once again founders, another big hand. >> welcome to philadelphia to be here for the first time and some weren't. >> tonight on book tv in depth with the author until to prize-winning columnist. she talked about social policy in the politics that guided.feme >> in terms of the milkwe're political representation we areh behind north korea.all so americans like to congratulate themselves all the time.er one of, not doing very well andt maternal mortality.ked so m obviously we talk so much about things like obesity in good

health. a we really are not doing any morl near as well as we should. not and we shouldn't be doing it our because it's egalitarian, that n was our early argument. pl we should have women in high places because that is the fairness principle. if everything worked in america, if offers were chugging along really well. hospitals were running likeaseal clockwork. congress was really doing a banw of job. py i would say, you know, things are prettyin good. we need women in positionsas w because nobody is leading as well as they should be.hy if we are ignoring a big chunk of the population and that accounts for. >> watch the entire interview tonight at eight eastern.

>> spend the weekend in ohio state capitol columbus as book tv, americanist treaty he and c-span local cuts in vehicles with behind-the-scenes at the history and literary life of volans' largest city on book tv on c-span2. browse the rare book collection and ohio state university. >> originally published between march 1918 in december 1920. an american periodical called the little review. the reason i brought these out today is not so much to show you this first edition, but to show you a later edition that is extremely rare. 1921, the american government declared ulysses obscene and pornographic. people still wanted to read it. we actually have a copy of one of the pirate editions. if you notice the spine, alice-in-wonderland and the little minister.

>> throughout the weekend and saturday at noon eastern literary life in columbus ohio with book tv and c-span local content vehicles on c-span2. >> up next former abc news foreign correspondent talks about the stories he covered over his 30 year career. author of their impact. the 2012 colby military symposium held annually at the university in vermont. this is just over an hour. >> i want to welcome you to a symposium but presentation this morning. we're going to be hearing from buried tons more. like many of you, i think that we know that there was another era of miscasting in this country that goes back several decades. we received all of our television news from just three networks.

it was more or less the same. everyone has his or her particular favorite, but we all appreciate acres in business programs who we just did the number solid in reporting, long serving. peter jennings, harry k. smith. abc. walter cronkite was cbs. and we also respected greatly the correspondence with those programs. one of the best, as ted koppel says, we gave american

television viewers will without the need to know, not necessarily what they would have selected for themselves. that era is largely gone. we have good sources of news today, but they no longer provide a common starting point for our national dialogue. we are very fortunate to have mr. dunne's more here with us today from an error that many of us think was a golden era of miscasting. he has an illustrious and long background. i have provided his background for you to be read. i don't think you want to hear him rather than me, let me just say that he covered foreign affairs for abc news for 30 years. lyndon's ounce in to bill clinton. he traveled with them all overseas and was a regular on planes with secretaries of state from 1965 to 95.

every major international event. diplomatic shuttles. as i said to him on a phone call , international affairs jackie. very envious of the many people he just met and the many stories that he has covered and witnessed. again, i will let you read his -- would like to add that after his retirement in 1995 he became a fellow at ted joan johnston center of press politics and public policy, the john f. kennedy school of government at harvard in addition to lecturing on the roles in shaping public policy. conducted an extensive study of the potential consequences of live television coverage, something very interesting. published by harvard in 1996. the kennedy school and a favorite of mine, the work as a

step in the kind of balanced awful and probing analysis with the school can be proud. the former secretary of state henry kissinger. his newest book that some of you have copies of. this compilation of essays dating from the weeks when he accompanied me on the mideast shuttles in the early 1970's to his commentaries on the arabs bring, marked him as one of the significant journalists of our era. so it is a great pleasure for me to welcome. i want to thank him for the service that he has rendered to our country and sound news reporting flynn. still contributes to vermont in his commentaries. thank you for coming. [applause]

>> thank you very much. thank you all for being here this morning. now that i am a retiree i don't usually give up this wrong. this is an opportunity or is presented as an opportunity for me to talk about my book. 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 and my retirement years. i am -- in making a speech about why book, it's kind of difficult. i'm focusing today on this section which is actually a subsection of the book. news media about which i know a little bit.

