sentinel books. >> thank you very much. >> and now on booktv, maria armoudian, fellow at the university of southern california's center for international studies, presents her thoughts on the role the period ya plays on affecting public -- media plays on affecting public opinion. this program is just under an hour. [applause] ..

c-span is my favorite media in the world. i hope it is just the beginning of doing things with c-span. thank you for doing this for booktv and i thank all of you. so grateful you are here. so many things going on in los angeles. you could be in a million places and you are here and i find that personally fulfilling and also fulfiling finally because these are important matters so thanks for all that. [applause] >> a couple personal notes about the book and how it can about. i have been engaged in questions about my own heritage.

two grandfather's, victims of the survivors. it always baffled me why a government and all the people that it could recruit would target everyday people. my family were not elite. lebron not really educated. they were farmers. why would they be targeted for annihilation? so it started to lead to questions about why they were treated so badly. that was coupled with other questions that when i put them together led me down the path of mass media. that is one other incident where remember in the 1990s when there was an emergence of a new kind of talk radio that we haven't really heard until the 1990s? mostly really straight ahead public affairs on television and in newspapers and then we had

this emergence of very e. emotional kind of polarizing mass media emerging and i had gone home to see my parents in oklahoma and my dad was very upset and a angry and i could hardly talk to him anymore. couldn't figure out what had gotten into my dad. it was like a lost my father. i got into the car and he turned on the radio and it was one of these stations with one of these folks that likes to blame one side for everything and call them names. i said to you mind if we turned that down when i am in a car. he said i want to hear the news. i realize at that moment there were a couple things going on. one is that because for many decades mass media in the u.s.

had tried to be to some success mutual and objective. there's a lot of argument whether you can be objective in any sense within the scholarly world. most people say you can't but at least there was an effort now it was changing. people got caught up in this still believing they were listening and watching mass media being objective and neutral and not taking sides. he believed what he was hearing on radio and that has changed since then. i got my dad back which is nice. weaken passbooks back and forth and articles. media framing helped with the book. and the third thing that led me down this path was i had been

working in the public service sector, legislature and city trying to pass public policy that i thought was really in the public interest. it was so hard. partly because most people didn't understand what we were even doing. didn't know what we were doing. i see my fellow commissioner joyce who was with me through part of this. there is not enough information out there of basic public policy in every day media that people are watching, reading or listening to. that led me down this path. why such a provocative title? "kill the messenger," the media's role in the fate of the world. what i came to realize in the research i had been doing, mass media messages can be used for good and not so good.

they can be used in a constructive way or a destructive way. most of the book is about the more destructive part of mass bdm and how it has been used to destructive ends. genocide, war -- the rest of the book is peacemaking and protecting human rights and protecting the environment. things i tend to think are more positive. not everybody may agree with me on those things. one of the people i interviewed in bosnia for the bosnian chapter of the book was a professor and he had a quote that i realized was kind of encapsulating part of what i was saying and that is a bullet can kill a man but the ideas behind

the bullet still bounce. that is part of what went into "kill the messenger". not journalists, not mass media but particular para don imus that have been used to forward these destructive ideas destructive ends. so where is the power? power is first rooted in information and ideas and they are so powerful, i call them the dna of society. you know how our bodies, all the organs and cells know what to do because of the dna is the information that tells them how to function in a system. societies are like a system and we are the parts that are

decoding the information and the ideas and participating in our society and our system as a result. when that information is flawed in our body like that dna gets a mutation, it doesn't go so well for the body just like it doesn't go so well for society. it can turn on itself. it can destroy parts of itself and can destroy the whole of its self. so information turns into ideas through this concept of framing. anybody here heard this idea of framing? a guy raises his hand because he has been to one of his talks. long before that. the idea behind framing is the world is full of this vast amount of data and it doesn't

always make sense when it was disorganized and even history you couldn't read all the history there is in the world and make sense of it. you couldn't go to bosnia and understand what happened in bosnia by walking around. it is when it was organized in a particular way some information is put in and some is put out and a little story that it tells and that is a frame. some talk about a picture frame which is part of the story so if i see this big boom in here and can see the whole room betsy of peripheral and not the whole room i can focus on this part and get an idea of a room so i see this pretty woman here and very handsome man here and good looking room we have. only part of the room because if i look over their, no comment.

