has tried to deal with new ones on this question over the last 15 years hasn't always worked out, you know, the way that i would have liked it to work out. we are in a historical period where we are fighting this question today and nail every day and i do think that some of the reaction to the obama presidency has to do with these kind of questions. i'm not going to throw dollars of acquisitions of the tea party people about race. i'm not going to sit here and do that. but i do think that there is no question that there are in our media there are representations of the two americas, and they are jury in tensely at odds with each other. this is not all americans, by the week. it's like 30% of americans on

this side and 30% on this side and the other 40% are somewhere in the middle, and sort of agreed with both sides here and there and i think this 40 per cent tends to agree more with the progressive side in the conservative side otherwise "the new york times" would be losing circulation like this and there would have been a value judgment made by the society at large since "the new york times" is failing the country. i don't think that has been made by the citizens of this country i don't think it has been made by the media consumers of this country. "the new york times" stock is in a difficult position in this building and they're having whatever difficulties they had but they are still selling a million whatever copies a day and a lot more copies than say the "the washington times," which is maybe the right-wing equivalent if "the new york times," everything that bill says it is then its opposite number is this paper in the "the washington times," which some of

you may not even know exist but it was started by the reverend moon 30 years ago, and it exists because he is willing to lose what ever he loses, $30 million it think, an astonishing amount of money over the years. they've never gotten their circulation that i'm aware of above 100,000 kalona million. so, conservatives like to let the free market test decide things, the free market is deciding. "the new york times" is a success, the "the washington times" is not. it's underwritten by an extremely wealthy man. >> that's my conclusion. >> there are microphones. if you want to talk to move into the ogle and just tell us who you are, what organization you are connected to and ask a brief

question. stand up. >> i'm michael myers, the executive director of the coalition. i want to ask michael during the question of diversity i don't think you got it, i don't think you got the point. the point is that you can hire minorities and people for the standards of ethical standards so that the complaint about jason player wasn't that he was high because he was black and the editors and people loved what the standards down and then check, didn't treat him as they would treat anybody else who was a journalist because she was black. and second, with respect to the newsroom as bill was talking about in terms of coverage, if

you don't cover people you know a lot of the reporters particularly the black reporters -- the black reporters have sent hired with points of view about race and community and they cover blacks cover blacks and civil rights and they omit and exclude from the paper people who don't agree with them. >> let's gather a few questions and then turned the questions over to yes, you. >> michael white, my question is a lot cognitive dissidence. in the times for whatever it is, wherever it is, ernest and philosophically consistent or is it making the calculated decisions about its financial survival and benefit? and the example i will give you on this is i've had a lot of

good intention to the real-estate development and associated politics. and if i go back in time and look at the coverage of eminent domain of these issues or for instance the columbus circle development and i compare it to their coverage of what i think is a very big story which has to do with the real-estate partner bruce ratner and it takes place after they engaged in buying a building with eminent domain for their new headquarters i don't see consistency. >> can i take that question? okay. you want to answer both of these now? you are getting into some of the contradictions some would say hypocrisy between the values and the times preaches on its editorial page and its behavior as a corporate entity with a bottom line and a wall street

profile. aside from that use of eminent domain to the space for its new headquarters such as the executive compensation the times has railed and real about that and paper and inevitably on its editorial page and inevitably reports surfaced in a news report about it. however, even though corporate governance is one of arthur sulzberger jr.'s hobbyhorses, the times executives are way overcompensated. as a matter of fact there have been movements on the board to suggest they give their bonuses back and they have so that's one thing. and opening up this question to this larger issue of the times finances, michael, you are wrong of the times does not -- is not

read by a million people a day any moerenhout into the circulation this quarter bring it down below million for the first time since the mid-80's. in terms of the market test whether the times his successful or not i do not think that the "the washington times" is the correct doppelganger or comparison. i think the correct comparison as "the wall street journal," which outstripped sales and circulations of the times on a national basis and by the way i would surprise michael goodwin of "the new york post" told me recently that the times is on the red or bought by 200,000 people in new york which really staggered me. i think that they have actually

since the golden age, towards the end of that golden age they were faced with huge financial difficulties, white flight and municipal problems of the city were causing in conjunction with the new literacy where you had college graduates to just didn't read the times anymore. i haven't spent my life in academia. but, they were market testing, running focus groups. i believe a lot of their -- the two sections, thursday and tuesday style section. the expanding the consumer news, news. a lot of their day coverages driven by the demographics of marketing. so, yes, i think that financial

concerns deutsch although they wouldn't like to admit that they have to our financial concerns to determine how they write about. >> point to get about "the wall street journal" the reason i mention the ball straight times is that "the new york times" is what you say shot through its news columns with subject to the end bias i don't think that is "the wall street journal" yet. it's just it's editorial-page but that is the "the washington times" so in that sense it is doubled down to "the new york times" that you described in your book. that's what i meant. michael myers. i take your point. i'm only talking about the second point and ignoring the first point. maybe black reporters have a point of view about a black neighborhood. maybe that's true. white reporters do, too.

this gets to one of the core questions about the whole history of diversity and multiculturalism in the country and its key to the whole d date. was the full diversity point of view in america at american institutions was it some default objective point of view that was sick with a capital c and completely deracinated of any kind of bias at all or was it just a point of view of the man who happened to run that thing back then, and it had its own biases and subject devotees. this is a very important question very hotly debated. i will stop there.

>> when i was doing my graduate work on extensively used the new york times. my dissertation was on the city and state relations and "the new york times" coverage over a period of 50 or 60 years was terrific on the subject. now i want to address you about today, and i'm talking from the standpoint of my piece of diversity. i'm italian, italian american, and i am a roman catholic, and i take both of those very seriously. i am wondering as a reader of "the new york times", whether you think i can trust the integrity and the honesty of the newspaper when it covers subjects such as those relating

to my ethnicity and religion reporting on those in a fair and accurate and trustworthy way. >> why would you think if i said yes? >> aye chollet half italian but it's true why not catholic i am part i italian. i don't read every word of their coverage of those issues. i assume to some extent you're talking about problems with the catholic church and the child abuse things. i can't speak, i won't speak to the particular issues. it's not flashy enough in my mind but bill can do that i'm

sure. i would make the point those things apparently did happen. there are certain realities in the world of "the new york times" didn't create. we did go into iraq on the basis we were going to find weapons of mass destruction that didn't exist. "the new york times" didn't create. the catholic church is having these problems. "the new york times" did not create that reality. >> i grew up with a lot of italians and am dating one. [laughter] so i have to pass on the italian thing. i do think though that in terms of the driver difference in calculus in the newsroom the times hasn't followed through. it doesn't have its representative frattali and reporters in the same way that it's had its representative

african-american who are latino. it's not part of the mix. i think they want the white ethnics into one big mass. the catholic thing i will say i won't go as far as bill donohue and say that bill donohue, who is the president or chairman, executive director of the catholic league who thinks the time is a deeply bigoted newspaper. i won't go as far as the archbishop in saying that but i will say that the times often seems distant from the realities of catholicism. right after my published covering the news, the second wave of the george sex scandal broke, and i went on some radio and tv a lot being asked questions about this and having gone to catholic schools, including a very good catholic