when i retired one of the things that i absolutely promised myself and anyone else would listen is that i would not fall victim said that horrible a fraction that afflicts some people of my age. it is diagnosed as called for by this. that is the belief that everything that happened in my time was wonderful and everything that is happening now is no good. but i have to be honest, sometimes it's hard to fulfill that promise to myself. as i look 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 the news media.

those of you who are experts in the subject, and i know that when our speaking here for the next few days, there are always more experts listening than i am on most of these subjects. but a golden age, whether they be of ancient greece or renaissance italy or broadway musicals, largely a function and a creation of a unique set of circumstances. in those golden ages and when those special circumstances are fundamentally changed. so before i talk about the demise of the golden age of television, one person lucky enough to have been part of that era, i would like to talk a little bit about a. the golden age of network television news once roughly speaking from the middle of the 19th century to the middle of the 80's.

there were basically three television networks. abc, nbc, cbs. there 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. just to give you a basis for comparison, there are fewer than 20 million people who watch the evening news. i have to say that virtually all of them are on social security. the year people don't watch the evening news. the newscast evolved into a kind of town meeting therapy session which people could use to ponder the momentous events of the world, their nation, and of their neighborhood. those were, indeed, a momentous times for all of this. the cold war was at its height.

in the aftermath of the cuban missile crisis of 1962 it seemed the very real possibility that we could have nuclear war. by 1965 the vietnam war was raging. 1990 -- i'm sorry, by 1968 antiwar protests were everywhere in the country. also in the 1960's the president, his brother, and the country's most prominent black leader or assassinated, two of them in the same year. now, beneath this seating 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. they've reflected middle-class values and essentially centrist politics mainly because those who produced them were middle-class and moderate. never very far from the center. the assassination of president john kennedy was a watershed for television news. weber has since been discovered from at the time of his tenth he was certainly a much beloved president. the aftermath of the event, a very long wait in calling the people on the margins or almost bernardino what happened. even though that coverage did involve the murder of kennedy's assassin.

the population generally did receive a colman influence by the networks. it was important that in this time of history 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 cause walt had connections with both russia and cuba. ..

two levels of respect in the eyes of most americans. there are many people involved in the news programs, but three men became their personification. walter cronkite at cbs news, david brinkley of nbc and leader of adc and howard k. smith, who left cbs to anchor at adc. when you were watching them on television, you were getting an authentic person, not the creation of focus groups, queue

ratings honeycutt artists and publicity people. these virginia and journalists, and i can promise you that the way they can cross on the air is very much the way were in person. the personality was different it's notable how similar they were in terms of background and journalistic philosophy. a remarkable, too all were southerners. the background turned out to be very important to how they approached probably the most important story of their times and hours, the civil rights movement of the 1960's. as young men, none of these three had been an activist for racial equality. cronkite actually confessed as a young man he had not have 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 broadcast. and so, 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 golden age of television, television news experienced the greatest influence because it rejected extremism and had assets assembles unquestioned journalistic integrity and excellent in so doing contributed to peace and stability in both foreign and domestic news. the daily arguments in the newsrooms were not partisan to become part of them nor where

they above what story would be interesting or titillating or amusing but the debates about what was the most intrinsically important thing that ever happened that day that the people needed to know to make them better citizens? as the stage of cbs news in those days 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 the polls these days the news media generally ranked 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 the still usually cannot a little ahead of the united states congress. so, what happened?

well, as i said that the outside with the unique circumstances which created them are fundamentally changed in the case of the news media, huge changes came about because of the new technologies and these in turn completely changed the business models for print and broadcast media companies. i am sure that many of you here know that much more about the new technology that i do, but please, humor me and allow me to talk a bit about the changes that did take place during the 30 years i was a correspondent for news. my first assignment was to paris. originally, i was supposed to go to saigon, but the vice president of the position was killed in a commercial plane crashed and when the dust settled instead of going to saigon sent to paris as the roving correspondent and what that meant is in those days unless the was vietnam come it was almost any of their place.

