go online to studentcam.org. >> up next, former abc news foreign correspondence barrie dunsmore talks about the stories he covered. author of "there and back," he thinks of the 2012 colby writers symposium in northfield, vermont. this is just over an hour. >> want to welcome you all to the colby symposium's book presentation this morning. this morning we're going to be hearing from barrie dunsmore. and like many of you, i think that we know that if there was another era of newscasting in this country that goes back several decades when we received all of our television news from just three networks. and it was more or less the same. everyone had his or her particular favorite, but we all

appreciated anchors in the those news programs who we trusted and were solid in their reporting, long serving types like chet huntley and david brinkley and tom brokaw and john chancellor at nbc, peter jennings, harry k. reasoner -- harry k. smith, excuse me, and -- excuse me, harry reasoner and howard k. smith with abc. and walter cronkite with cbs. and we also respected greatly the correspondents with those programs, the likes of the brothers marvin and bernard kalb, sam donaldson and one of the best, barrie dunsmore. as ted koppel says in in his forward to the book, we gave american television viewers what we thought they needed to know,

not necessarily what they would have selected for themselves. now, that era's largely gone. we have good news, sources of good news today, but they no longer provide a common starting point for our national dialogue. we're very fortunate to have mr. dunsmore here with us today from an era that many of us think was a golden era of newscasting. he has an illustrious and long background. i've provided his background for you to be read. i don't think you want -- i would think you want to hear him rather than me. but let me just say he covered foreign affairs for abc news for 30 years reporting from washington and abroad on the policies of seven u.s. presidents from lyndon johnson to bill clinton. he traveled with them all overseas and was a regular on planes of their secretaries of state from 1965 to '95. he reported from more than 100 countries on virtually every major international event from

wars to summits to diplomatic shuttles. as i said to him on a phone call that as an international affairs junkie, i was very envious of the many people he has met and the many stories he has covered and witnessed. after i, again, will let you read his bio, i would like to add that after his retirement in 1995, mr. dunsmore became a fellow at the center of press, politics and public policy, the john f. kennedy school of government at harvard. in addition to lecturing on the role of the news media, mr. dunsmore conducted a study of the potential consequences of live television coverage of war, something very interesting here. and the next war live was published bihar saturday in 1996. joseph nye, dean of harvard's kennedy school and a favorite of mine as my students know described duns more's work as exactly the kind of probing

analysis of which the school can be proud. he has won other awards, but met me just conclude with the comments of former secretary of state henry kissinger of his newest book that you, some of you have copies of, and he'll be discussing this morning. this compilation of essays dealing with the weeks when he accompanied me in the early 1970s to his commentaries on the arab spring will mark dunsmore firmly as one of the significant journalists of our era. so it's a great pleasure for me to welcome barrie dunsmore, and i want to thank him for the service he's rendered to our country in sound news reporting, and he still contributes to vermont, at least, in his commentaries in local newspapers and vpr. thank you, barrie, for coming. [applause] >> thank you very much, professor, and thank you all for

being here this morning. now that i'm a retiree, i don't usually get up this early. [laughter] this is an opportunity or is presented as an opportunity for me to talk about my book. but my book is pretty hard to talk about because it's about almost everything. it's a compilation of columns, commentaries, book reviews, speeches and other such things all of which i have written in my retirement years and of which i am, i'm quite proud. but i in making a speech about my book, it's kind of difficult, so i'm focusing today on the section which, actually, a subsection of the book which is on the news media but which i know a little bit. when i retired, one of the things that i absolutely

promised myself and anyone else who would listen is that i would not fall victim to that horrible affliction that infects so many people of my age. it's diagnosed as old fartitis. and that's the belief that everything that happened in my time was wonderful, and everything that's happening now is no good. but i have to be honest, sometimes it's hard, sometimes it's hard to fulfill that promise to myself. as i look at the, at the media landscape today, there are certainly things that are troublesome, at least that i find troublesome. and i'm going to talk today about the golden age of network television news and of the news media. those of you who are experts in the subject, and i know that when i'm speaking here for the

next few days there are always more experts listening than i am on most of these subjects, but golden ages whether they be of ancient greece or renaissance italy or broadway musicals are largely a function and a creation of a unique set of circumstances. and those golden ages end when those special circumstances are fundamentally changed. so before i talk, however, about the demise of the golden age of television as one person lucky enough to have been part of that era, i'd like to talk a little bit about it. the golden age of network television news runs, roughly speaking, from the middle of the 1950s to the middle of the '80s. and in those days, as the professor pointed out, there were basically three television networks, abc, nbc and cbs.

and they were the windows on the world for the great majority of americans. each night more than 50 million people would be watching the evening news. of and just to give you a basis for comparison, nowadays there are fewer than 20 million people who watch the evening news, and i have to say that virtually all of them are on social security. [laughter] the young people don't watch the evening news. the newscasts evolved into a kind of town meeting/therapy session which people could use to ponder the momentous events of the world, of their nation and of their neighborhood. and those were, indeed, the momentous times for all of us. the cold war was at its height, and in the aftermath of the cuban missile crisis of 1962 it

seemed a very real possibility that we could have nuclear war. by 1965 the vietnam war was raging, and by 1995 -- sorry, by 196 l anti-war buttons were everywhere in the country. also in the 1960s a president, his brother and the country's most prominent black leader were assassinated, two of them in the same year, 1968. now, beneath this seething surface that we had there were several ongoing and interlocking social revolutions over race, feminism, the new technologies and sexual freedom. at such a moment, the newly-found power of television could have become an instrument for extremism and division, but it did not.