high school then archbishop in the white plains now having some of whom were brought up on charges or however you want to put it, knowing some of my schoolmates who had bad experiences, some of whom actually sued that the narrative carried in the times was different from my own personal experience. donahey puts it rather blunt when he says the catholic church doesn't have it pedophilia problem that has a homosexual problem. first of all i think the use of the term pedophilia to describe that scandal was inaccurate because most of the victims up to 90% were opposed to this and what qualifies as the romans

call that. >> [inaudible] excuse me? thank you. you are always good for the zingers. [laughter] so the use of the term pedophilia, and i had an argument with bill o'reilly about this and of course didn't have much patience for the nuance but it's important because essentially it made these priests who were abusing their authority and power and influence over these kids to be baby molesters as opposed to people who were abusing their power and influence over these kids who were postpubescent, 14, 15, and in one case there was a kid in my high school who ended up suing who claimed he was -- his molestation started when he

was 17 and continued until he was a junior at holy cross, and i remembered the first day of going to my high school where in an assembly they said look, you're 14, and great freshman year, most of your 14, others will be 14 soon, you are men who now responsible for the choices and decisions you make. now that is a generational perspective that's changed much, and maybe it was a smokescreen, but what i'm saying is that i think that the way the times reported that scandal was completely off. >> we want to get a couple more questions and to respect this gentleman here. >> kind of another facet to the diversity question. i think most of us would agree that the times is very much a paper of a particular social

class. i know you might call it the golden age. when i was reading the paper in the 1970's and i was seen the ads for boarding schools and summer camps, i knew that wasn't quite where i was at in reality. and i think the question i have is a question, statement, i would like your response. i feel like the times approached diversity is reflective of the social class. the fact that the have made asia less out of it is reflective of the social background when you see the newsroom was 98% white i think there's a reason why that was. most of us in this room, you know, as you say it is the new york times. most of us in new york live diversity and we work with people and we are related to people of a variety of ethnic and racial backgrounds.

but in the times environment, that is still a bit exotic and does that affect their approach? >> one more question and then we will go to the gentleman here. >> [inaudible] >> put the microphone up to your mouth. the question i asked is how can you talk for more of an an hour and not mention the run-up to the iraq invasion with the garbage put out. she had editors. >> excuse me. that's come up repeatedly. you were not paying attention. islamic if i could just add something. the reporting did not bring itself to drive us into iraq. >> israel and the palestinians

to respond that is out of the purview of my book a mostly focus on domestic issues. yes? >> brinza mika to this gentleman here, please. former publisher of publishers weekly. it seems to me that you could list 200 stories that you did like in the times as well as the 200 stories you didn't like. and that on balance you would have a newspaper that makes a mistake and a newspaper that does well. >> you can do that and come back a few years from now, spend as much time as i did and let's see >> i forget the time all my life. >> and the -- >> let me say that having been the publisher of the article i

take a real interest or i become a student of anything i read which also includes "the wall street journal." "the wall street journal" since murdoch has taken over, while the certainly still remains there is considerable leakage in what they are covering and what they are now doing and what they used to do and their golden age has gone well. but i don't see as against the grand notion that it is not good for the democracy. you have listed what seems to me having to address that big grand initio about whether the times is good for dhaka see or not. >> the gentleman here who didn't like the catholic church as if --

>> we want to get a couple more questions than. >> i think it is more the nitpicking. >> let me get a couple more questions and then answer others. anybody else want to ask a question? >> henry is required to ask a question. >> you didn't ask the question which i think is important and constitutes and that question is it good for the jews? [laughter] but we've spent since we have to nonissues i'm sure they will have interesting answers but we are coming to the end of the evening. so i will give the few minutes

to wrap up to give their thoughts and then we will let people go home and get dinner. >> i think we are handing the microphone to other people. >> i have two quick questions and -- >> and you are? >> i wish we had been entitled to two things. one about philosophy. you asked what the people gave up their times subscriptions. i did as a result of what i thought was disgraceful reporting and commentary regarding the tea party and the congress woman being shot in arizona. the journalism was its worst and i am wondering that takes it over to the rest and reading the editorial pages worth it

anymore. second regarding accuracy i have a friend serving in iraq and years ago "the new york times" when the mess was happening reported that there had been an attack which involved in bye e-mails to with him and he said it never happened. they didn't want to leave the safety of baghdad today got the report and ran with it. i wish i could believe what they say is going on in cairo. but between the editorial page going off the ball and the fact i couldn't trust the mother stories i wondered if the times is any more worthy of being read in any other paper. [applause] petraeus to make a quick question for michael. there seems to be a given. >> who are you, sir? >> my name is gavin.

there seems to be given that all races need equal distribution at any new source in order to give a solid picture of what the news is and no one has ever said why. that seems to be an accepted fact and i don't understand why that is. it seems to me that "the new york times" was white male in the 70's and it was more accurate than it is today since we came up with this agenda where everyone has to be equally represented but to me, reporting sounds like a very esoteric pursuit. i want to look at an event coming use the english language to document it, record it properly, who, what, when, where, why, why does everyone have to do this equally. it seems like insisting -- the performers from the midwest and some single moms.

>> why don't you take five minutes to answer this question and the two prior questions. >> to the issue of nitpicking i can say that if you come back if you think you could find something for the same rigorous process of several years, more power to you. i don't think it will. as to the question of whether someone's estimate or racial identity makes them a better reporter on any given subject i would say there is a question in uncertain stories of access whether it is the identity and the access translates into better reporting is a different story i spent two years in sri lanka reporting on the civil war i spoke when a local languages

but i did just as well as anybody would have gone there who happened to be of south asian background. i don't think you need to be of a certain ethnicity or race or color, and that i object to. i don't mind giving people a break. i don't mind giving the opportunity anyone deserves but i don't think that we should be the reserves for certain races and my experience is it doesn't work. it creates resentment in the newsroom and bad journalism. >> what do you have to say about the question of tucson? >> i have a lot to say about that. i think that it was deeply unfortunate that the times lead

the pack in assuming that it was political in nature. paul krugman's blog, january 8, was it? january 9th he blog to something to the effect of we don't have proof yet, this was political the odds were that it was and there were other journalists who took their cues from that. i'm concerned about the tone of the civic and civil discourse in this country, and i think that the tea party probably has more violent rhetoric, but the liberal and progressive side has its own problem with this and i can quote you right now frank rich who calls americans who

wouldn't take on the torture and gitmo good germans to call john ashcroft the best of the mall. paul krugman who committed religious believers islamic extremists, maureen dowd who equate to the male domination of the catholic church to the taliban and the bush administration that we really are in a theocracy and the arizona shooter and the anti-immigration antiillegal immigration law was meant by linda greenhouse with an image that came out of nazi germany. so i think that the times and the left as a lot to answer for

and may be because the internet people get more slashing and attention to it allows you to make a precise analogy about something the government of nazi germany did it again to get precise analogy and make it stick and then lowercase it's fair game hunt. r. dee very critical piece of him. you know, i would return to the question was -- there you are. i don't think anybody says that there has to be equal members

and says 42% of the population of the news room has to be xx1 on balance it is better to make an effort to have this kind of a newsroom diversity and to represent different ideas of view him when i've been on the and of running a magazine trying to achieve that young lady can you keep part in the first row. to degette to the question of

what we are here to answer, democracy and democracy is to be instituted that we to bend on new two and foremost it to do that nurturing the substance his providing information they want as unbiased way as possible, but inevitably some value judgments about what kind of society they have and want to have have to be made. now any newspaper, "the new york times," the guardian, any so-called straight news outfit, one of the networks has to be very careful about the balancing

of those to things win it's legitimate to balance those two things and we want the news organizations to be completely and morally neutral on the questions and of the time we've been at mcgill of mistakes along those lines and on balance i think that it's trying to do a fair job. >> thank you. bill's book is outside for anyone who would like to purchase it. i would be glad to have the book out there but they are out of -- the magazine is democracy and he has a website. if you go to the guardians of u.k. and go to the comment section the little navigation

across the top go to the comment and looker of that page you will find my blog. i have a lot of conservative comments to give it to me so you can join.