there's this other piece which is the idea -- note spin zone. there was an experiment that captures this better than i could tell in any other story. communication scholars took a kkk rally that wanted to happen in new york and two newspaper articles about it and framed it as an issue of public safety, and it wasn't a safe thing. it was framed as an issue of free speech, we stand for free speech. and gave it to another group. same history of the organization, and background of the organization. two different reactions.

people who saw the free-speech frame supported their right to hold a rally despite their opinion about the organization. people who saw the public safety frame not so much. did not support it. had some arguments. together that is the essence of a frame. the idea of some information in and some out and has this kind of angle which tells the story. thome media frames -- not much media but all frames when they get disseminated in mass media they get sent to a wider and wider audience. but all frames tell a particular story. what i found in each of the genocide situations was it almost told the exact same story

only with the characters change so there was a good guy and a bad guy. there was always a political problem in which the bad guy got blamed. there was always an argument that the good guy belong to the land and the bad guy was an innovator. there was an argument that the good guy was doing all this good for society and was clean and the bad guy was very and by his very presence was willing and sometimes it was worse than that. the first example i will give is the one of rwanda. i tell the rwanda story because it is the most clear picture that we get about how mass media can be so effective. one radio station was

disseminating these messages and it flipped to society. all societies have rancor and conflict. but how do you get a brother to kill a brother? how the you get a has been to kill a wife in the name of some cause? or doctors to kill their patients or teachers to kill their students? set the mall on fire? that is a hard task it wasn't unique to rwanda that people who were friends were turning on each other and turning each other in. it was in bosnia. best men, and intermarriage is and all these cases. diamond to turn my time on and i didn't. i am going to do that right now.

what happens? is not media alone. there's always a crisis situation. crises can be resolved in cooperative ways. doesn't always mean you could turn on the other, and what we call a vicious leader comes to power. in armenia, we had killer, and leaders are nothing without -- why are we following these malignant leaders? this goes along with a vote story. so in rwanda you have this crisis situation, in malignant leader, an incident where the plane of the president was shot

down and then you had a radio station that had been around for a middle while. it was the hip station that played the best music and told the funniest jokes and had political commentary and once the plane came down it became more and more vicious targeting one particular group for annihilation. and particularly for shooting down the plane of the president, painting them as -- soiling the land and the worst part of it that really gets people to kill the other is that if you don't kill them first they are going to kill you. and so when the message was coming through, the radio

station in rwanda, it was one message not countered by other mass media. rwanda is not a heavy reading society as much as it listens to a lot of radio so people got these messages over and over again along with their hit messages of jokes and great songs. they started to believe them. started to believe that their neighbor was coming after them and started to believe that if they didn't kill that they would be killed and if they didn't kill their democracy would fall apart. this is the other element of a genocidal frame. a grand cause for which everybody can get behind. democracy sounds good. we like the sound of majoritarian democracy. it is often saving humanity like

in nazi germany they said we must save humanity because these oilers are ruining at. there is an international jewish conspiracy. so people got scared. mass media was the way they were sending messages to people. in rwanda it was 100 days. eight hundred thousand people brutally killed. a lot of hatred. a lot of machetes and things that would make them feel this pain for the longest period of time they possibly could. that is not human. this is beyond human. but unfortunately it is not unique. we saw very similar things in bosnia where they had intentionally put people into these concentration camps where they would starve to death and dying of thirst and die of

disease and torture them. similar to the holocaust and the army and genocide. it was such an intense hatred that was developed for people. how does this happen? you get these messages but don't we just reject them when we know our neighbors? it doesn't always happen in every situation. it happens because it is concentrated me the and it is not countered. it is not opposed by another media source. and a society develops in which all of this psychological phenomenon starts to develop. so for example let's -- most people heard of group think. groupthink, when a group of people all agree on something and one person knows it is wrong often goes silent.