the connections that are almost like the dark ages compared to today. most were with telegrams and those can take from 12 to 24 hours from an exchange and there were some phone calls because they were the radio type, they had 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 more primitive than that. there were no long distance calls, and certainly no satellites. that situation but actually shaped my first big scoop and historic story.

during the 1968 middle east war i got to the suez canal with the israeli troops who had spent the week fighting across the sinai desert and pushing the each options back against the suez canal. this was a historic event. and it happened that 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 dispatch rider that made his way across the desert to to leave. the next morning the film was put on a commercial plane to rome and it had to be shipped to pan am or twa to new york. when i got to new york film had to be unloaded and taken to the headquarters. it had to be processed and edited. so my big scoop of fri appeared on the abc news on sunday night. by that time, there was a

cease-fire in the middle east and instead of a big scoop, it was just a feature story. compare that to 25 years later during the first gulf war when i was able to do live reports from the roof of my hotel incoming missiles into saudi arabia. in those intervening 25 years, the cameras had gone from black-and-white films to color films to color videotape. the cameras became smaller and smaller so they could be handheld, and satellites made direct distance dialing much more possible and cheaper and there were enough satellites and operations so that these could be used almost anyplace in the world. so even by the time of the october 1973 war which really wasn't 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 to leave. just as the revolutionized print during the civil war the communications satellite totally changed the nature of 20th century war reporting. gone were the days of the two-way and freed a time lag between the evin overseas and it actually appearing on television in america. computers and digital was asia ultimately made it possible for to people to carry enough equipment by hand to transmit live sound and pictures from virtually anywhere in the world. as i conclude after doing a study at harvard kennedy school, it meant that the next war was probably inevitable. it was also decidedly a mixed blessing the genie is out of the bottle and we simply have to learn with that.

these technologies gave us the capacity to make the news more immediate, more vital and more competitive. but in the meantime, cable television which had been around for quite a long time found new ways wire people and they began to get access to people. cable began to challenge the big three networks seriously cutting into their ad revenues and ultimately the 24/7 cable stations woody eliminate the big monopoly on the news as well. however all of these changes pale in comparison to the newest of new information technologies that have totally revolutionized the mainstream media. the internet combined with the personal computer and cell phone and the accompanying a rival of the social networks, facebook and writer and youtube and the personal blog committee of began 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 and it's the revolution of the arab spurring and egypt and libya and nasiriyah have been anything other than very, very good for freedom and democracy. but also believe that professional, knowledgeable and trustworthy reporters must continue to play an important role in the news media, something which i will expand on a little bit. this might be a good time to make a general statement about the new technologies. in my view, while they certainly are game changers in many respects, they are inherently neither good or bad. like all the revolutionary predecessors from the movable type to the telegraph, the re essentially neutral instruments with a serve the society or subvert depends very much on how they are used and to what end so

those are the fundamental technological changes that brought about the demise of the age of television, the other significant change i mentioned concerned in the business models. they are directly related because it was the new technologies that were responsible for the business model changes in the first place. when i joined abc news the network television news didn't function for the purpose of making money. as the condition for their licenses the on cbs news and was a businessman, not a journalist but they enjoyed the prestige that cbs brought and he did not expect the news division to menachem or the stockholders they headed in b.c..

in my first year 1965 the annual budget for abc news was about $5 million lost money. but the mint is the revenue that it made in commercials which ran on the evening news didn't add up to the amount of money being spent. when i left, 30 years later because there is a main news program is made possible by satellites and so on the annual news budget that had gone from 5 million to 500 million they not only covered that the added another 200 million or more to the network profits. the abc network profit for the others as well as they were all about the same situation. when i first wrote about this