>> now we look at problems facing the news business with a panel of journalists and victor, co-editor of the last reporter please journal the lights and the collapse of journalism and what can be done to fix it the moderator is, with of the new american foundation. this is a little less than an hour and a i'd like to welcome you to the new america foundation to what will be a fascinating discussion about the current state of journalism from today's media landscape.

our work here it policy as part of the team has within the new america's open technology initiative. it's about the changing media technological landscape affects the citizens participation in the democracy. the backdrop for the work that report on the democracy in the digital age and a report that concluded that individuals need three things to participate in a space society. development and credible information, the education needed to engage with that information and to participate in the public life of the community. how this will happen in the 21st century is part of a vigorous debate and the fcc, notably it released a report on june 9th to focus on the changing media landscape in the broadband age and it was wrong in the making and informed in 68 pages have received a lot of media attention and it makes the team

and the event today very timely. for the event to be focused specifically on a book that brings together many of the most significant contributions to the debate about journalism in the future it comes from many perspectives. the book today has the same title not particularly optimistic. will the last reporter turn out the lights. as the coveted terse note in the first paragraph of the introduction, american journalism is an existential crisis and if that doesn't make you think this is serious it goes on to say it is impossible to conceive the governments and the rule of law, not to mention individual freedoms, social justice, and effective and enlighten the solutions to the daunting problems. without a credible system of journalism in short ensure about

everything rides on how the crisis and journalism plays out to meet these are the questions that form the backdrop for the book and the event today. the contributions of the book contain a wide range of perspectives and journalists, scholars and activists. to introduce the book it invited victor who is a professor at new york university on the book and what it covers. we will move to the round table discussion and will be joined by four additional authors. nikki of sure professor of george washington university for several days but informs me its she's yet to start. she's almost a professor. thomas frank a former wall street journal journalist of what's the matter with kansas and the economist of harper's magazine.

jessica clark as well as a dissenter of the social media at the american university and finally, credit geren, former editor and president ceo of the free press. also to see a familiar face in the audience especially the professor the dean of the annenberg school and also the chapter author. before i start there's a little housekeeping and i mentioned before that even is light streamed and on the web as well as record on c-span. everything is on the back wall before ever or as long as c-span, google and wikileaks can index come for those on twitter and if you are watching remotely we only have about twice the audience in the room watching remotely, please use that even and we will pick up your questions in the q&a session at the end. if you do have a question in the final session of the event please wait for a microphone. we need to respect the on-line

audience to make sure that they can hear us, too. without a further contraction i would like to provide mr. pickard as a competitor. victor shouldn't it be as optimistic as the title suggests, please. [applause] >> thanks, that is a great question and i'm afraid that might talk will be a little bit in keeping with the pessimism of the title and we will then rely on the panelists to bring it back up. it means a lot to me to be able to talk that the new america foundation. i haven't been here since the spring of 2009 when i was working here full-time as a research fellow and when i reflect back on that period i remember there was something in the air at the time as we were moving into these new offices it wasn't just a fresh carpet smell but there was a sense of optimism about the media policy

reforms that were possible before us and what was also interesting is that at this time there's a lot of talk about future of journalism as a problem for public policy. and if you recall in the spring of 2009, journalistic institutions seem to be imploding. we had major papers like the seattle intelligence or the iraqi mountain news going under jobs and revenue were in the precipitous decline. but to use an old cliche we also sold at certain circles here at the new america and within d.c. solve this crisis as an opportunity to explore structural alternatives to the commercial media model for establishing a public service model for journalism and that was one of the zero original motives for this book that we coedited. a lot has changed in the last two years but unfortunately the journalism crisis is still here.

the hemorrhaging has slowed down but the long-term view of the journalistic institutions remain bleak and the conversation should never just be about newspapers of course. it's about the future of journalism but it's still newspapers where most of our original reporting comes from and the newspaper industry that is under their greatest, undergoing the greatest decline. according to the p research center newspaper newsrooms are 40% smaller than they were in 2000 and there is little evidence that the advertising revenue that one supported these jobs would ever return but instead would continue to gradually fade away. so what this suggests is that the advertising supported journalism, the model that has functioned for the past 125 years or so has come apart. so what comes next, that is a core question in our book and bobby chesney and i and others had hoped for a transition to

some kind of public subsidy model but in a tragic irony just as we see convincing evidence for the failure of the commercial media all around us, we as a society are barely maintaining even the current levels of funding for the public what is worse is many of the highly touted alternatives have not panned out. specifically payables or on-line subscription models where the reader thank you contant but some have likened to a hail mary pass for the newspaper industry hafed it way to becoming work for the certain markets but it doesn't seem to be a systemic fix. i recently watched the new documentary page-one if anyone has had a chance to see that yet. a few of you. i felt that it was generally very well done. but i was struck by how much the seem to be pinning their salvations on the success of the tables and this in despite the fact that the recent reports are showing that the revenue that is being generated by the table was not coming close to offsetting

other losses. other digital start-ups are emerging but it is questionable as to how much the news they are producing given the number of journalists they employ. to just get flexible, i exchanged e-mails recently but george marshall, the founder of the talking points memo i'm sure that you are familiar i'm a big fan and an exemplar for the internet can produce in terms of use production and i asked john khamenei journalists they were employing. i always heard it was around ten he told me that my information was dated and they are now employing 14 and they expand to 17 very soon, 17 journalists that sounds promising but if you juxtaposed with the thousands of journalists jobs lost in just the last few years to a more sobering assessment i don't want to the pessimistic there are reasons for the experiments

continued that a consensus seems there. this crisis is as much about how we think about journalism as the journalism crisis itself and if you think of journalism primarily as a commodity it dictates his existence but it's first and foremost as a public service or good and it must not be sustained regardless of the market support and these different approaches. overall there has been compelling pluralism to these debates about the future of journalism. that's why bob chesney and i put together this book with 32 essays on the future journalism which i will briefly discuss in my remaining time we have three basic aims for the last reporter to bring in the focus of the structural nature of the crisis to organize the debate according

to many of the major positions on the future of journalism and the first proposals. it there's these three objectives we reprinted classic pieces from 2008 and 2009 to give a sense of the run-up to the early stages of the crisis. we try to capture the more innovative policy proposals for supporting journalism and this is something i hope we can get into more in the discussion. and we also have pieces of the implications on the island media landscape like bruce and the aver mentioned to take seriously this idea that people are increasingly getting their political information from a fake news like the daily show and that this raises troubling questions about accountability. there's a number of contributors to the book that what kinds of content are rushing into the void left by the parting a traditional journalists. we try to fairly represent the diverse views many of which we did not agree with we have simon