the biggest example, the size of a line, told everybody to say it was six inches and the person they're redoing an experiment on who knew it was not six inches but said it was six inches because everybody else said it was 6 inches. what is this phenomenon? when everybody does something why do we start to doubt ourselves? start to doubt our own morality? it is this human phenomenon that we start to conform to our surroundings and not everybody does. that is an important point. even in rwanda. even in the holocaust. certainly in bosnia there were dissenters who were rescuing the

other and they were defying and risking their lives to rescue the other. my own family if it weren't for their turkish neighbors who warned them probably wouldn't have made it. and that is true time and again for many families. for the vast majority this group phenomenon starts to take over. there is a phenomenon called mountain spacing on it as i come across the. we have mob behavior and groupthink and intergroup relations. when you go to a ball game and the bad guy gets a point and everybody gets really upset about it that is an intergroup emotion. what happens when these emotions gets swept in? they have an automatic behavior

policy to them so anger has a need to resolve. resentment has a need to change this. hatred has a need to destroy the other. rage -- these emotions take over in these periods when the story is told that it is unjust. this isn't the only story. in rwanda's twin called burundi, love to talk about burundi. this will sound like a happy ending and i warn you ahead of time there is no such thing as a happy ending because politics is constantly changing and it can go one way and it can go the other way. but burundi like rwanda, two ethnic groups.

essentially the same, the hutu and tutsi and the third one not engage in the trouble. the religion is the same. the language is the same and across the board there is no language difference or religion difference between the hutus and the tutsis in rwanda or burundi but in burundi they were engaged in the same kind of ratify a killing. one thought was going to kill and they beat them to it and similar as the other side but something changed in burundi. it didn't go down the genocide or path. you start and say they had a malignant leadership. they have a crisis situation. they even had mass media that was demonizing the other and

blaming the other, developing hate for the other. what was the difference? there were two things. it was all encompassing so they did have competing frames. not necessarily good because they were just killing each other. than a bunch of people got involved some from the u.s. like the search for common ground and europe and they set up a new studio and said we will try a media experiment. these experiments included every news story is going to be reported on by one hutu and one 2 t together. you not only had to agree on the information but had to agree on the frame. you can't just blame the whole thing on the other side. and so now they found themselves trying to figure out what was

really going on and why people were killing each other and what was underneath this complex. they were going and realizing that the hutu and tutsi were all people. they have been dehumanized for so long and called sleaze and cockroaches and infestations for so long now they were like wow. then they started this radio program and there were beautiful things that started to happen. they started having conversations about the role of bystanders and the role of people who were rescuing the other side. before these programs, if one person -- i am mixing them up.

one person is a hutu rescuing a tutsi that person would be considered a traitor and would be marked for death. pretty common in wartime situations. you can't help the other side. they talk about what a heroic act that was. to be sophia main as to rescue somebody from being killed even if it is from the other side and the more they talked about this the more the trader started sounding like a hero. more people would call in and confess they were rescuing somebody from the other side and it became more and more commonplace. then there was another little incident that happened. the leaders of the factions were

sending in the communique and the head of this journalism operation -- had the privilege of talking to him on the phone in exile but these -- he would read them and say this isn't true. come back with something that is true. instead of getting what we see in western media where they say congressman such and such says -- wouldn't even say that. i am not saying that. come back with something true for come back with something productive and constructive and i will put it on the air. it started to change how people responded. it started to change what people were thinking. i went several pages and didn't look at my notes and now i don't know where i am. another important part of burundi was the radio dramas.

it is radio society. they had protagonists who were not identified and you couldn't tell. there were some physical differences allegedly that the colonial settlers had suggested but we don't know if they were really that different. so you would see the strife that these people went through as a result of the war but you didn't know if it was your side or the other side and it started to develop this kind of compassion for the others. these are just a few of the elements of a mass media that took something from the brink of genocide where next door it was a genocide and managed to bring it to a point of having a peace

agreement though i would argue it has a long way to go but most of us do. most human interaction as we look out there and see that there's a lot of violence unfortunately but it is one of the stories where we saw a peace making going that was generated partly through mass media and not just mass media. but it is a world can play. we have seen major transformation. two others i like to talk about. one is the south african transformation. south africa as most of you know, and apartheid country. very brutal to the black south africans and had a divided media within the country so the