they've gone from lost leaders to cash cows. among other things, such profits began to attract wall street, and by the 90's all three networks had been taken over by corporate conglomerates with no connection to the news whatsoever, the companies like ge and disney were interested in one thing and one thing only, and the was the bottom line. the result of this change is that the number one preoccupation or subsequent managers began ratings because the amount of money that any division could turn is based entirely on how many people were watching. so began what is now usually described as the dumbing down of the network news a policy based on the mistaken assumption that this would attract more viewers. show doctors were brought in and focus groups were employed 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 newscasts became softer, they continue to lose viewers and revenues to it and an ever faster rate. by the late 1990's, a cable news and the internet for taking a huge bite out of both of the viewers and the revenues. one step to cope with this is to make big cuts in the news coverage itself. networks use the end of the cold war as an excuse to reduce the eventual coming eventual closing of most foreign bureaus and the cutbacks are not simply cosmetic. in 1964, i'm sorry, 1984, i was transferred to the abc news bureau in london as the senior

foreign correspondent. in those days adc's overseas headquarters of london we had our own building, we had our own studios, and we had the location right in central london near the bbc, and almost from in fact almost exactly 200 employees at the time. today abc rents into rooms in an office near the airport and there are 12. yet with these cuts did was to eliminate some of the previous real strength of the evening news broadcast. the stories that made them different and better than cable. so the ratings continued. they allege the internet and the social networks that they have stolen much of the readership.

even worse, web sites such as craigslist and and she'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 to the major newspapers like "the washington post" do not have nearly the staff and coverage that they once had, especially with the foreign area and even many of the old domestically have been given early retirement. "the new york times" is hanging on with the help of a 250 million-dollar loan from the mexican billionaire. the times is trying in various ways to charge for its online version which seems to me is perfectly proper but people are accustomed to getting most of the things online for nothing, and apparently they are still resisting paying. no one seems to have found for making the new speaker's but big moneymakers they once were and actually the aim now seems to be

just survival and in the case of quite a few papers they are failing at that too. the once powerful weekly magazines face the same leadership problems as the newspapers and their only shadows of their former selves. time is in survival mode, u.s. news is basically folded, "newsweek" was sold recently for a dollar. you can tell by just looking at these magazines house limb they are but 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 that they can get their material published, and that means they have a better chance of being picked up as guest

commentators by the cable news channel switch to pay quite well. publishing and all of its old forms is clearly struggling come and eat books published by amazon.com may be the future. i noticed that the once revered encyclopedia britannica is no longer going to be available in book form 2010 was its last edition and it will too only be available on time. i assume it is quite be going head-to-head with wikipedia. the latter certainly doesn't have the cachet of britannica but as it doesn't pay for most of its writers or doesn't charge the readers it may win that battle. so, that pretty much brings us to amend the demise of the news media for this part of the lecture. what remains is why is 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, the social networks and the personal blogs represent liberation from an old top-down management controlled by large corporations that has no place in the real i.t. age people cannot find out things for themselves and think for themselves and they don't need professional journalists to tell them what's happening. it doesn't equate to wisdom but does give you some perspective and what i see is that in spite of all of the plateau is available to provide and dispense 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 purchases. and they don't want to be bothered with diverse opinions. and 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 from socialist, communist or nazi. the president of course is none of the above. but, i would guess that if challenged, very few of these critics would be able to even roughly define what any of those words actually mean. in my day we reporters would try to set the record straight when politicians did nothing but blue smoke. we were discouraged from expressing our personal opinions and our reporting but we were

expected to challenge public figures who distorted the truth or flat out lied. nowadays fact and flies don't seem to matter. balanced reporting, quote, quote especially for cable news and false taking to of the most extreme people on either side and having them yell at each other for period. a seems to me that the viewers learned nothing from these debates. and i know that i am far from being the only one that thinks this. as it turns out, david gergen who was an acquaintance of mine and is now a professor at harvard kennedy school of the commentator on cnn. he has a law degree and served in the u.s. media and pacific and was in u.s. news columnist and later editor. most notably for many years, he served in the white house as an adviser to president nixon, ford, ronald reagan and clinton. when he was working from clinton

he approached me about becoming a white house spokesman on foreign affairs. when that didn't work out, he suggested that i could become the spokesman of 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 the bullet. had i taken that job, and had i stayed on for a bit, when the monitor the lewinski scandal erupted and linda troup was involved both of those levies would have been working for me to the pentagon. [laughter] as i say i dodged a bullet. but that is a digression. in a recent interview, he talked of his concerns about the aspects of today's journalism. he's not against young journalists and certainly neither am i ret in his words, you want young writers who are