and ticketing for the payables and suggesting that the networks in the new media like the wikileaks will organically produce an alternative is given time and that belched the editor and chief of the libertarian reason magazine suggests the journalism crisis is written by its losers in and people like us are being overly alarmist. we deliberately sought views that didn't necessarily correspond with their own. like many books we saw this as a vehicle to intervene in the policy debates and make clear we support a public subsidy for the stand experimental and the print media policies are not inevitable nor are the natural or necessarily ideal. the book does this in two ways, one is by the internationalizing the problem of ensuring with other democracies are doing in response to their journalism crises. while bentsen and creditor in who you will hear from leader

both to great jobs of showing this how the u.s. is unique among the democracies' for how little on the public media system will also debunks many of the myths associated with the government supported press like the idea that it leads to less journalistic independence or a totalitarian society the research also shows the exact opposite happening and internationalizing the problem the debate places the crisis in the historical context and the culmination of the wonder and the historical process these we can see the internet didn't simply break the news a few years ago it's been a slow decline for decades and argue that there were structural vulnerabilities built into the commercial systems original design. the historian richard john has uncovered a traditional of large

subsidies for newspaper distribution and including deutsch after the war in our book and even less known are the roads not taken when the government merely intervene to permanently create a less market the dependent media system. my chapter in the book focuses on one of these critical junctures in the 40's which saw the briefed ascendance of what might be referred to as a social space approach to the media and the similarities facing today progressive policy makers sought to lessen profit pressures and key parts of the media system and the call for experiments in the nonprofit print media and more of a public interest model for broadcast media for the broadcasters didn't adhere to the strict public-interest mandates that would trigger a public discussion and their broadcast license, that is of

course inconceivable today and michael copps spoke last week on these issues and has often tried to insert some of these ideas back into the policy process. a watered-down or suppressed by the pressures and in some cases the result of the indus ??? and the result of the liberal policy makers made no risk by their own conclusions and fearful of it sounded too radical and there's a number of parallels we can draw between the report on the future media at least with regards to its policy prescriptions not being in sync with its underlying critique. so these outcomes especially in the 40's also arguably from today as well reflect immediate industry consensus, not necessarily the broader public. these are not inevitable outcomes and the affirmative all for the government will regulation was possible then and

remains so today. so i think that the conclusions of bob and i from a lot of this research can be condensed into five points. i don't want to pretend all of the contributors would agree with these five points but they go as follows. first journalism produces a public good that is essential to the democracies. second, the advertising model that has subsidized journalism for the past on hundred 25 years is no longer viable. third, neither a new commercial, nor nonprofit models are replacing the journalism being lost in the traditional media. fourth, given what could be seen as a market failure policy interventions are needed to establish the public-service journalism. finally, international models as well as u.s. history suggests a legitimate government will rule for supporting the press. so that is an overview of the book and i hope it wasn't too pessimistic. if you are looking for some white beach reading material it

makes a good gift for yourself, from your family member and i know i'm eager to turn it back to tom and the panelists. thank you. [applause] >> thank you. >> i would like to invite the panelists to come to the stage to take place is. [applause] this because many chapters and we only have a certain size, so the authors present to represent their views and victor to represent the other 26. if you don't mind the author of

the report to talk to hampsterization journalism you mentioned -- can you describe you probably have some rich description of one particular that you're familiar with on how that is working out in your view the british national anthem would ever does, dark satanic mills but what are wonderful and bright and a fanatic with activity and the mills in question are what ever referred to as content mills. there's a couple of different companies in fact there's probably dozens of them by now that have figured out a way to produce journalism that's

really, really inexpensive. and the way that you do that is why hiring people via the internet you have hundreds of topics that you are looking for stories on come and what's -- and determine what ever, 300 words or something like that, and what makes it really a wonderful is that they pay these writers very, very little. i've got the amount somewhere in my car purrs story it was 15 cents? no, it would be really generous. that would be darkened satanic. they get $15 per story, and the copyeditors -- this is a company called demand media. that is on average people got $15 per store, and this is 300 words long and the copyeditors get $2.50 for each story that day correct. so the idea is that you have to do a whole bunch of these and a

day or a week to make a living at this, but people insist it can be done. you can earn a living this way. you just have to crank out lots and lots of stories. what really intrigued me about the content mills is the way that they choose what stories to assign to people. the dewitt with a computer program that looks at what people are searching for on google and then as nine stories on that basis. the combined with another factor which is what with an advertiser paid to associate themselves with a given topic? some things are going to turn out to be more desirable than other things and so i guess i assume some topics, the advertiser wouldn't want anything to do with it at all and so those things just don't get written about. that's the future for you, god damnit. that's what makes it, you know, so wonderful, and these companies, you know, we don't -- i don't think any of them are

publicly traded debt. am i right about that? one of them was sold to another company. so they have some value. presumably it is a model that can work to read the thing is does it work for the public? who does it work for? and i was intrigued by the cover when i was writing this story columbia journalism review was working along similar lines and had a great image on the cover of a hamster in one of those endless wheels, you know, hamsters love to run on those and that is the future of journalism, they said. it's all of us on a hamster wheel and so i thought about that image and that really struck me. like who benefits from these -- who wins - journalism is practiced along the model content and the answer is the guy that owns the hamster form, write? that is the only winner. i have another idea, to act. >> before we get too optimistic

-- [laughter] >> that was 300 words. [laughter] , nikki, you are coming at this from a different perspective, and the content in journalism and george after explores the way that the defense received. how about the perspective, the more expansive vision. ..5?q?2?l?j?

but this has existed for a really long time. if you think of it ebay so a?eas been taken by a random person. if you think of great moments in history that it has been caught on the snap of a photo and handed to a newspaper. it has been letters to the editor. so citizen journalists have been very active and what they've given today's papers, advice columns, et cetera. citizens journalism as bound around a long time. the real question becomes there has been anticline in traditional and news media. so what can we do to get some new news out there? and one thing people are looking towards is people like you and people like your neighbors to get some new content out.

but the problem i have with this is a lot of the time, the kind of content that people want citizens like you to be producing is very much like the kind of content that you see in your newspapers and on tv. and i think a lot of us have problems with the kind of news content that we see in newspapers and tv. so if i could think about citizen journalism as a little more expensive than think about some of the things journalists and could be, but isn't right now. >> banks, nikki. i'll turn to just go with a question about her chapter. the analysis of the context of where we are, about how journalists met work in a network environment. perhaps you can talk to us a little bit about that background we have seen the demand media

future mickey heads off. partial gaps over there. tell us more about the context as you see it because i think that's very useful. >> so, the chapter from the book is an excerpt, beyond the atco chamber, reshaping politics available at your local independent bookstore. and we wrote it about the new cycle from 04 to 08 at how many ways flowing into fiorini around media to try and really jumpstart innovation in new ways of operating and to find some citizen journalism and interact to anteater journalism products and use them as part of the larger strategic campaign. so part of what we look at and what we encourage journalists to do in the book has become truisms at this point. part of what we look at has been

debunked at this point, which is kind of the horrible pleasure of writing about the current events. so, it's a complicated debate that's happening around what is the contact between journalists and their users and how should these users be position. as citizens? as cheap labor? as ambassadors, as activists? and it depends on what you're trying to do with journalism, which is a point often missed. it's kind of a monolithic mechanism. we would look at the ways in which not just individuals and journalists are interact in, but how networks are being activated, networks of activists, networks of activations and other institutions in our favorite forms of journalism are firming as a result. does that answer your question?