african language really never knew any other story other than what the state was telling them which with all their side. nelson mandela was their token terrorists whereas the english language and the african language media were telling a completely different story and were showing the abuses and the killing that was going on and the other wrong less of an apartheid society. they couldn't solve that alone in south africa. there was too much lopsided power but over the years journalists kept taking this story to the next level and the next level as the next level until businesses got involved, government got involved,

business sanctions until finally decades and decades and decades later we see this transformation in south africa. what if nobody knew that information? what if nobody ever challenge the apartheid structure, with no one told the story of steve beco who was beaten to death in his jail cell? nobody could have acted so this is one more example of how media play a role in transforming something very important from an apartheid racist system to a multiracial democracy. northern ireland we see journalists actually helping to bring about a peace process. check the time. if i don't go over, time for a

question. i focused on a lot of the extreme cases. sometimes it doesn't quite get that extreme but there are subtle things occurring. the united states for example is very polarized right now. the media has become very polarized and people are going into what we call echo chambers where they only listen and watch and read some me yet and they hear the same story over and over again. other people watch and listen and read this other me and that is not 100% true. some people are crossing over but there is a large enough section of society that are getting that. one of the most important issues facing us today right now is the

issue of climate change. this week we heard that 97% of the greenland ice sheet is melting. we are seeing drought across the country. massive drought. food prices shooting up. they expect ocean levels to really rise quite a bit receding the coast line. extreme weather getting worse and no policy action. y no policy action? why aren't policymakers doing something? why are people getting out of there suvs? maybe climate change isn't really happening. to some people that is not really happening. it is worse than not really happening because scientists are scam artists. if you listen and read and watch particular media this is

repeated over and over and over again. scientists are scanning you. dozens and dozens of news articles. what do you think that does? not just that people no longer understand the issue of climate change. it is that they hate scientists and don't believe science any more. if we take our faith out of science completely we might be in some more trouble. ..

>> so i think i'm going to close this by saying a few things. one is that there's several main media effects. one is information, right? if you don't know, if you don't understand, if people don't hear, read, comprehend, they cannot act in a responsible way. and in a democratic society, you need to be able to know and understand and act in a responsible way. but you can't do anything about things you don't know. so there's information effect. another one is agenda setting. what people think about is often what they hear and read and learn from some form of media. it's changing with social media,

changing a lot x we'll talk about that quickly -- and we'll talk about that quickly. um, it brings certain things to the forefront, and there's only so much you can have in the fore front, and it moves other things to the back. and then there's the framing effect, which i talked about. and the cultural effects. this is one i just want to emphasize a little bit. what are cultural effects? what are the things we care about? what are the things that are right? what are the things that are just? what are the things that are acceptable down to the clothes we wear? well, some of that is perpetrated through a mass media thing. there's a social law that gets established, and political scientists have found that social laws are actually more powerful than state laws. so, you know, have we sped to get here?

we break the state laws. but, you know, people don't violate social laws have often. very often. so when was the last time you saw a man wearing a pink skirt? [laughter] unacceptable. and what would happen if he did that? that's a social law, and you just can't violate them. i have a chapter in here about changing a very important social law which was the female genital cutting in senegal which in ten years they completely -- almost, i mean, it's never completely eradicated -- it's almost completely eradicated because they couldn't do it for thousands of years because it was such a powerful social law. nobody would even talk b to a girl, much less marry a young woman had she not been what they called cut. but through a social action campaign with mass media, they got people to understand the

custom, what was going on with the custom, but also what the cost of it was. people's health, people's well being and democratic choice. so now with new media, with the internet how is this changing? for good and for bad. for good -- and for bad -- is the gatekeeping effect. so for many, many years traditional mass media told us what to think about, how to think about it. not that we all obeyed, but they gave us this news and this frame, and it was what we got. good news about that was it was usually fact checked. two source, and it wasn't usually rife with, you know, misinformation. here in the u.s. the bad news is it kept out a lot of stuff that maybe we wanted to know about. that's changing.