more by accident, perhaps, the design the news broadcasts of that era were voices of moderation amid the chaos. they reflected middle class values and, essentially, centrist politics mainly because those who produced them were middle class and moderate. sometimes a bit to the left, sometimes a little to the right, but never very far from the center. the assassination of president john kennedy was a watershed for television news. whatever warts have since been discovered on the persona of john kennedy, at the time of his death he was certainly a much beloved president. television three-day nonstop coverage of the aftermath of the event went a very long way in calming a people that on the margins were almost paranoid about what had happened. and even though that coverage did involve the murder of kennedy's assassin, lee harvey oswald, the population generally

did receive a calming influence by the networks. and it was crucially important that in this time of history that this time of high anxiety in history that the networks conducted themselves responsibly. after all, just the year before the united states and the soviet union had come right to the brink of nuclear war. and both oswald had connections with both russia and cuba. so at the time there were big questions raging around the country. was the soviet union involved in the assassination, and if so, should the united states stage a preemptive attack against the russians? a preemptive nuclear attack? well, it wasn't very long into this period that the networks firmly said, no, no to both questions. the russians were not behind the assassination, and, therefore, no preemptive strikes were -- they were off the table. so the country began to breathe

a great sigh of relief. now, one can almost hear the breathless tones and purple prose of the all-cable news networks if, god forbid, something like a presidential assassination should happen today. it can be said that the networks behaved with great seriousness and dignity and in doing so they achieved new levels of respect in the eyes of most americans. there were many people involved in the news programs, but three men became their personification. walter cronkite at cbs news, david brinkley of nbc and later of abc and howard k. smith who left cbs to anchor at abc. when you were watching them on television, you were getting an authentic person, not the creation of focus groups, queue ratings, make-up artists and publicity people.

these were genuine journalists, and i can promise you the way they came across on the air was very much the way they were in person. while the personality of each man was certainly different, it's notable how similar they were in terms of background and journalistic philosophy. remarkable, too, all were southerners. the southern background turned out to be very important to how they approached probably the most important story of their times and ours. the civil rights movement of the 1960s. as young men, none of these three had been an activist for racial equality. cronkite actually confessed that as a young man he had not had the courage to challenge his teenage friends at his texas high school when they made racist remarks. but all of these men had seen enough racism in the south to know that it was morally wrong to perpetuate a system that blatantly failed to enforce equal treatment and protection under the law.

and this proposition would eventually be accepted by the nation as a whole thanks in large measure to the extensive news coverage of the civil rights movement by the network television news broadcasts. and so when the civil rights act of 1964 and the voting rights act of 1965 were all passed, it could be said of the networks that this was their finest hour too. in its gold withen age of -- golden age of television -- or in its golden age, television network news had its period of main influence mainly because it had as its symbols men of unquestioned journalistic integrity, and in so doing contributed to peace and stability in both foreign and domestic news. the daily arguments in the newsrooms were not partisan, nor were they about what story would be most interesting or

titillating or amusing. the debates were about what was the most intrinsically important thing that had happened that day that the people needed to know no -- to make them better citizens? the as the sage of cbs news in those days, eric sevareid put it it's not my job to tell people what to think, it's to suggest what they might think about. the image of network news has, of course, greatly diminished since walter cronkite was considered the most trusted man in america. in most polling these days, the news media generally rank among the least respected and trusted institutions in the country, although i might note that while they are down now to almost single digits in this regard, they still usually come out a little ahead of the united states congress. [laughter] ..

please humor me and allow me to talk about the changes that did take place during the 30 years that i was a correspondent with abc news. my first foreign assignment was to paris. originally i was supposed to go to saigon, but the vice president was killed in a commercial plane crash and there were a number of personnel changes and when the dust settled instead of going to saigon i was sent to paris as the roving correspondent and what that really meant was that in those days unless it was vietnam it was almost any other place in the world and probably

the middle east. but even in paris communications and were almost like the dark ages compared to today or got most of my word with a head office with the telegrams and these could take from 12 to 24 hours for an exange, and there were some transatlantic phonecalls but they were the radio type. they had to be looked many hours in advance. they were very unreliable and as a matter of fact they could cost as much as $100 for just a regular call. then of course when i was working in the middle east in the 1960's, communications were even more primitive than that. we used only telegrams between the field and america because there were no long distance calls and certainly no satellites. and that situation would actually shape my first big scoop and historic story. during the 1967 middle east war,

i went to the suez canal with israeli troops who had spent the week fighting across the sinai desert in pushing the egyptians back across the suez canal. this was an historic event, and it happened it was on a friday when this took place. that night the black-and-white film that we had collected for the week was given to a staff writer who made his way across the sinai desert to tell at the. the next morning the film was put on a commercial plane to roam. in rome and had to be shipped to pan am or twa plane to new york. when it got to new york the film had to be unloaded, taken to the headquarters. it had to be processed and then it had to be edited. so my big scoop of friday appeared on the abc evening news sunday night. by that time, there was a cease-fire in the middle east

and instead of the big scoop it was really just a feature story. compare that to 25 years later during the war when i was able to do live reports in the room from my hotel of incoming scud missiles into riyadh saudi arabia. in those intervening 25 years, cameras have gone from black-and-white film to color film, to color videotape. the cameras became smaller and smaller so they could be comfortably handheld and satellites may direct distance dialing possible and much much cheaper. and there were enough satellites and operations so that these could be used almost anyplace in the world. and so even by the time of the october 1973 war, which really was not that long after the 67 war, i was able to get my reports on the air each night by using the satellite facilities located in suburban tel aviv.