>> no come a day spirit i'll turn to the air and then to create. jessica has brought up not journalism as an audience, but planar range of roles. i am just sort of intrigued. that seems to an immediate historian. in my view, we are in a different age, where we can engage with an audience in new ways. i just wondered if you can shed any light on the other chap -- chapters or the role of the audience can play, whether there is some limits to that. and there always was historically. >> sure, absolutely. there's always been potential for the audience to be more of a media producer than to just a media consumer. a lot of times people assume

this is something invented with the internet, but there is a very long tradition of that. and to bring it back to the area that i have done research on, and especially the 1940s, at that point it was generally understood, i think, that there wasn't this dichotomy of people creating their own media and the media policies from up above. at least media reform is thought that these areas were very much laying and to focus on media policy reform was also enabling a new ways the audience could create new media. there was via print media reform in the 40s that was short-lived, largely because of other political shows. but i think you can draw is a lot of parallels between what is happening then and now. and one of the benefits of doing that is the sort of -- it breaks

through this ahistorical amnesia that we keep thinking that the internet is changed everything. that's why i it's always good to bring some history that. >> craig, you have millions of signatures and favor of public service media within the last six months around the budget titles that have gone here in d.c. to continue defending at a stationary level.g how realistic is that? >> well, it's more realistic than we allow ourselves to be. i think there is sort of doesnm thing in washington where limitñ are put on what is possible, that are detached from what people want and need. this isn't in my chapter because i discovered after training?pwx again, which is hard to believe÷ because of how they turned again./÷

there was a survey asking how much of the federal budget to you think is to support the republican in the house? people's answer was 5%. now of course, it's actually only $400 million a year that works out to $1.25 or so. and even more so they thought that was okay. so here we are in washington have any political debate where people are fighting over some table scraps and yet the actual audience out there, the actual'z voters out there have no problem spending arguably hundreds of millions or billions of dollars more. flash is never the way it's been presented.o÷ they are not aware that while we are spending that dollar now.6xx

this has been their approach to this problem, but i think there is a better approach, where we step back and look at the important role journalism place in our society. we ask ourselves, how are we going to fill in these huge gap0 that the are described? looking at the policies, there'1 interesting things around the edges and tax policy changes. when it comes down to it, what we really need is a lot of money and the political will to say

our money should go toward supporting the social good, which is journalism. there's actually a surprising amount of energy for it. our group took on a million petition signatures in support of maintaining public media institutions themselves probably put in more. look at all the people who give support or are part of this and culture run public media. we talk about millions and>x millions of people are potentially political force. yet all we asked them to do is get a pledge time and get your tote bag. when we are really in trouble, help us defend this tiny piece of the pie. there's an interesting discussion if we put these stands to work, building up more robust public media system and one that goes beyond just pbs and npr to the broader universe that has community radio and nonprofit experiments and many of the things the other

panelists are talking about. that opportunity is staring us in the face and we have let ourselves believe we can do is fight over this tiny little bit. >> i'm feeling not to mistake. >> cancers of the world united. >> but i'll go back to tom frank. you in the chapter basically high they could treat in the modern age. do you see any hope at all? and are we laughed -- [inaudible] >> i don't deal in hope. bitterness, citizens of alienation, anger, that is me,9÷ man. >> i was just trying.

.. >> that's what all my friends were doing, and to this day, a lot of them still can't get tenure track jobs, and we're in our 40s now. i look at the situation, and i could make more money writing for the alternative news weekly in chicago so i did, you know. that was the end of that, of

academia. you wanted to know -- what did you say? any optimism. no, i thought about this, and, you know, the models for the future, right, is the model the content mill, you know, that's one system that it works any ways; right? and people get paid, but what -- look step back. the reason i wrote about this stuff is because my -- throughout my career i've been documenting the way market pop pew lism, this term i made up for the face that we have in markets and we think markets are perfectly democratic and will deliver wondrous results and the way this all-american dogma fails and fails and fails and fails and what you say in journalism is the most spectacular failure, since 2008,

the financial crisis i suppose. it's just one after another. what we see is the demise of the professional model of journal. i. what model takes its place? hamsters getting pas $15 per story or is it the, you know, the public subsidy model? you know, the first time i heard about the public's subsidy model, i thought it was the greatest idea ever, and i know that's how it works in scaped knave ya where the newspapers are heavily subsidized in all kinds of way, and that seems awesome to me until i thought about the world we live in where we basically have one two of the political parties in the country. they would smash that. they would dry it in a matter of minutes. they are talking about messing with the debt ceiling to send the economy into the tail spin they think it should be in so the gold is valuable or something like that, you know? okay, that's my joke. [laughter]

what will succeed? you know what i've been reading lately, and it's both al tern natalie horrifying and yet clairvoyant. you remember william hurst? this was the guy, sue can cane, and his model of journalism is first get yourself a gold mine; right? be born into a really, really, really wealthy family, and then, you know, buy up all these quality writers and sort of pursue your ideosin karattic vision, and he started on the left. he got a war going all on his own, you know? amazing man, and then moved way to the right in the 1930s, launched these bizarre red hunting sprees and witch hunts and this stuff. fascinating man, but that model is going to survive and thrive. that model, that's the fox news

sort of model. in fact, there's all kinds of ways in which they take pages from the biography of william hurst, and you see them doing this all the time. i had another model that i thought would work. no. [laughter] so -- sorry. [laughter] >> thank you, tom. the -- we had commissioner copps here last week talking about the role of the fcc and in prior decades, the fcc played a role of the public's obligations, and these are in a way lapsed, and perhaps you could talk, bring context to the audience about where we are right now and perhaps talk about what you said in the book, but also about the

fcc report that was released because it's interesting to be said this and perhaps the media to do more than it has. >> well, the interesting thing for me about the fcc report is it did an amazing job of chroniclizing it and only in the world demand media can those be classics, but here we are, and, you know, the fcc report did a great job of the problem, and i think commissioner copps is vocal to this to his credit and what can we do about it, they just threw up their hands and sort of become this thing where we candidate -- i was joking with a colleague that we can't really do anything about it. it might be the obama doctrine, and i think that sort of infected the fcc in a way they seem really unwilling to use the powers they have, powers to say,

you know what? you're using the public air waves for free, and that comes with responsibility. that's been completely watered down. even the fact where getting a call from the fcc used to scare a broadcaster, make them near slows. as this report chronicled, they have not taken away a license in 30 years. eventually that toothless watchdog doesn't scare you anymore, and i think the failure in some ways of the current fcc has been in not reclaiming that role. i think they had a real opportunity. i think this crisis was an opportunity to take some like this future media report and say we really do have a problem here, let's do something different. here's innovative policies, things to do, and instead they threw up their hands, and it's our responsibility to say that's not good enough, and that we need to get beyond. god bless the panel discussion. believe me, where would i be without it, but at some point we have to get beyond that and engage with the public, and there's been discussion about,

you know, maybe doing that at some point. i think we're at that point where if we don't engage local communities or engage the community journalists in this question, we're not going to get anywhere, and we are going to be left with william hurst's model or the fox news model. i don't think we're there yet. i haven't given up hope. i think there's a lot of opportunity and see a lot of energy, but it takes a different attitude from journalists themselves. asked about journalism school, i actually went to journalism school, and they very unsuccessfully beat out all these opinions that didn't work with me, but others who were told you can't be involved in politics, you probably shouldn't even vote if you're a journalist, and you know, because of good reasons of being objective or fair, i don't believe in octoberivity, but being fair in your reporting, but the bosses never play by those rules and spent 30 years at the fcc consolidating and concentrating and becoming so big when they toppled over, they