really, really bright. but i think understanding the world today it does require the use spend enough time doing that. he continued i taught abc news anchorman peter jennings who was a serious figure and new the streets of beirut better than anybody i knew and if anything was happening in the middle east i would turn on because i knew he's been there, he's worked there and he knows it. it really comes down to this. the reason for the demise of the news media it matters. that is because if we do not have a reasonably informed electorate, the very nature of the democracy is threatened. citizens need to have a basic understanding of the issues the country faces, and the political parties or candidates have done or promised to do in the future. but the evidence is building

that even with all of the new technologies, we do not have a better informed electorate. actually there is evidence that the opposite may be true. in ancient greece, democracy is born of course there but there were to political or social class is by for the power in athens in the city-state's and the ready oligarchs and the dhaka sees -- democracies. they wanted to establish the state in which only the owners of substantial amounts of property to vote and hold public office. the democrats insisted that all male citizens have the same rights coming in for a century or more, the democrats usually prevailed. but the great philosophers plato and aristotle were not big fans of democracy. according to plato, ordinary people were easily swayed by the emotional and deceptive rhetoric of ambitious politicians.

it was, after all, those that were the majority of the people time to time and again voted to support the disastrous campaigns of the polynesian war which was the 27 year struggle between athens and sparta which effectively ended a to the golden age of greece. and of course plato had a special anger because a was the demo the was ultimately responsible for the death of socrates. impleader's best work, the republic he opted for neither oligarchy or democracy, people here of course know that 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 can't be known as utopia, and as you know, we are still looking for that one. 2,000 years later during the enlightenment that philosophers john locke and john russo were

leading advocates of the new social contract between rulers and their people that would replace the absolute power of the marquee. the social contract included the new concept that political government should be based on the consent of the government. thomas jefferson carefully studied john locke and integrated this idea of the consent of the government directly into the american declaration of independence. his by darfur is inevitably stressed jefferson's abiding faith in the american people's wisdom in choosing their government. but, with significant qualifications. as he once said, whenever people are well informed committee can be trusted their own government. and he also said if the nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be. jefferson's concern about

ignorance and his belief that people must be informed drove him to become the great component that he was for education. his other preoccupation, freedom of the press, was directly related to the spirit of jeffersonian scholar is explained that he saw the press as an essential element in providing citizens the object of inflation that the needed to make sound political judgment. those two ideas are tied together and most journalists favored the jeffersonian quote. the basis of the government being the opinion of the people coming every first object should be to keep that right. were it left for me to decide whether we should have the 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 a qualification. i should mean that every man should receive those papers and

be capable of reading them. well, more than two centuries later one of the country's respected political lines remains greatly worried that today's americans are not just dillinger formed but woefully its current form of rationing carter's national security advisor and one of the best strategic thinkers and one of its more prolific analysts the american and global power the strategic declined to less what he called six critical dimensions that stand out as america's major and increasingly threatening liability. about the world of the uncomfortable truth is that the united states public has an

alarmingly limited knowledge of basic global geography, current events and even puzzlements in the world history. thousands of u.s. troops were being killed in the middle east area 63% of young american adults could not find iraq on the map and 88% couldn't find afghanistan. he mentions the polls that show more than half of college seniors didn't know that nato was formed against the soviet expansionism and 30% of american adults couldn't 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 that continues in his latest book to argue forcefully

why this matters. in his words, the cumulative effect of such widespread ignorance makes the public more susceptible to the demagogic alisa stimulated year, especially when aroused by a terrorist attack. that in turn increases the probability of the self-destructive foreign policy initiatives. in general, public ignorance creates an american political environment more hospitable to the extremist simplifications. in an interview about this book on cbs brzezinski made it clear that what he had in mind was the war in iraq and afghanistan. and the alarming drumbeat for the war and iran. as he summed it up in that 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 an intelligent people. white light italy agreed i would like to repeat the demise of the

media that i've been discussing has to do with a loss of respect they once held with the american people which is certainly diminished their importance and their influence and the failure of their business model which has left them with devotee of a 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. still magindanao 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 newspaper space there are certainly fewer of them. we are fortunate to still have