now the gatekeeping is coming both ways where people are taking, um, things and making a big news issue out of it, and it's spreading all over the world. the traditional mass media are getting it and taking it further. we saw this with the arab spring, right? so people were, they were tweeting it, they were blogging it, they were posting it. al-jazeera had been in there for many years capturing some of the changes that were going on, but then it becomes this exchange between them. the other good part about this is there are certain parts of the world where we just can't get much information out of. but with some of the social media, we are getting it. so i don't know if anybody saw burma vj, this was a documentary about burmese video journalist, vj stood for video journalist, and he was capturing all the oppression he and others were facing on his little cell video

and uploading it to the internet, and they made a movie of it. and iran, when the green revolution was attempted and there were beatings, people were capturing it and putting it up on the internet. so there's an open window here because of the internet and social media, but then you've got the other side which is there are a lot of misinformation that's getting on there too. and it's not getting vetted for factual data. and it's not getting vetted, um, for the framing. and some of it can be very vicious. doctor videos getting sent around that aren't really what happened. we saw this happen here in the u.s., we see it other places. so how are we going the deal with all of this? the other thing that i'm hoping will occur as a result of new media is cross-border collaborations.

so people can actually learn from each other culturally when they can't afford to fly over there, or there would be other, other restrictions about going to learn other cultures and learn, um, what's actually occurring and exchanging information. that would be quite a beautiful thing. and i think it's starting to happen with things, with some of the blogs. but i think we are hoping to see more of this. so in closing, i want to say that we have great potential to have our media, both our social media and our mass media, start to stand for the things we care about and to stop being a divider and to be more of a uniter. the us versus them frames that we are fed since very early in

the movies, in sports, in war, they're just a frame. it's really all us. there really is no them. so if we can start to parse out these frames, start to understand what's going on and build, build more of this media that we'd like to see, more that supports the growth of human potential, peaceful societies, protection of human rights, and we can do that in several ways. one that i am advocating for is interinstitutional media. traditional media's really facing some struggles right now; competing with the internet, funding it in the future, newspapers are folding, closing down. but the institution like the educational institutions can start to work together and build a media that is both fact

checked, that's got some depth, that's got some scholarly material in it that can really help people to understand political phenomena more. other, other models that are emerging from other countries are things like cooperatives where journalists are building media together so that they run it and not, um, an executive telling them what to do. so it can be based on journalistic principles, it can be based on what we see in places like burundi where both sides have to check the frames. and i have great hope, i have great hope that, um, we can build this if people stay vigilant and people stay committed. and the bottom line is we're all part of the media now. all of our twitters and all of our facebooks and all of our blogs and all of our internets -- internets, how'd you hike that? i liked it.

collectively. and you never know who's actually reading these things and getting them. so when we choose the frames that forward what we would like to see in the world and we correct the factual misinformation and we share what we know to be true, then we start to see a change gradually. as it builds, the more traditional media get ahold of it, and we share the other way around too. so thank you so much. i'll take a question or two. [applause] i'll just take one. [laughter]

dr. appleton. >> thanks. i have a question. you mentioned earlier that in rwanda there was a sort of flipping of the frame. that process of which one frame becomes the dominant frame. how much do you think that individual horrors such as hitler or an individual person who's often the president of a country or something like that actually helps in this that process of flipping the frame one to the other, or -- >> so you're asking the role of leaders? >> yeah. how do they relate, do you think? >> i think they matter a lot. see, there's different -- kill the messenger, the idea was to kill the paradigm that is destructive, right? and that sometimes and often the paradigm that is destructive is led by a malignant, narcissistic leader, and it was in rwanda.