took the rest of us with them, and i think though that again out of crisis comes opportunity, and we are at one of those moments of opportunity, but it's going to be a fleeting moment, so if we don't, you know, activate now, if we don't get out there and actually engage the public in this discussion, begin to reintroduce them to these crazy ideas contained in this wonderful book, you we really don't stand a chance. >> so before we engage the public in the room and online, i'm going to give the last questions to nikk, and jessica. you're sort of working more the media face or the community journalism. what promising models do you see out there or behavers do you see, changes within the profession of community media? >> part of what we are seeing is a deconstruction of journalism, the different functions that the

journalist serves are taken by the public or the compacts of users and makerrings. there's fact checking, combing through data bases, trying to not just find the news story, but to call together collections of data and pictures and others that tell a larger story. learning to work in this way, it both democktizes the process and fills in the gaps if you don't have a millionaire in your back pocket. we were at the university of chicago at the same time, and while he was trying to make something out of this discipline that was sort of crumbling, i was trying to make up my own discipline in a multidisciplinary masters program. i have a faith in innovation and in piecing to the the old and the new, and i'm seeing a lot of that, and it's really encouraging, and it's also part of the deeper history of what we now think of as the mon littic

broadcasting was just amateurs, small educational stations, a bunch of people trying to do something good for the public that got rolled up into a larger entity, and that same thing needs to happen now. we need to be taking a critical look at, and sometimes a very critical look at what the new technologies can do for journalism, and for rewarding the behaviors that represent real up inyo vaition in this -- innovation in this space. >> you sound like william hurst there. >> one of the points i really want to make is that it's really important that we don't patronize the public and say that the public needs to be told about how important news and information is, and that we think about journalism not just as journalism, but as news an information as the knight commission report put out there, and what that means is not to ask citizens to be replacements

or serve models for good jowmplism or to look for them to be journalists, maybe standing on guard for what's missing in public media, but to see people as acting as civic actors, and seeing journalism as part of what they do each and every day, and i think that it's really important to recognize that people do want news, and people don't need to be told that they want news, and people are already chronicling parts of their day and chronicling what they see in their towns and in their communities. if you look at facebook feeds, you see local news all around you. it's not defined as local news, but it's, hey, my park down the street has some gray feetty in it. that's local news. we don't call it as such; right? it's important to take on a much more expansive notion of what it means to have the public involved, and to not necessarily

be so concerned that what the public is getting back doesn't quite resemil the jowmple -- resemble the journalism we want to replace it or to supplement. >> thanks. is the mike here for the questions? so we have to wait for the mic because the mic isn't here. here we are. the mic is here. great. we'll take questions from the gentleman in the -- please stand up. >> thanks couple fast comment questions. i've been a journalist for 50 years in the print area, and i'd like to address briefly what this lady said about citizen journalism. i think that verges into the wonders of blogging which i look on with a jaundiced eye when it comes to anything like a replacement for traditional

journalism, but secondly what you are suggesting might work with local news, but how is that going to possibly work with national and international news that requires people who have access, training, funding? what's the citizen journalist going to do about that? i suggest it's nothing. the second point is addressed to the gentleman talking about lipping the public on behalf the public broadcasting. i think that's a great idea, but what, if anything, does that do for the print media? frank said, i don't think there's any chance at all that congress, or at least one party in congress would for a moment appropriate any money for print money. >> thank you, sir. nikki, if you can take a stab at that question. i noted a chapter by sean powers in the book as well looking at international coverage. >> right. well, i think that nobody out

there is arguing that you or me are suddenly becoming the next white house correspondent. that's folly; right? the question is whether we can supplement some of the news organizations on the decline, and those are local news organization; right? if communities are in their communities covering news, i think that's a great thing, but it's really important to remember how much we can ask people to do. it's more about encouraging a sort of journalism as a civic act than it is about encouraging particular types of journalism, and that's the difference i'd like to make. in no way am i suggesting citizen journalists are replacing, but these are ways to sustain and provide alternatives to funding to be sure the good journalism we care so much about

continues to exist. >> okay. thanks. frank, mentioned sean powers. >> surement -- sur. one of the more interesting proposals in the book is from scene powers looking at the funding for international broadcasting, for example, the voice of america, that the u.s. puts out almost $700 million a year towards that, and there's a law, the 1948 agent that -- act that prohibits that to air within the borders of united states and he suggests perhaps that's an outdated law and look at ways to provide international coverage through those sources. >> okay. thanks. craig, public service media. >> well, you know, i think in terms of the broad sheet, that's not going to happen, but in

terms of subsidizing and supporting reporters, i think that's a very good idea. i think that's absolutely what we need to be doing, and they will probably be multimedia, and in terms of print journalism, of course, we're talking about online journalism, but we're still talking about the written word, and that's absolutely what we do need to be supporting and subsidizing. it turns out the political environment, you know, i'm not blind to, you know, whose in charge of certain agencies, and parts of congress right now, but i also saw that when we saw this incredible response in attempts to cut broadcasting funding, all the sudden, there's six or seven senators with requests for money because of the great support of media. if we can demonstrate the broad public support, if we can organize that, then those political realities can change, and i think that's increasingly part of the conversation we need to be having. how do we mobilize people?

citizen journalism is a part of it. i think the answer is both. you need them at meetings and they are supplemented by things happening in the community, and they will then talk to each other. from a policy perspective if we don't do that gulled old fashioned organizing or start to accept that, politics will be part of the solution to the media crisis, then we really don't stand a chance at all. that's the best chance that i've found so far. >> next question. come to the mic. the gentleman in the back. >> interpress service. just piggy backing on the last comment here, that politics is part of the solution, i'd like to suggest politics is all the solution, and that, you know, i want to challenge the panel to deal with the question of whether this whole idea of, you know, getting more money for

public television, public radio, isn't really kind of skipping over, you know, stages of development, you know, the model that was suggested, the closest thing to a good model of what we'd like to see was from the 1940s. we all know there's been a few generations of change in the wrong direction for obvious, well maybe not obvious, but very fundamental reasons in this country, and so what i wanted to argue for you to respond to is that, you know, what we're dealing with here in this country is, you know, fundamental social and economic changes which translate into political changes that really transcend the putting forward of more money for subsidizing journalism as a solution. we need something -- we need to start organizing to deal with the political issues before we go to this kind of solution is

my suggestion. >> any thoughts, victor? >> i'll just start out reactioni think is a very provocative, very true comment that the gentleman just made which is this idea that we will need a transformation in the political culture in many ways before we can really get to some of these solutions that we're calling for. i mean, when i start out my talk earlier saying that in 2009, there was this kind of optimism. we thought that was a window of opportunity where this could be this paradigm shift. this was a critical juncture. i don't want to say the window is totally closed, but it has been ironic that at a moment where we see market failure around us, what we often hear the most is from the tea party movement calling for even less government intervention in public policies, so i think the first step will probably be at

least liberal policymakers to stop buying into the logic that government has no legitimate role in trying to address this crisis in journalism. >> okay. frank in >> we have a chicken and ago problem here because in order to bring about the political change you talked about, we have to reform the media because they have such an incredible role to play in, you know, shaping those perceptions and what we're going to do. there's no question we need to tackle both problems, but i guess i ultimately believe there may be some, you know, relatively simple things and relatively inexpensive things in the, you know, the millions and billions that we can do that might help bring about that shift. i don't think there's questions that it's an uphill climb. it's a tumultuous moment, and maybe in a couple years, maybe we're talking about the tea party or something that comes next, and we should be in the