excellent reporters doing their best even under frightful conditions. i can name many valued close by mentioning the two. from the island and worked for the london sunday times was right in the middle of what is now the syrian civil war. he was distinctive for the ipad she wore to cover the high that she lost in the 1990's when she was shot reporting in sri lanka. this was the last message that she took when her and her friend were targeted and killed by rockets fired by the syrian army. she rode i think the reports of my survival may be exaggerated. that was the neighborhood of homes which was the focal point of the resistance to the syrian regime and in retribution its people for being subjected to

relentless attacks by artillery tanks. sickening, reid. i can't understand how the world can stand by, and i should be heartened by now. watched the baby died today. shrapnel. the doctors could do nothing. his little tummy just heaved until he stopped. feeling helpless as well as cold, we will keep trying to get out the information. anthony won the two pulitzer prizes for reporting one of the "washington post" and the other at times. he was born in oklahoma, his family had their roots in lebanon. he was familiar with arabic but he became fluent only after hard work as an adult. this ended up by giving him a great advantage over most of his country it's because he could easily pass as a local tree as good as he was exploiting the

politics or the battles of the middle east was even better in detecting the basic humanity of the people and their struggles. in his books and in his reporting into with america's best newspapers, she was able to change the perceptions of many people this country who are prone to seeing the arabs as either decadent sheiks or terrorist nations. anthony continually risked his life in baghdad during the iraq war. he was shot in the arm while reporting from the west bank and last year campos to be executed as a spy when he was captured by the gaddafi loyola. the past year while based in beirut, he spent most of his time in egypt covering the new revolution. in the meantime periodical he had been sneaking in and out of syria from lebanon to see and hear from himself about the ebb and flow of the efforts to unseat the dictator botcharov

sob. last month in he alluded to the syrian authorities that he suffered from severe asthma and a the end of what would be his last covert trip to syria, 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 likes who do they were taking risks but they persisted in their very dangerous way of life. i've often been asked what motivates people to want to cover the war? as it happens, she eloquently answered that question as a speaker at an event just over a year ago to honor the many journalists who have helped behind-the-scenes the journalists themselves who in the past decade lost their lives. this is part of what she said on that occasion that the church in london. we go to the remote whirs loans

to report what is happening. they have the right to know what our government and armed forces are doing in our name. in the 24-hour news we are on constant call but wherever we are, we are reporting 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 at tricare when your flight was reached, the printed page, the website or the tv screen. we do make a difference. 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 and who we can

put trust and if we can get our support. the best we to do this is to pay attention to what the right and broadcast, and to tune out the hate stores and the misogynist is, the racists and those who would divide us. if enough of us can do that, america will be a better informed and its democracy may yet be saved. thank you. [applause] [inaudible] >> so what we do?

if i had the of siloed formula i would be selling at to the facebook owner for a billion dollars within five. what we can do is to pay attention to people that we know our not misogynist or racist or not shouting in ways to divide us. there are significant numbers of reporters dealing with foreign affairs and certainly in "the new york times," "the washington post" still has some, and the magazine's 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 there are a few good ones on television. i think still. if we were to reject the idea

that the present situation we can only do this on an individual basis. i am hopeful scott. i hope they do because on the one hand it's a very tough not to craft today. on the other hand the options are wide open because there are so many ways that you can publish or broadcast or whatever i can't say that i have total confidence this is going to happen i hope there will be some new business model that will take us beyond where we are now and that we will still have flourishing and effective news media because in the absence of

that i think we are in very serious trouble. >> yes? we are educating more of our youth that they shouldn't be happening. do you believe that perhaps our educational system is lacking? >> i will lead off on brzezinski the answer would be yes. we hear an awful lot about what is failing to teach the sciences and math and i think that is demonstrably true in terms of the scores that are talked up by american students but it's equally true that in the social sciences whether they would be in pledge your history or geography that they are very much wanting to.

it's interesting that she learned in high school in vermont because she had a teacher there was absolutely brilliant and learned about the government of the united states and the system and how it worked then i know many college students i have talked to ever learned. i taught the course of middlebury and then i have some students were very good who knew nothing about the japanese internet before the war to. it hadn't come up in their almost 16 years of education. so yes i think that is a major factor in the level of their i say ignorance that is out there.