it wasn't a free media, it was a media that was operated by a particularly ideological group. it was privately held. it wasn't government, so we can't say government media bad. and in some cases government media can actually do good things. the bbc is mostly great. not so great in the norb ireland case -- northern northern ireland case and a lot of ore ways. but when it flips, and i didn't mean to imply that rwanda it did flip. it didn't flip. it gradually went there. and it was the same thing in nazi germany. the flip in rwanda was when the plane went down that all the blame landed on the tutsi people for taking the blame -- taking the plane down, and then it just became increasingly hateful in these messages. and usually it's gradual. nazi germany was very gradual. take these rights away, insult

the jews, take more rights away, call them awful names. isolate them into this corner and to these ghettos, and, you know, justify it by saying they're destroying humanity, and they're part of an international conspiracy. start killing them and maybe even don't even tell anybody. because a lot of what was going on in the nazi germany press was that they were just, um, creating this positive morale around hitler and turning the country around and hiding what they were doing. even though, even while they were saying all these awful things about jewish people and, you know? does that answer your question? so in nazi -- so leadership does matter, if i got your question right. just for a second because i didn't talk about this at all, but in the wars of yugoslavia

part of the war was about seizing mass media, so the serb forces were going in and grabbing television stations and transmitters and putting their messages in there, again, killing the journalists while they were at it, by the way. it was just an awful thing. and that was, again, to control the message. and that would be a flip. one minute you've got journalism, ethical journalism, one minute you've got malignant leader controlling the message. and dead journalists. it's awful. >> how do you -- i really appreciate your proposals and perspectives included in -- [inaudible] media report. at what point did that in and of itself become dangerous such as, let's say reports about the

armenian genocide or jewish holocaust, are they to feature denierses? >> right. >> or there are people who don't believe we landed on the moon. should science reports feature them? so where is that line, and who determines it really? >> right. well, that's a really important question. i mean, there's a line in my book where i say we don't question gravity anymore. i mean, it's established. we have gravity. right? i mean, there are certain things that are factual. i don't think that that is a perspective. an opinion that tries to counter a factually-established law or rule or fact. such as the armenian genocide, such as the holocaust, such as climate change. you know, if there's, if there was a legitimate finding that could challenge a fact, you

know, tow we know there's -- now we know there's a -- [inaudible] did i say that right, wyatt? okay. [laughter] it was a new finding. for a long time we didn't know there was a higgs -- [inaudible] does everybody know what i'm talking about? it's a subatomic particle that scientists have been searching for for years and years and years, and they finally established -- well, mostly established, they're not 100% established -- that it even exists, and it gives mass. enough physics. but, um, you know, if there's ed, that's one thing -- if there's evidence, that's one thing. if there's no evidence, then should this be disseminated as if it's as worthy? this was the problem in climate change. the scientific community in the peer-review journals, 100% agreement that what is happening

is the planet is warming, and it is warming as a result of human activity. the scientists, and i shouldn't put it in quotes because they are scientists, but most of them are working for think tanks that serve, you know, the fossil fuel industry and the coal industry and such. the journalists were portraying them as scientist against scientist, but the second batch weren't doing climate research. should they be given equal ground? no. should a holocaust denier be given equal ground? no, that's established. should we argue that there's not gravity? does that answer your question? i mean, i don't see anything wrong with, you know, for entertainment purposes to be able to explore something to some degree, but, you know, i

don't think misinformation is a good thing. joyce, fellow commissioner. >> you mentioned real on about the transition and the polarization of the news media somewhere around the '90s from more fact-based news to, you know, the two sides. and i'm sure that in the book you mention this, but i'm just wondering was there, is there any particular factor, major factor that you think contributed to that transition? any, any policy change, any social, anything that happened that would -- because there was a very stark change. >> there were a few policy changes that were going on during the '90s. some people hate the fairness doctrine because it was like you have to give two sides to everything. but that was one of the things that changed. there were other changes. part of it, part of it also

dealt with consolidation of industry and the laws that govern the consolidation and the mergers changed so that you could have more consolidation and more mergers. one single entity owning a lot of mass media. some of it was also the way we treated the public airwaves. but then the emergence of cable. so there were several things going on all at the same time. and i think, you know, here in the u.s. it's a different situation than what we see internationally. internationally we see, i mean, a lot of it is power. internationally we saw, um, these malignant leaders using mass media to get control and kill others. here in the u.s. we see, um, corporate companies trying to make as much money as they possibly can by feeding us the lowest common denominator which

is often emotional. they don't even believe it. look, rupert murdoch believes in climate change. he has said it, he says he is proud of making fox news the leader -- not just fox news, news corporation -- the leading green media company. the leading -- news corporation. the same one that's on there in three dozen news segments that called scientists scam artists. yet rupert murdoch himself, the ceo, brags about how much he's doing to combat climate change. how do you explain that? that is in the book. how do you explain that? makes money. it's a publicly-traded company. it's a flawed model. you know, i don't think there's anything wrong with people making money, but there's got to be some kind of balancing with the public good. i think "the new york times" does a pretty good job of that.