very least be ready to seize on the opportunities. for example, public media, we passed a trillion dollar stimulus package, and the public immediate -- mood ya institutions -- media institutions had nothing in there or didn't even ask. why aren't journalism jobs just as important as jobs building roads, but they had nothing together, nothing to even put in there, and that was a real missed opportunity. i tope that by the next time they won't make that mistake. >> [inaudible] >> yeah, maybe they said they didn't want it. >> the gentleman in the back of the room, no back of the room. the tall gentleman. >> [inaudible] >> i came, and i'm so glad that this panel follows on it because i think the media is hugely

important for all kinds of reasons i won't bore you with, and i'm glad that this institution has done two panels on this, and i agree with the thrust of the discussion, the public investment in the media has all kinds of uses, and that's where we should look. given that everyone is saying that, i want to point out one thing i don't think should be forgotten. i think if the people are going to be asked to up vest in the media, there are some flaws in how the media has performed until now that should be looked at. it might be a will of mobilizing more support. my own work is u.s. foreign policy, and i'm dismayed at how the media covers what the united states does outside the u.s.. you know, last week when i was here, i mentioned the new "new york times".

there's one line about hillary clinton and i thought it was horrible. sunday, "60 minutes" repeated the same mistake where basically there's no telling the american people some of the things that the u.s. government is doing wrong outside, so that people are not well-informed about it. my point is i do agree with the thrust, but if we are going to be asked to invest in the media, and i think we should, the media should also find ways of correcting some of its flaws, and one of the biggest is long term u.s. support of dictators. i'm from africa so that's very important to me. the american people have no clue about how much the u.s. government throws out dictators in africa. >> thank you, sir. questions of governance in media. i think of this in pessimistic about media and tom frank and i share some of his

possessism and we're left with community media and public media has been, let's face it, endowed in some critiques really this year. i wonder if this doesn't bring out the broader question of governance that nikki, jessica, or craig would like to suggest? >> one thing should be clear. i don't think everybody on the panel should be assumed to be -- well, i very much do believe in public media. i don't think everybody on the panel should necessarily be con trued as supporting broad public investment for all sectors of public media or of media because i don't think that i should be giving subsidies to the "new york times" or "wall street journal" as much as i love them very much, but i think there's a really important question about media literacy here; right, and it's how can we make sure the public in a time when the media

is increasingly fragmented and increasingly confusing, and there's more and more and more of it and your tension is limited to even less. people as we learned from an fcc report that came out this last week, people spend nine months -- nine minutes per month reading local news; right? what can we do to be sure the nine minutes are the best nine minutes they can spend reading local news; right? how can we make people the smartest news readers that we can; right? there's definitely problems with the media, and that's what the role of academics and public policy poke folks are to point out and hold the media accountable for those things; right? it's very important to realize that, you know, part of what we're going to see in terms of the dark and scarry future is not necessarily a future of public support, but perhaps a future where there are bigger media institutions, and then a

lot of smaller media institutions that are much smaller than they once were so i just wanted to recalibrate that a little bit. >> anything, craig, on -- go ahead? >> on govern annapolis? >> on govern nansz if we're talking about reinvesting public media, we have to address who is handing out the money and who gets it for sure. that removing the robust public media system from the annual appropriations process and, you know, leaving, i think one of our big problems 1 the public media is at the mercy of the political whims of washington, and i think a better strategy would be proactive policy to create a public trust, something that would really fund public media for the long term, avoid the cyclical nature of funding, depending which party is in charge, how much are, you know, they being hammered or not hammered as the case may be. i don't think that's the way to

do it in the long run. it's a govern nans problem and changes the way we appoint the people where maybe the president shouldn't pick the members of public broadcasting, look at reforms there, and how the money is spread out. there's a lot of turfness in the field and bringing money might help some of that, but look at 9 institutions, how they relate to each other, that's another discussion, but we have to look at governance because if you ask the american people to invest tax dollars in the media, they have to have good reason to believe that might be spent more responsibly. >> okay. another question -- a suggestion made in the report last week of directing advertising dollars, the u.s. government spent which is around a billion a year by his calculation. at -- more actively directing it

towards areas of journalism is created, thinking about local journalism. it's more than the media, and i just wonder if anyone has anything to say on that from the panel, but i will take other questions. we're getting to the end of the q&a session. to the back, yes, great. thank you. >> hi, there. i'm susie kim, a reporter from mother jones here in washington, d.c.. there's a lot of discussion of funding the politics in the media. i want to turn to the politics of the media. one of the interesting developments here is the fact that, you know, there's been a big rise in, you know, organizations, need ya outlets that lean left or right, and they are not just producing commentary in what is traditionally considered blogging, but origin reporting, and even folks like the "new

york times" and the post follow the lead of these organizations, you have the huffington post, folks producing original reporting online, but at the same time, you know, i think along with this development of the localization of the media is one, you have a lot of increasing public distrust in media in terms of left and right on where this news is coming from, and even if it's based on original solid reporting, i mean, you know, they recognize it comes from outlets with a particular bias, and sensationalism. it overlaps the fact that politics are involved and the stakes are political, and you have complaints from both sides about that. i mean, i guess the question is what is the place for disinterestedness? i guess that's a better term than objectivity, but in media, and who should be promoting that? is this a value that someone, an institution, whether it's publicly funded or not should be

trying to sustain in the midst of, you know, all of these developments and news. >> okay. tom, do you want to? >> i'm not going to answer that because i've never done disinterested journalism. i've been a columnist or a opinion guy. i have a question after these guys answer that, i have another question for them to really get them this time. [laughter] >> okay. any -- jessica? >> i've studied both sort of disinterested and partisan media. i say ideally there's a set of people who are trying to establish some common facts and establish the range of opinion, and often in the sides of beltways, that range is not characterized broadly enough for people which is part of the reason there's been a growth of partisan media, and obviously everyone argues from their interest whether it's corporate or political interests, and so there's a larger question of moving from objectivity to

transparency and the question nikki brought up. how can we understand the different ways in which news is used as a tool and characterized? how can we make that more transparent on the face of it, and how can we use the moneys that go into federally funded public broadcasting as a tool for developing the standards and ethics more explicitly, and then trying to hold some of these other outlets accountable? we saw moving from npr to nbc, and nbc recognized here's a smart woman who is innovative, she's, you know, forward thinking. they snapped her up, and she was able to go there because she was not held under the same scrutiny in that commercial space as she has been in the last year in the public space. i'd like to see equal standards applied across the board, and even as michael argues in his chapter, to some of the fake news that's really serving as a primary news source for younger users. >> okay.