just as the telegraph revolutionized print reporting during the civil war, the communications satellite totally change the nature of 20th century war reporting. gone were the days of the two and three day timeline between the event received and it actually appearing on television in america. computers computers and digitalization ultimately made it possible for two people to carry enough equipment by hand to transmit live sound and pictures of virtually anywhere in the world. as i concluded after doing a study at harvard school it meant that the next war was probably inevitable. it was also decidedly a mixed blessing, but that media is really and truly out of the bottle and we simply have to learn to live at the. these new technologies gave us the capacity to make the news

media more vital and more competitive, but meantime cable television which have been around for quite a long time found new plays in wired cities in millions of people began to get access to cable. when that happened cable began to challenge the big three networks, seriously cutting into their ad revenues and ultimately the all-new 24/7 cable stations would eventually eliminate the big three monopolies on the news as well. however, all these changes really pale in comparison to the newest of new information technology that has totally revolutionized the mainstream media. the internet, combined with the personal computer and the cell phone and the accompanying arrival of a social network's of facebook, twitter youtube and the personal blog, they have begun to refine and redefine what constitutes news and what actually is a reporter.

now no one would argue that citizen reporters using a cell phone amidst the revolutions of the arab spring and egypt and libya and now serious have been anything other than very very good for freedom and democracy. but i also believe that professional, knowledgeable and trustworthy reporters must continue to play an important role in our news media, something which i will expand on a little bit. this might be a good time to make a general statement about these technologies. in my view, while they certainly are game changers in many respects, they are inherently neither good nor bad. like all their revolutionary predecessors from movable type to the telegraph, they are essentially neutral instruments, whether they serve society or subbird is depends very much on how they are used and to what ends. and so those are the fundamental technological changes that

brought about the demise of the golden age of television. the other significant change i mentioned concerns the business model. the two of course are directly related because the new technologies that were responsible for the business model changes in the first place. now when i joined abc news nearly five decades ago now, network television news did not function for the purpose of making money. according to the fcc rules of the day, networks were obligated to carry the news of public affairs as a condition for their licenses. bill paley who owns cbs news, was a businessman, not a journalist that he very much enjoy the prestige that cbs brought and he did not expect the news division to enrich him or other stockholders at cbs and neither did leonard goldenson of abc nor robert and david sarnoff who headed nbc. in my first year, 1965, the

annual budget for abc news was about $5 million. and it lost money. now what that meant was that the revenue that it made in commercials which ran on the evening news, did not add up to the amount of money being spent. now when i left, 30 years later, because there were so many more news programs made possible by satellite and so on, the annual news budget has ballooned from $5 million to $500 million. but, commercial revenues not only covered back, they added another $200 million or more to the network's profits. avc networks profits are the others as well because they were all in about the same situation. when i first wrote about this a number of years ago, i coined this phrase, network news divisions have gone from leaders

to cash cows. among other things, such profits began to attract wall street and by the '90s, all three networks have been taken over by conglomerates with no connection to the news whatsoever. companies like ge and disney were interested in one thing and one thing only and that was the bottom line. the result of this change was that the number one preoccupation or subsequent used managers became ratings, because the amount of money and a network and news division would earn was based entirely on how many people were watching. so, so began what is now usually described as the dumbing down of network news, policy based on the mistaken assumption that this would attract more viewers. show doctors were brought and to come up with more interesting items for the broadcast.

ultimately this brought us less foreign news and more celebrity stories. fewer serious subjects and more news you can use. but even as the newscast became softer, they continue to lose viewers and revenues too in an ever faster rate and by the late 1990s cable news and the internet where taking a huge bite out of both the viewers and the revenues. now one step to cope with this losing trend was to make big cuts in news coverage itself. networks used the end of the cold war as an excuse to reduce eventual, eventually closing most foreign bureaus and those cutbacks were not simply cosmetic. in 1964, i'm sorry -- in 1984, i was transferred to the abc news bureau in london as the senior foreign correspondent.

in those days, abc's overseas headquarters -- though we had her own building. we had our own studios and we had a location right in central london near the bbc and almost, in fact almost exactly 200 employees at the time. today, abc rents two rooms and an office near heathrow airport and their art 12 staffers. yet, what these did was eliminate some of the previous real strengths of the evening news broadcast. the stories that made them different and better than cable, and so the ratings slide continued. for newspapers and other print media the challenge of the internet and the social networks is that they have stolen much of the readership. even worse web sites such as

craigslist and angie's list etc. have siphoned off most of the classified advertising, which since the early days of newspapers has been their bread and butter. even today major newspapers like "the washington post" do not have nearly the staff and coverage that they once had, especially in the foreign area and even many of the old pros domestically have an given early retirement. "the new york times" is hanging on with the help of a few -- $250 million loan from the mexican millionaire carlos. the times is trying various ways to charge for its on line verses which seems to me perfectly proper but people are accustomed to getting most of their things on line for nothing and apparently they are still resisting it. no one yet seems to have found the formula for making newspapers the big money makers that they once were and actually the aim now is just the survival

and in the case of quite a few papers they are failing at that too. the once owned weekly mag seems face the same sagging readership problems as the newspapers and their only shadows of their former selves. time is in survival mode. u.s. news has basically folded. "newsweek" was sold recently for 1 dollar. and, you can tell by just looking at these magazines how slim they are, that they are no longer paying what they once did, which was the highest salaries for reporters. nowadays, you see quite a few, in fact almost exclusively opinion columns in these magazines and some of the columnists are still quite good. i think maybe some of them also are working at discount prices so they can get their material published and that means that they will have a better chance of being picked up as guest commentators by the cable news channels, which pay quite well.