iraq war, you know, if we don't talk too much about them not fact checking the iraq war and all the people dead as a result of that. but, you know, generally speaking "the new york times" has a mission which is to provide a public service, and they're for-profit. have you do that? i guess -- can you do that? i guess it can be done. i know i went off your question. >> we'll take one last question if there is one. >> yeah. >> what were your trusted news sources for information? >> first thing i did to write this book was i went into the peer-reviewed literature. and the reason i went to the peer-reviewed literature first is that, um, most people foe the peer review -- know the peer review process. the peer review process is what academics use. when you submit research, you submit it without your name, without your institution. it goes to a body that fact checks it before it can get published. and once it, once it passes a

fact checking and if they really all agree in this blind process that you are saying something that is, a, a contribution and, b, is not, you know, hogwash, then it can get published. so that's where i started, was with the peer review process. and, by the way, there are flaws in every system, and there are some flaws in the peer-review process too. but at least it's, you know, um, substantive in terms of, um, in fact check enough that i can trust it as a foundation. some of these chapters, and bosnia was one in particular, there were competing, um, journals. there were two different narratives about what really happened in bosnia, so i got on a plane, and i went there. and i went and i talked to people all around the different sides, and i talked to judges, and i talked to prosecutors, and i talkedded to professors and settled in that, actually, this side that had the most journals

were the ones that most people i interviewed agreed with. in other words, the side -- it's, without going too much into the chapter, most people agreed on what happened in bossy that in terms -- bosnia in terms of the professors and the academics and the researchers. there were a handful that didn't, but there were people i respected, and that's why i went back. but i found that the majority of people the story was more aligned with what the bosnian intellectuals and people on the streets, um, agreed with. so, so that's basically what i did is i started with the peer review, and then if there was a conflict or a problem, then i -- not just, yeah. i mean, when i was in bosnia, i spoke to, like i said, judges, prosecutors, um, defense lawyers, people on the street,

professors, students, people who lived through it, people whose parents lived through it. and it was, it was a task. [laughter] but that was one that was the big, tough one to resolve. the rest of them there was, i would say, a pretty solid, um, understanding about what had actually happened this each of the conflicts in the academic community. does that answer your question? okay. that's it? [applause] >> for more information visit the author's web site, armoudian.com. >> here's a look at some books that are being published this week. in marie curry and her daughters: the private lives of science's first family, shelley

emling recalls the relationship between the physicist and her two daughters. arun n chaudhary documents the obama presidency in realtime. in "the freedom manifesto: why free markets are moral and big government isn't," steve forbes, ceo of forbes incorporated, and elizabeth ames argue that a free market is the only way to a fair, moral and free society. peter davison, editor of "george orwell's complete works," presents insight into the author's personal life in "george orwell diaries." in "subversives," seth rosenfeld chronicles the fbi's clandestine involvement at the university of california berkeley in the 960s and why it mattered to

ronald reagan. investigative reporter richard miniter examines the most important decisions of president obama's first term in "leading from behind: the reluctant president and the advisers who decide for him." look for these titles in bookstores this coming week, and watch for the authors in the near future on booktv and on booktv.org. >> what are you reading this summer? booktv wants to know. >> well, right now i'm reading mark frost's "grand slam," a study of bobby jones and the rise of american golf. frost earlier wrote "the greatest game ever played" which is about the 1913 u.s. open. it reads just like a novelist, wonderful writer, and i'm really enjoying it. i just finished daniel silva's new novel. silva writes brilliant novels about an israeli agent, and i've also read three books this summer by ben coes who writes about an american