thomas? >> oh, yeah, my question is where's the unions in all of this? the voice of professionalism? you know, what's happened to them in all this massive decline going on? >> in a word, decimated i think. i think a lot of them are losing a lot of union jobs and they are gone. i think craig can speak to this as well. i don't think they've been silent on these issues at all. >> do they have ideas? do they have suggestions? >> well, there's definitely been attempted to create worker-owned newspapers, and some have been successful. there's other business models that have been attempted where sometimes the union members are exploited in the deal like the tribune so there are other -- i don't think they've been ab acceptability. i think -- absent. i think they've been engaged. >> i think the newspaper guild is outspoken in particular while, of course, being

decimated. i think the unity groups, national organization of hispanics and black journalists have been far up front and challenging frankly companies that they have been relint on for their sur dure survival and in terms of mobilizing journalists, there's a long ways to go, and i think that knee jerk skepticism of government involvement and politics in the newsroom presents a big challenge and very often working journalists are the last ones to speak up in their own defense. as the desks cleared up around them, they thought i'm here to be a journalist, just cover it. i shouldn't say anything. again, those rules do not apply to their bosses. they are happy to lobby and push for policies, and eventually, they looked around, and there's just a handful of them left. >> having done research in this area, i can actually tell you that journalists who are often

union members that -- a lot of journalists who are in these situations where they see their newsrooms emptying out around them are often the least likely to innovate, and that's something to really remember as we think about this. when we think about journalism in crisis, there's often a fear and panic that goes through the hearts and minds of journalists, and they tend to think backwards instead of thinking forwards. what we need to do is be able to face the crisis on its head and encourage in-- innovation and instead of clinging for jobs, clinging for recirculation and readers, we need to think how to move forward. >> thank you. we're getting to the end. a couple more questions. this gentleman on the end in the light jacket. >> a-media. what have you wrote or spoken bout the self-anointed media

watchdog bloggers and filmmakers and social media users who have been monitoring and correcting so-called mainstream well-paid and still in-- influential broadcast and print media who have made mistakes in recent years? today, all over christian media that i follow very closely, i have noticed an uproar about nbc coverage of the u.s. open, the national golf championship yesterday that edited out a reference to god, i believe in the pledge of allegiance. nbc, i heard did issue an on-air apology yesterday, but that was not sufficient to the commentators i have been listening to. >> any suggestions? jessica? >> i wrote about it quite a bit. i think the dynamic holds no

matter what the ideology is. there are many more ways to hold media accountable, and there are many more opportunities to create responses from people that you don't agree with. i think that that is signature of this moment, and it's about free speech. i think -- i mean, i don't know how else to answer your question. >> i will just a little bit about the back checking movement. i think it's a very interesting disaggravated unit of journalism that's emerging, and the role it will play, i think, a very open question in whether it succeeds or just become another case of he-said, she-said. final question if we have anyone? yep, the gentleman at the back in the white shirt. >> thanks. very quickly. if we're ever going to move this

beyond the think tanks and economic circles, i think everybody in journalism who thinks this is an important issue has to put skin in the game. has there been talk about a month long strike where all journalists who want to participate put their pens down, put their commerce down? of course, like any unionist will tell you, not everyone's going to agree to participate in that. maybe you get 40%, but the point is you can try to address the issue, call some public attention to it, and everyone can spends the month, i prefer august because congress can do the least damage to us then, and we can all enjoy ourselves, but following the end of that period, everyone can have their articles ready, and we can draw the line in the sand, con condemning those broadcasters, networks, and papers that don't join the strike or didn't cover the strike. it's time to take some actions

other than just talking to ourselves. >> what was the strike against? >> it would be a reminder to let everyone know that if we are doing anything important, some people might just notice. it's absence. >> with that question, i'll bite. a strike in august? i'll is the panelist to perhaps answer that question very blank or provide closing comments. >> we saw the writer's unions strike, and some of the things that came out of that more online video for writers who are out of work got to play around and more reality television. it's a very dangerous proposition. there's plenty of content for people to consume, so i would say that other means might work better. >> okay. any thoughts? have we made you more

optimistic. >> oh my good, no. this illusionment is my business. the guy who asked about the bias critique -- this is actually a really fascinating aspect of our culture in the last 30 years. i used to run a magazine called the bachelor, and there's a great essay by a guy who should be here today, chris layman. you guys know this guy. he traced the history of the bias critique where it was invented by spar row agnuw deliberately in 1969. i'm sorry, 24 is -- this is the history of the liberal media. before that, it was the other way because there's william hurst in chicago. these are very right wing gems, and so the bias particular was that these guys were doing the newspaper was always doing the bidding of big money.

sparrow flipped it on its head that the real problem of journalism was the professionals. the problem is with professionalism, these people who arrogated the power of publishing to themselves in their little clique of professional writers or whatever it is and are making news decisions for the entire country. what's funny, as that's become less true over the years, you know, now there's fox news, a.m. talk radio that's almost completely conservative with an exception here and there. as this has become a less and less valid description of the media environment we live in, it's now everywhere. the liberal media bias critique is everywhere now as it's become less true. it's a fascinating story. >> nikki, journalist strike or last comments? >> i'll defer to jessica's comment on that, but i do want to say something about this idea

of disinterestedness, and i think there is some really good stuff written by james carrey, two journalism scholars and find them at presslink.org, and what they talk about is not so much creating a journalism of politics or journalism of partisanship, but a journalism that really allows people to understand the issues that are going on, and i think that there is a place for partisan back fighting. those are the things -- i just moved from l.a. and people from l.a. don't read about politics and talk about them at parties. we just don't do that. in dc, that's what people do i find. >> just last week. [laughter] >> so, you know, when you think about the kind of journalism that can really serve people and talk about journalism to increase media literacy, you can

explain things to people that just doesn't start each day a new, for example, or instead of a he said, she said, think about the person you're quoting is a skeptic on global warming is really worth quoting. there's a way to change the discourse of journalism without hedging on the question whether or not it's objective. to just say one thing about the idea of the liberal media critique began. there was not one until sparrow w agnew because there was not a class of liberals. thank you. >> i'm not ready to endorse the strike, but i am ready to advocate for organizing, and i think that, you know, that is going to be a key to turning the tide is really engaging the public and engaging working journalist in these stormy political questions, and so if that means we have to live in a world where at parties we talk about the future of journalism,

i'm willing to accept worse parters for the broader change. there's a lot of changes for people to think about the media and journalism as not just something that happens to them, but something they are actually, they actually can influence whether that's doing their own journalism or getting involved in the larger prelim questions, -- political questions, and i hope if we can get to the point where those discussions are being had, we're a long way down the road. >> victor, you edited all the chapters. i'm sure you have fine thoughts. >> i'm intrigued by the idea of the strike. [laughter] i'll leave it at that. the idea of partisanship or bias in media, there are a couple pieces in the book that deal directly with that. chris hedges savages the idea of objectivity. laura mcginn raises the important question that i so much agree with. it's not about partisan journalism. it's more about these partisan

hats, like, you may describe them as james o'keefe who are not constrained by facts, and they are rushing into a void. laura mcginn talks about that in the book. i want to end on an optimistic note which i think the idea about market failure and public subsidies it's never so much about protecting the incumbents or just shoring up the status quo, but it's about transforming the entire system, and i think once you do that structurally, over time a lot of these cultures will change, and if we could somehow confer the status to journalism that we give to libraries and public schools and museums might not be the best analogy there, but i think you get the idea. i think that would be an hon

honorble aboutive there. thank you. >> thank you, victor. as victor said, in short, just about everything rides on harvest crisis and journalism plays out. i hope you continue to be engaged in these questions, and if you are interested in further work on these issues go to media policynewnetwork.net. if you have room, joins in the back of the room for wine and cheese. there are copies of the books for sale. i think you can snag at least six signatures. [laughter] thank you again to the panelists. put your hands together. [applause] thank you. [applause] thank you all for coming. [inaudible conversations] ..