>> [inaudible] >> i don't want to condemn teachers because frankly 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? >> we will come to you next, okay? >> my children are in the 20s now, college graduates and i'm just wondering do they get most of their information on line or on the internet and i know most of their friends said situations >> what is to be of this

generation. >> with all of the other people like that that my daughter now lives with and studies with and so one don't watch television news at all because actually that is a program, and i guess colbert does deal with issues that out there and does so in a way that the people find not just amusing, but they learn from. i don't think that we can hang our hats on that, but at least it is a slender reed for that but nevertheless, it's a positive factor and there are not that many because there is good information on pbs every night but if no one is watching it and it doesn't really help, does deutsch? >> i promised this young man.

>> if you have the significant ability to do so how would you rectify the way the internet is affecting our news casting in america? how would you change the internet and how it affects the information? the sensor or anything else is ultimately self-defeating. it would have to organically emerge in a positive way if possible as a remark of the forces it to the centrists and so on and so forth i don't think any government or any czar is going to be a lot to do very much with that. we will have to see how that ultimately shakes down. >> would be better if the internet was not news vv to used for spreading information like that? >> i think it serves -- it is right now so which of the

information on the internet is totally bogus. people have to learn to be able to seect what is and what isn't, and i think that a lot of people are very wanting in that regard, and as i mentioned earlier, the people sometimes now don't want to go to a website is a dhaka as a conservative god forbid you would want to read anything to was written by a liberal and vice versa. with the result that there is very little cross pollination. commesso the information may not even be wrong, but it is so often it ecologically colored and does not provide some kind of a balanced fought. i don't know how to deal with that. but it is absolutely true that people now watch, listen, read only those people whose prejudice is a share, and that's not a good thing.

>> i think the social media is a fascination that has taken over the youth and their free time, shall we say, is just taken up by the social media leaving no time for educating themselves or watching or listening to anything that's serious. >> there's no doubt that a great deal of time is spent dealing with the social media. i don't find that twittered seems to be the one of choice of many people because what are the limitations of 140 characters. >> that says quite a bit what it says is not very good. i had an account on one of the

social media for a think three days because i was curious i had opened an account and i got so many messages that were just nonsense. it just blew my mind as to how many people had time to sit around and talk about nothing. three days and i close the account. i think maybe this can evolves. maybe this will evolve, there is a certain fascination with it now. i devoutly hope that this would be the case that it will lose some of its power to enthrall and people look objectively to say wait a minute why my spending all this time to do this? but as i say, i devoutly hope that. i'm not predicting it. >> yes, sir.

>> i was thinking about our generation that can still remember the pledge allegiance to the flag, things of this nature, we are the last conscience i think of this country because we remember back when we could leave our door open on the community we had the community life and everything they've lost ability because they are all working. they don't have time, they don't have the time to just sit and talk around the family table and all of those wonderful things that we have as i was growing up and my father was a hard-working individual who paid his taxes and he donated to the church and did all those wonderful things that was expected of him in that timeframe only to become less kind to the coming and we speak and half truths and from the is

worried about where the next dollars are going to come from so they can support a lifestyle which they've become accustomed to. that might be declining and it's our children may not ever see it, but do you still believe that our generation is the last generation that is the consciousness of this country of what was founded on and that is deteriorated and going away. >> i would like to be not that pessimistic. almost everything you have said i understand and agree with and share the personal experience. when i hear people denigrating the knowledge and understanding of the working class people, i think back to my youth, not just my parents, but the people around us. my parents and relatives and

things, i grew up in a world war ii. of these people were intensely interested in what was going on in the world. i heard winston churchill the speeches. i heard fdr makes speeches to the iraq leader adolf hitler. too. i didn't hear what he was saying that it didn't sound good. these people but for products of the dust bowl in 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 the debates. that doesn't happen anymore. i don't take the view but it's possible that we do change of a colleague of mine the was here to speak to you later, ralph peters, we were discussing this last night and he said when people talk about how divided we are -- his focus on gettysburg, and it sounds like an excellent one and i look forward to reading it -- that he notes and