publishing and all of its old forms, is clearly struggling and e-books published by amazon.com may be our future. i noticed that the once revered encyclopedia britannica is no longer going to be available in book form. 2010 was its last book edition and in the future it too will only be available on line. i assume that it's going to be going head-to-head with wikipedia. the latter certainly doesn't have the cachet of britannica, but as wikipedia doesn't pay for most of its writers or doesn't charge its readers, it may well wind that battle. so that pretty much brings to an end the demise of the news media for this part of the lecture. so what remains is, why does this matter? there are people perhaps in this room who believe that it really

doesn't. they would say that the new media of the internet, social networks and personal blogs represent liberation from an old top-down management controlled by large corporations, a system that has no real place in the new i.t. age. people can now find out things for themselves, think for themselves and they don't need professional journalists to tell them what's happening. now if i were a lot younger, i think i would probably feel that way myself but while age doesn't necessarily equip you with wisdom it does give you some perspective and what i see is that in spite of all the platforms available to provide indispensable information, there is tangible evidence that today's citizens are remarkably ill-informed. we have a situation where people read, listen to and watch only those who share their prejudices

and they don't want to be bothered with diverse opinions. so throughout the internet and the blogosphere and the cable channels and talk radio, we have more and more people with passionate partisan opinions that are almost entirely fact free. we are constantly being harangued by people who claim that president obama is a muslim, a socialist, a communist, and not see. the president of courses none of the above, but i would guess that if challenged, very few of these critics would be able to even roughly apply what any of those words actually mean. in my day, we reporters would try to set the record straight when politicians did nothing but low smoke. we were discouraged from expressing our personal opinions in our reporting but we were expected to challenge public figures who distorted the truth

or flat out lied. nowadays facts and lies don't seem to matter. balanced reporting, especially on cable news, involves taking two of the most extreme people on either side and having them get let each other for a period. it seems to to me the viewers learned nothing from these pseudo-debates and i know that i am far from being the only one who thinks this. as it turns out, david gergen, who is an acquaintance of mine, and is now a professor at harvard's kennedy school and a commentator on cnn -- but david also has a lot degree, served in the u.s. navy and the pacific and he was the u.s. news columnist and later editor. most notably for many years, are gerken served in the white house as an adviser to president nixon, ford, reagan and clinton. when he was working with clinton he approached me about becoming

the white house spokesman on foreign affairs. when that didn't work out, he suggested that i could become a spokesman at the pentagon. but especially with the cold war ending, it didn't sound very interesting to me so i declined the offer. i really dodged a bullet there because had i taken that job and had i they stayed on for a bit, when the monica lewinsky scandal erupted, and linda tripp was involved, both those two ladies would have been working for me at the pentagon. [laughter] so as i say i dodged a bullet there. but that is a digression. in a recent interview gergen talked of his concerns about the aspects of today's journalism. he is not against young journalist and certainly neither am i but in his words, you want young writers who were really really bright, but i think

understanding the world today does require you spend enough time doing that. gherkin continued, i thought abc news anchorman peter jennings was a serious thinker who knew that the streets of beirut better than anybody i knew and if anything was happening in the middle east i would turn on peter jennings because they knew he had paid his dues, he had been there and he has worked there and he knows it. it really comes down to this. the reason for the demise of the news media, it matters and that is because if we do not have a reasonably informed electorate, the very nature of democracy is threatened. citizens need to have a basic understanding of the issues the country faces and what political parties or candidates have done or promised to do in the future. at the evidence is building that even with all the new technologies, we do not have a

better informed electorate. actually, there is evidence that the opposite may be jirga. in ancient greece, democracy was born of course there are but there were two political and social classes that divided the power in the city states. and they were the oligarchs and the democracies. the oligarchs wanted to establish a state in which only owners of substantial amounts of property could vote and the democrats insisted that all male citizens have the same rights and for a century or more the democrats usually prevailed. but the great philosophers plato and aristotle were not expanse of democracy. according to plato ordinary people were too easily swayed by the emotional and deceptive rhetoric of ambitious politicians. it was after all the demos where

the majority of the people at the time to time and again voted to support the disastrous campaigns of the peloponnesian war which was a 27 year struggle between sparta and africa were effectively ended and of course plato had a special anger because it was the demos that was responsible for the death of socrates. the republic -- oligarchy or democracy. people here of course know he sought to define and create the ideal community, the one society that would possess a perfect sociopolitical legal system. that is the one that came to be known as utopia and as you all know we are still looking for that one. about 2000 years later during the age of enlightenment european philosopher john roth and -- were leading advocates of the

new social contract between rulers and their people that would replace the absolute power of the monarchy's. locke's social contract included the concept of political rule or government should be based on consent of the government. thomas jefferson had carefully studied john locke and integrated this idea of consent of the government directly into the american declaration of independence. his many biographers inevitably stress jefferson abide in in the mac in people's wisdom in choosing their government. black, with significant qualifications. as he once said, whenever a people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government. and he also said, if a nation expects to be ignorant and free and expects what never was and never will be, jefferson's concern about ignorance and his belief that the people must be

informed drove him to become the great proponent that he was for public education. his other preoccupation, freedom of the press, was directly related to this. jeffersonian scholars explained that he saw the press as an essential element in providing citizens the objective information they needed to make sound political judgments. those two ideas are tied together and most journalists favored jeffersonian quote the basis of our government being the opinion of people, the very first objects would be to keep that right. if it were left to me to decide whether we should have a government without the press or without newspapers or newspapers without a government, i should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. yet here again, jefferson as his qualifications, but i should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.

