and he said, according to the wire, i want what is coming to me. and that's all of it. ..

thank you for not only being the media sponsor but being the first radio station to air the scholar circle which has been but quite and interesting quite some time. i got to thank c-span it's one of the favorite media in the world. i'm hoping it's a beginning of doing more things with c-span. thank you for recording this for booktv.

you're here i fienltd it fulfilling. these are important matters. so thanks for all of that. [applause] a couple of personal notes about the book and how it came about. you know, i had been engaged in kind of questions about my own heritage, i had two grandfathers, one on each side that were victims of the genocide. survivors their families were victims, twoabl. it baffled me about why the government and all the people that would target every day people. my family were not elite, they were not even really educated there, they were farmers.

why would they be targeted for aniluation. it lead to the question to why would people want to kill them? it was coupled with other questions when i put them together lead me down the path of mass media. one other incident with -- do you remember in the 1990's there was an emergence of a new kind of talk radio they we hadn't heard before. we had mostly straight ahead public affairs on the television and the newspaper. we had the emergence of emotional, very kind of polarizing mad mia emerge. i had gone them to see my parents in oklahoma, and my dad had been upset and angry and i could hardly talk to him anymore. and i couldn't figure out what

was going on. what had gotten in to my dad? it was almost like we lost my father. we couldn't talk about anything that ho to scare do with politics. we got in the car and he turned on the radio and it was one of these stations with one of the hosts that likes to blame one side for everything, calls them names, and i said, dad, do you mind if we turn that down while i'm in the car. he said i want to hear the news, and i realized at that moment there were a couple of things going on because of many decades mass media in the u.s. had tried to some success neutral and objective. there's a lot of argument about whether or not you can even be objective in any sense within the scholarly world. most people say you can't but at least there was an effort to

being neutral. that was changing. people got caught up in this still believing they were listening and watching mass media that were being objective and neutral and not taking sides. so people believed everything he was on hearing on the radio. that has changed since then. i got my dad back. it's nice. we can pass books back an forth and articles and talk about both sides of the media and media framing. it helped this he read the book. [laughter] get your dad to read the bock. and the third thing that lead me down the path i had been working as he said in the public service sector in the legislature, and also in the city trying to pass public policy that i thought was really in the public interest, and it was so hard. and it was so hard partly because most people didn't understand what we were even doing. didn't know when we were doing.

i see my fellow commissioner joyce here, and she was with me through part of this. and i thought, this is -- there's not enough information out there but basic public policy in every day implead that people are watching, reading with listening to. that lead me down the path. why a provocative title? "kill the messenger." the media's role in the fate of the world. whey came to always -- realize through the research of my book and my disser station is that mass media and mas media messages can be used for good, and they can be used for not so god. they can be used in a constructive and destructive way. most of the book is about half the book about the more directive parts of mass media and how it has been used to really destructive ends. genocides, wars, and how that

came about. but the book is dedicated to ways in which mass media has been used for positive things. peacemaking, protecting human rights, protecting the environment things i tend think are positive things. not everybody may agree with me on those things. and one of the people i interviewed in bosnia, for the boss knee began chapter of the book was a professor there. he had a quote that i realized was kind of encapsulating part of what i was saying. that is a bullet can kill a man. but the ideas behind the bullet can kill thousands. and so that was part of what went in to the idea of "kill the messenger," not journalists, certainly, not mass media, certainly, but particular paradigms that have been used to forward these destructive ideas and destructive ends.

so where is the power? power is first rooted in information and ideas. and they are so powerful the information ideas i call them the dna for society. so you know how our bodies are all our organs know what to do because the dna is the information it tells them how to function a system? societies are like a system and we're like the parts that are decoding the information, about idea is and participating in our society and our system as a result. that information is flawed in the body like that dna gets a mutation, it doesn't go so well for the body. just like it doesn't go so well

for society. it can turn on itself. it can destroy parts of itself and destroying parts of itself can destroy the whole of itself. so information turns in to ideas through the concept of framing. and has anybody heard this idea of framing he raises his hands because he's been to one of my talks. >> long before that. >> long before that. so idea behind framing is that the world is full of this vast amount of d.a., and it doesn't always make sense when it's disorganized and even history, you know, you couldn't read all the history there is in the world, and make sense of it. you couldn't go to bosnia and understand what happened in bosnia just by walking around. it's when it's organized in a particular way some information is put in, some information is put out, and then it's kind of

got a little story that it tells. and that it a frame. some people talk about a picture frame, which is part of the story. so like if i see the big flume here, and, you know, i can't see the whole room, i can kind of see it preferly, but not the whole room. i can focus on this part and i get an idea of the room. i see a pretty woman and a handsome man here. what a good looking room. part of the room. because if i look over there, no comment. [laughter] so that's part of the concept. there's other piece which is kind of the idea of spin you've heard the word spin zone. and there's an experience that captures this probably better than i can tell than any other story. these communications scholars took a kkk rally, and that wanted to happen in new york.

and they took two different newspaper articles ability it, one framed it as an issue of public safety and how it wasn't a safe thing and they gave it to one group. they took another article that framed it as an issue of free speech, and in essence carried an argument it's the kkk we stand for free speech and they give it to another group. same organization, same history of the organization, we know the background of the organization, two different reactions. people who saw the free speech frame supported their right to hold a rally despite their opinion about the organization. people who saw the public safety frame, not so much. didn't support it. had some arguments against it. so together that's the -- that is the essence of a frame.