we can think about that there are new numbers the we are talking about 800,000 killed and seriously wounded in the war over four years how could it be in that particular time? it's taken us a long time to recover from the civil war and one of the things that really surprised me when i came back finally to no longer be on the road was how have much of the civil war was still with us in certain parts of the country particularly and that's troubling. but nevertheless, bill level of violence and the level of is a divisiveness is not as good today as it was then. so i think we can change. i don't think that there is some dictum that we are due. i used the phrase that i devoutly hope that we are not.

and i probably won't be around to see how it works out. [applause]

originally published but in march of 1819 and december of 1920, and in american periodical called the little preview coming and we have copies of all of those as well. the reason i brought this up today is not so much to show you the first edition, but to show a leader in addition that is extremely rare. 1921 the american government declared ulysses obscene and pornographic, and the book was banned. people still wanted to read it however, and we actually have a copy of one of the additions. if you notice the spine and, you have alice-in-wonderland and of little minister.

during the republican and democratic conventions we are asking middle and high school students to send a message to the president now joining on the booktv is space moyers not pangolin press. some of the new titles coming out in 2012. i want to start with the patriarch. what is this? will it is a sort of extraordinary story. ted kennedy, before his death,

reached out to david nassau clammed biography of andrew carnegie among other things, and gave him an extraordinary offer which is he gave him exclusive access to the kennedy family papers, the papers of his father, joseph kennedy, which have never been shared with any biographer, and there were no strings attached. there was no family review, and david spent years on this book digging through the archives, digging past the mess and starting from scratch. one of the things the papers allowed him to do of course is to get a kind of closer to the core of joseph kennedy because they'd never been used but i think crucially for the first time they were able to follow the money. the kennedy family fortune as always kind of a black box, and he's really able to put together exactly how joseph kennedy did it. hollywood is a big part of the

story that hasn't exactly been understood before. and we all know about wall street. we all know of some of the myths some are even more than we might have thought and others were less so. and i think in the end of light that kennedy we can't ask them now but when he picked david nassau is that he saw in carnegie a sort of model for the art of his father's life, someone that made a great fortune relatively early and then spent the rest of his life figuring out ways to do good, to do things with that, and of course one of the things he did is to make his son president, and that piece of the story how joseph kennedy was involved in his son. it's fascinating and there were some newsbreaks in this work. >> kofi anan has a book coming out as well.

>> it is a biography of statecraft. for a man that has a reputation as a diplomat, it is delightfully unvarnished. it's no secret that he has issues with the bush administration over iraq and other matters and it is no secret that he had some issues with the state of israel over lebanon. in the sense what is poignant up this book is that there is a lot in it about what he tried and failed to do. what i think is really quite moving, too, and not expected is that how much the u.n. does to the lives of billions of people around the world in a way that is really off the radar screen, and his account of what this organization does in the world today is an argument in the sense for what it can't do, and then at the end of the day it is a great statesman with great

power on the world stage telling stories about them the great characters he's had to work with. stomachs of mr. nassau and kofi anan's box both coming out in the fall of 2012? >> that's right. this book after the election, kofi anan's but after the election. >> the nobel prize winner. >> his long-awaited memoir of the african civil war which of his country nigeria and late sixties was the scholar that runs through his life. he's never talked about it and he's never written about that. it's coming of age both for a writer and as a country and it

shows the hopes, the promises for this young country and how tragically pope turned into patriots and the civil war tore this country apart, and setting on a pretty maligned course. it's a beautiful book that really is a part about the role of writer in the conscience. >> what is the role to be committed? to stand up and sort of speak to those that won't speak or those that can't speak since things fell apart and still sells to under 50,000 copies a year come from high schools all over the country not just in the united states alone. some 80 billion copies in the publication of 1959 through to this memoir which is a mike ditka said capstone to his great career. >> how has this helped? >> he is somewhat weakened in his 8s