well, more than two centuries later one of this country's respective political mines remains worried that today's americans are not just ill informed but woefully ignorant. dr. presents key has continued to be one of america's best strategic thinkers and certainly one of its more of prolific analyst. brzezinski had a focus called strategic vision come, america and the crisis of local power. and setting up his thesis concerning america's strategy he listed what he called the six critical dimensions that stand out as america's major and increasingly threatening liabilities. one of those he identifies as quote, a public that is highly ignorant about the world, the uncomfortable truth is the united states public has an alarmingly limited knowledge of basic global geography, current

events and even pivotal moments in world history. brzezinski supports this assertion by citing surveys that even as thousands of u.s. troops were being killed in the middle east area, 63% of young american adults could not find iraq on a map and 88% could not find afghanistan. he mentions polls that show that more than half of seniors didn't know that nato was formed against soviet expansionism. and 30% of american adults could not name to countries that america fought in world war ii. he blames this on a deficient public education system and on the news media, which except for a few major newspapers, brzezinski holds in low regard. brzezinski continues to argue forcibly why it matters.

in his words, the cumulative effect of such widespread ignorance takes the public more susceptible to demagogic leg stimulated fear especially when aroused by a terrorist attack. that in turn increases the probability of self-destructive foreign-policy initiatives. in general, public ignorance creates an american political environment more hospitable to extremist simplifications. in an interview about this book on cbs brzezinski made it clear that what he had in mind were the wars in iraq and afghanistan and the alarming drumbeat for a war in iran. as he summed it up in a conversation with charlie rose brzezinski seemed to be channeling his jefferson and plato by saying, we can't have an intelligent foreign-policy unless we have intelligent people. while i totally agree i would like to repeat that the demise of the news media that i have been discussing has to do with the loss of respect they once

held with the american people, which is certainly diminished their importance and their influence. with the failure of their business model, which has left them with the ever weakening financial base so that they are now less able to do the job of informing the public than they once were able to do. that said, i would like to close on a more positive note. in the often now denigrated mainstream media, it needs to be stressed there remain many reporters willing to risk their lives so that we all can be better informed. while most days they get less time on the air or newspapers space, there are certainly fewer out there. we are fortunate we still have excellent reporters out there doing their best, sometimes

under frightful conditions. i could name many but i would like to close by mentioning two. marie colvin, who is from long island and worked for the london "the sunday times," was right in the middle of what is now the syrian civil war. colvin was distinctive for the eyepatch that she wore to cover the eye that she had lost in the 1990s when she was shot reporting in sri lanka. this was her last message sent not long before she and her photographer were apparently targeted and killed by rockets fired by the syrian army. she wrote, i think the reports of my survival may be exaggerated. that was the neighborhood of holmes the focal point of resistance to the searing regime and its people were being subjected to relentless attacks by artillery and tanks.

sickening road marie. i cannot understand how the world can stand by and i should be heartened by now. doctors could do nothing. ..

>> in his books and in his reporting in two of america's best newspapers, he was able to change the perceptions of many people in this country who are prone to seeing the arabs as either decadent sheikhs or a bunch of ragheads with terrorist inclinations. anthony continually risked his life in baghdad. during the iraq war he was shot in the arm while reporting from the west bank x last year he came close to being executed as a spy in libya. for the past year, shadid spent much time in egypt. meantime, periodically he'd been sneaking in and out of syria from lebanon to see and hear for himself about the ebb and flow of the efforts to unseat the dictator, bashar assad. last month he he lewded

authorities again -- eluded authorities again, and he died from a major asthma attack. he was 43 years old with a wife and two children. the news media is much poorer for the loss of the likes of these men who knew they were taking great risks, but persisted in their very dangerous way of life. now, i've often been asked what motivates people to want to cover wars? well, as it happens, marie colvin eloquently answered that question as a speaker at an event just over a year ago to honor the many journalists who had helped behind the scenes and the journalists themselves who in the past decade had lost their lives. this is part of what ms. colvin said on that occasion in hon done. we go to -- london. we go to remote war zones to report what is happening. the public have a right to know what our government and our

armed forces are doing in our name. in an age of 24/7 rolling news, blogs and twitters, we are on constant call, but wherever we are war reporting is essentially the same. someone has to go there and see what's happening. you can't get that information without going to places where people are being shot at and others are shooting at you. the real difficulty is having enough faith in humanity to believe that enough people, be they be government, military or the man on the street, will actually care when your files reach the printed page, the web site or the tv screen. we do have faith because we believe we do make a difference. and so this final thought. if we truly care about what is happening in this country and in our world, there are people in the news media in the whom we can put trust and to whom we can give our support.

the best way to do this is to pay attention to what they write and broadcast and to tune out the hate spewers, the misogynists, the racists and those who would divide us. if enough of us can do that, america will be better informed, and its democracy may jet be saved. -- may yet be saved. thank you. [applause] >> we have at least five minutes for some questions -- [inaudible] thank you so much for emphasizing the importance of the news media for our democracy. >> thank you. so what do we do? [laughter] well, of course, if i had the absolute formula, then i would be selling it to the facebook

owner for a billion dollars, wouldn't i? [laughter] well, i think just really to follow up what i've said, i think that individually what we can do is to pay attention to people that we, that we know are not misogynists, are not racists, who are not shouting in ways to divide us. there are significant numbers of good reporters dealing with foreign affairs in, certainly in "the new york times," "the washington post" still has some. the magazines like the new yorker has some very good people and some of the great books of the middle east, the contemporary middle east have been written by journalists. there are a few good ones on television, i think, still. and i think if we, if we reject the idea that the present situation where the agenda is

set by the likes of rush limbaugh, then we can only do this on an individual basis. but that's all i can think of at the time. i am hopeful that, that our younger people will have an opportunity -- and i think they do can, because although on the one hand it's a very tough nut to crack today, on the other hand, the options are wide open because there are so many ways that you can publish or broadcast or whatever which certainly didn't exist in my day. and i can't say that i have total confidence that this is going to happen, but i devoutly hope that it will, that there will be some new business model that will take us beyond where we are now and that we will still have a flourishing and effective news media. because in the absence of that i think we are in very serious trouble. yes.

>> [inaudible] our education system's educating more of our youth that this would not be happening. do you believe that perhaps our educational systems are lacking? >> well, i will, i'll lay it off on brzezinski, and the answer would be absolutely, yes. it is -- we hear an awful lot about how it's failing to teach the sciences, math, and i think that's demonstrably true in terms of the scores that are chalked up by american students. but i think it's equally true that in the social sciences whether they be english or history or geography that they're very much wanting too. as it happens, i have a -- despite my advanced years -- i have a 20-year-old daughter in

college at nyu in new york. and it's interesting that she learned an enormous amount in high school in vermont. because she had an ap government teacher who was absolutely brilliant, and she learned more about the government of the united states and the system and how it worked than i know many college students that i have talked to ever learned. i taught at, i taught a course at middlebury, and then i had some senior students who were very, very good who knew nothing about the japanese interment in world war ii. nothing. it hadn't come up in their, in their almost 16 years of education. so, yes, i think that's a major factor in the level of, dare i say, ignorance that is out there. >> [inaudible]

so deficient? >> i don't want, i don't want to, i don't want to condemn teachers because, frankly, the good teachers as we all know can change our lives, and i certainly have had some in my lifetime. so i wouldn't make that a blanket condemnation. i think the whole system is demonstrably not working as well as it should. yes, sir. and we'll come to you next, okay? >> well, my children are in their 20s now, they're both intelligent college graduates, and they don't read the paper, they don't watch the news. we get "newsweek," they don't look at "newsweek" either. so i'm just wondering and, you know, they get most of their information, you know, online, on the internet. and, you know, i know most of their friends, same situation. so -- >> thank god for jon stewart, is what i can say. [laughter] >> what's to be with this generation, the y generation which is our -- >> yes. no, i think you put your finger

on it, and that's true with all the people that i meet that my daughter now lives with and studies with and so on. they don't watch television news at all. and i -- but i'm only half kidding when i say thank god for jon stewart because, actually, that is a, that is a program -- and i guess colbert which follows him -- which really does deal with some issues that are out there and does so in a way that young people find not just amusing, but they learn from. i don't think we could hang our hats on that, but at least it's -- it's too slender a read for that -- but nevertheless, a positive factor out there, and there aren't that many. you know, there's good information on pbs every night, but if no one's watching it, then it doesn't really help, does it? i promised this young man. >> if you had the significant ability to do so, how would you

rectify the way the internet is affecting our newscasting in america? would you -- how would you change the internet and how it affects the spread of information? >> i wouldn't go near the internet with a ten-foot pole. i think all attempts to regulate or shape or censor or anything else is ultimately self-defeating. i think it will have to organically emerge in a positive way, if possible, as a result of market forces and people's interests and so on and so forth. i don't think any government or any czar is going to be able to do very much with that. we will have to see how that ultimately shakes down. >> would it be better if the internet was not used for spreading information like that? >> no. absolutely not. i think it serves -- i mean, it is right now it's a troublesome service because so much of the information on the internet is totally bogus. and can that's, i mean, that's

the troubling thing. and people have to learn to be able to select what is and what isn't. and i think that there are a lot of people that are very wanting in that regard, and as i mentioned earlier that people sometimes now they don't want to go to a web site if you're a dyed in the wool conservative, god forbid you would want to read anything written by a liberal, and vice versa. so there's very little cross-poll anyization. so the information may not even be wrong, but so often it's idealogically colored and does not provide some kind of balanced thought. and i don't know how to deal with that. i really and truly don't know how to deal with that. but it's absolutely true that people now watch, listen, read only those people whose prejudices they share. and that's not a good thing.

yes. >> i think social media is a fascination that has taken over our youth, and their free time, shall we say, is just taken up by social media leaving no time for educating themselves or watching or listening to anything that's serious. >> uh-huh. well, there's no doubt that a great deal of time is spent dealing with the social media. i find that twitter seems to be the one of choice of many people because what are the limitations on twitter, how many words is it? >> 140 characters. >> hmm? >> 10 characters. >> 140 characters. that says quite a bit about the attention span of people right now. [laughter] i'm afraid it doesn't -- what it says is not a very good -- [inaudible] [laughter] >> i had an account on one of the social media for, i think, three days because i was

curious. so i opened an account. and i got so many messages that were just nonsense. it just blew my mind as to how many people have time to sit around and talk about nothing. three days, and i closed the account. >> i think maybe that this can evolve, that this will evolve, that there's a certain fascination with it now be, and many people getting into it now for the first time, and they're fascinated by it. again, i devoutly hope that this will be the case, that it will lose some of its power to enthrall, and people will look objectively and say, wait a minute, why am i spending all this time to do this? but, as i say, i devoutly hope that. i am not predicting it. yes, sir. >> i was thinking about our

generation that can still remember, you know, god and country, you know, pledge allegiance to the flag, saying prayers in schools, things of this nature. we're the last conscience, i think, of this country because we remember back when we could leave our doors open in our community, we had this community life and everything. and today the children have lost the ability because they're all working, they don't have time, they don't have the time just to sit and talk around the family table. and can all of those -- and all of those wonderful things that we had as i was growing up. and my father was a hard working individual, he paid his taxes, and he donated to the church and did all those wonderful things that was expected of him. in that time frame. we've become less kind today. and we speak in half truths. and everybody is worried about where the next dollar's going to come from so they can support a lifestyle which they've become

accustomed to. now, that lifestyle might be declining, and our children's children may not ever see it, but do you still believe that our generation probably is the last generation and is really the conscience of this country of what it was founded on, and that is deteriorated and going away? >> i would like not to be quite that pessimistic. almost everything you've said i understand and agree with, and i share the personal experience. my parents were working class people. but when i hear people denigrating the knowledge and understanding of working class people, i think back to my youth and not just my parents, but the people around us, my relatives and neighbors and other such things. i grew up during world war ii. but these people were intensely interested in what was going on

in the world. i mean, i heard winston churchill made speeches. i heard fdr made speeches. i actually heard adolf hitler. i didn't know who he was saying, it didn't sound good. because these people who were products of the dust bowl and the depression and so on, they cared about the political system. so much so that my father used to take me to the legislature to listen to debates. i don't think -- that doesn't happen anymore. but i don't take an entirely -- [inaudible] view, and i think that it's possible that we do change, and a colleague of mine who was here to speak to you later, ralph peters, we were discussing this last night. and he said, you know, when people talk about how divided we are, his book is on gettysburg. and it sounds like an excellent one. i look forward to reading it. but, you know, he notes and we can think about it, and there have been sort of new numbers

that we're talking 800,000 killed and seriously wounded in that war over four years, how much more divisive could one possibly be than at that particular time? now, it's taken us a long time to recover from the civil war, and one of the tings that really surprised me -- one of the things that really surprised me when i came back finally to no longer be telephone -- be on the road was how much of the impact of the civil war was still with us in certain parts of the country particularly. and that's troubling. but nevertheless, the level of violence and the level of divisiveness is not, i would argue, is not as great today as it was then. so i think we can change. i mean, i don't think we're, that there's some dictum that we're doomed. again, i'm using the phrase i devoutly hope that we're not. and i probably won't be around to see how it works out.

[applause] i think we're finished. >> with the republican national convention having wrapped up in tampa on thursday, democrats will now gather for their convention in charlotte, north carolina, next week. watch c-span for live gavel-to-gavel coverage including speeches by elizabeth warren, former president bill clinton, first lady michelle obama and the keynote address by san antonio mayor julian castro. watch every minute, every speech on c-span. here on c-span2 booktv will continue all day, every day next week with highlights of nonfiction authors and books from this past year. and on c-span3 watch 24 hours of american history tv with lectures, oral histories and a look at historical american sites and artifacts. >> well, you're watching booktv on c-span2, and we are on location in new york city at the annual book publishing

industry's convention held at the javits center in midtown manhattan. and we want to introduce you to a new author whose book is coming out in september. and his name is kevin powers. and he has written a novel called "the yellow birds." first of all, give us just a little bit of your background so people understand where you're coming from. >> sure, i grew up in virginia. 17 i signed up for the army. >> what year was that? >> that was 1997. that was, actually, before my senior year in high school. i ended up going to iraq in 2004 and 2005, got back. um, i've always been a huge reader, and i've always been a writer too. and when i got back from overseas, i realized that i had a story to tell about the war. so i started writing the book about a year or two after i got back. >> how long were you in the army and the armed forces? >> eight years total, yeah.

>> did you, did you feel fulfilled being in the armed forces? >> there was a lot that i liked about it. a lot of really good people. um, i appreciated the discipline. you know, i learned a lot about myself. and it was a privilege to serve in the armed forces. >> so you were in iraq in 2003-2004? >> 2004-2005. >> 4 and 5. when you got back and left the army, left the armed force, what was your life like? >> well, i think one of the things that's difficult coming back is kind of the lack of order and direction. life, as difficult as it can be in the military and especially overseas, it's incredibly simple. you know what's expected of you, and part of your job is, you know, right there in front of you, and you just sort of have to go do it. when you get home, there's so much free time, you know, you're just sort of bombarded with

options and possibilities, stimuli. especially coming back from the desert. color, i mean, everything is sort of overwhelming. the readjustment period is really challenging. >> and what did you find most challenging? >> i think the sort of not knowing what i was supposed to do next. that was, that was tough. i knew that i was going to get out of the military after i got back from my tour. and i sort of didn't know what the next step was going to be for me. so kind of figuring that out was a little tough. >> so you started writing "the yellow birds," or you started writing a novel, is that correct? >> i did, yeah. >> and how did you submit it? how did you get it somebody who could publish it? this was published by little brown. >> right. well, i started working on it while i was an undergraduate, and i had taken some creative writing classes. i actually was mainly writing poetry at that time. i ended up in graduate school at the university of texas and

showed it to professors, and they were really encouraging. a good friend of mine, phillip meyer, who's the author of "american rust," also a graduate of commissioners center read it and really loved it, and he offered to send it to his agent on my behalf. that's how i got into my agent. >> is this based on your experience in iraq? >> well, i say it's a work of the imagination that wouldn't have happened without the experiences that i had. i mean, the circumstances that occur in the book are not what happened to me while i was overseas, but i think the sort of emotional core of the book is something that i wanted to get out there and to communicate to people who maybe felt like they didn't understand that experience. one of the most frequent questions that i got asked and i think a lot of veterans are asked, what was it like over there? and it's hard to know how to answer that question. so that's really what i was trying to do when i started to write the book is sort of how do

i contend with that question, what is it like? >> well, you talked about the emotional core. what were one of the emotions that you bring out in "the yellow birds"? >> i think confusion is probably, i mean, you have a sort of job to do, and you understand your job. you may not understand all the repercussions, the way it'll affect you down the line, the way it affects the people around you and particularly the way it affects your family at home. you know, for instance, my mother, the hardships that she endured, and i don't think i really understood that until i'd had some time to mature and get a little older and kind of have conversations with her about what that year was like for her. so that's a story that i wanted to tell, too, sort of not just what it's like when you're overseas, but the effect that it can have on the families back home too. >> where did the title "the yellow birds" come from? >> it actually comes from a marching theater. it's a traditional army marching

cadence, and it's one of the epigraphs of the book. they have a yellow bird with a yell low bill perched upon my window sill which anybody who's been in the army, i'm sure, has heard that a million times. >> why did you decide to make this a novel rather than a fact-based book? >> i mean, i think a lot of people have really capably talked about what's, you know, sort of a big picture view of what's happened in iraq and afghanistan and what's going on over there. but i just felt like there was an opportunity to tell an individual's story, um, give a picture into one person's consciousness, emotional life during that tour, what that was like coming home. i felt like there was an opportunity for a story to be told on a kind of smaller, smaller scale. >> kevin powers, was ptsd an issue for you? >> i mean, i don't know. i mean, i was never diagnosed or anything like that. it was tough coming back, i'll say that.

it was a bigger challenge than i thought it was going to be. it's, you know, it takes -- i expected that things would be different, but you do have sort of noises that alarm you and things like that, and that's certainly something that i experienced. but, you know, i don't know if -- i do know that people have had it much worse than i did. you know, both my experience overseas and coming back. there's people out there who are really struggling with that, and, you know, maybe if this book can raise some awareness about what people are going through when they come home, that'd be something that i'd be incredibly grateful for. >> now, you're still a student at the university of texas. >> there i actually just graduated in may. >> congratulations. >> thank you very much. my major in poetry, yeah. >> as a first-time author, what's been your experience getting published and the whole hoopla surrounding it? >> well, yeah, i mean, it's really, it's exciting, you know?

it's not something i can say that i expected. i certainly hoped for it, but i've got a great agent, little brown's been fantastic to work with, so i feel i have a sort of support system in place. but, you know, it's a privilege that people might read something that i've written, so i'm really excited about it. so your next book, are you planning on doing another book, a book of poetry? >> i am. i have a book of poetry that's more or less finished, i'm still finishing this up, and i'm starting on my second novel which is just sort of in its very early stages now. >> is it based, also, on your military experience? >> no, it's not. no, no. >> well, we've been talking with kevin powers about his new novel, "the yellow birds," based on his experiences in iraq, and this comes out in september 2012. >> coming up today on booktv next, wired magazine correspondent andrew blum on his book, "tubes: a journey to the

center of the internet." and then "after words" with former white house national security council for asian affairs victor cha. after that a look at the life of juliet gordon low on the centennial anniversary of her founding of the girl scouts. >> john kennedy once met with harold mcmillan, the british prime minister, and you read the reports of the day in the newspapers, they discussed arms control, issues between the two powers. but only long afterwards did we get the notes on what they said to each other in private. turned out kennedy spent a lot of time complaining about bad press coverage. press was being tough on jackie and other things. and mcmillan who was a generation older said, jack, why do you care? it doesn't matter, you have other things to worry about. and kennedy quite heatedly said,

well, you know, that's easy for you to say, harold, how would you like if the press said your wife, lady dorothy, was a drunk, and mcmillan replied, i would simply say, you should have seen her mother. [laughter] so that's the kind of thing later on, you know, sort of fun things that give you an idea what these people are like that you just can't learn in realtime. >> historians and biographers use the advantage of hindsight to understand their summits through a prism -- subjects through a prism of time. sunday, your questions, calls, e-mails and tweets for presidential historian michael beschloss on the lives of presidents and wars, hot and cold. "in the depth" at noon eastern on c-span2's booktv. >> coming up next, wired magazine correspondent andrew blum reports on the physical components and locales that allow the internet to function globally. while researching his book, "tubes: a journey to the center of the internet, watts mr. blum toured