the idea of some information in, some information out, and it has this kind of angle. it tells a story. so media frames are what give not just media frames, all frames when they get disseminated in mass media they get sent to a wider and wider audience. but all frames tell a particular story. in one, i found in each of the genocide l situations is that it almost told the exact same story only it was characters changed. so there was a good guy and a bad guy. there was always a political problem in which the bad guy got blamed. there was always an argument that the good guy belonged to l land and the bad guy was an invader. there was an argument that the

good guy was doing all this good for society and was clean. and the bad guy was dirty and by his presence was soiling society. and sometimes it was worse than that. and i'll get to some of that with an example, the first example i'll give is the one of rwanda. i tell the story first off it's the most clear picture that we get about how mas media can be so effective. it was one radio station that would deseminating these kind of messages, and it flipped a society. all societies have ranker and all societies have a little bit of conflict. but how do you get a brother to kill a brother? how do you gate husband to kill a wife in the name of some cause? or doctors to kill their

parents? or teachers to kill their students? set them all on fire. that's a hard task, and it wasn't unique to rwanda people who were friends were turning on each other and turning each other in. it was in bosnia, best men at each other's weddings, families breaking up because there were intermarriages in all of these cases. i meant to turn my time on, and i didn't. i'm going to do that right now. oops. so what happens in genocide situations? it's not media alone, obviously within there's a crisis situation. right. bring crises can be resolved and cooperative ways. they don't always mean you're going to turn on the other. so crisis comes some often may

have a what we call a vicious leader that comes to power. we have are mania, we had hitler in nazi germany. leaders are nothing without followers. why are people following these malignant leaders? well, this goes in along with the story. so in rwanda, you had this crisis situation, you had a malignant leader. you had an incident where the plane of the president was shot down, and through -- then you had a radio station that had been around for a little while. it was the hip station. it played the best music and told the funniest jokes, it had political commentary, and then once the plane came down. it became more and more version targeting one particular group

for annihilation. blaming them for all the problems particularly for shooting down the plane of the president, painting them as they said the invader, soiling the the land, and the worst part of it that really get the people to kill the other is that if you don't kill them first, they're going kill you. across all jen said. when the message is coming through the radio station in rwanda, it was the it was one message, not countered by other mass media. rwanda is not a heavy reading society as much as it's an audio society. people got the messages over and over again along with the hip messages of jokes and great songs and they started to

believe them. they started to believe that their neighbor was coming after them. and they started to believe that if they didn't kill, they would be killed. and if they didn't kim, their democracy would fall apart. their democrat the majortarian democracy. this is the other element of a genocide frame. a grand cause for which everybody can get behind. democracy sounds good, right? we all like the sound of majortarian democracy. well, t often saving human. like in nazi germany we must save humanity because the soilers are ruining it and there's an international jewish conspiracy. people got scared mass media was the way they were sending the messages to people. in rwanda it was 100 days.

800,000 people routely killed. a lot of hatred. a lot of doing it with mat chetties. things that make them feel the bane for the longest period of time. they can possibly. that is not -- most the human. this is beyond human. but unfortunately it's not unique. we saw similar things in bosnia where they had intentionally put people in to these concentration camps they would starve to death and they would die of thirst, they would die of disease, they would torture there similar in the holocaust, similar in the are main began genocide. it was an intense hatred developed for people. how does it happen? we get these messages adopt we reject them when we know our neighbors? it doesn't always happen in

every situation. it happens when it's concentrated media and it's not countered. it's not -- opposed by another media source or. in a society developed in which all of this psychology phenomena gops. most people heard of group think, group think when grown up of people agree on something and one person know it's wrong often goes silent. they did this camp where they just took like the size of a line and they told everybody to say the size of a line was six inch. and then the person who was the -- when they were doing the experiment on who knew that it was not six inches, but said it was six inches because everybody else said it was six inches.

what is in phenomena. what everybody does something, why do we start to doubt ourselves, start to doubt our own morality. it's just -- it's just this human phenomena that we start to conform to our surroundings. and not everybody does. i think it's an important point. even in rwanda, even in the holocaust, certainly in bosnia, there were discenters who were rescuing the other. and they were defying and risking their lives to rescue the other. my own family, if weren't for the turkish neighbors who came and warned them probably wouldn't have made it. and that is true time and again for many families. but for the mass majority, this group phenomena starts to take

over. there's one phenomena -- i'm spacing on it. we have mob behavior. we have group thinking with and intergroup relations. you know how when you go to a ball game and the bad guy getses a point? and everybody just like gets really upset about it? that's kind of like an intergroup motion. what happens when the motions get plugged in? they have an automatic whatever deponent them. so anger has a need to resolve it. reacceptment has a need to change this. hatred has a need to destroy the other. rage has a need to destroy the other. and these motions take over in these periods when the story is

told that it's unjust. this isn't the only story. this is the good news. in rwanda's twin, it's. i through talk about the twin. i'm going use the example, it's going sound like a happy ending. i have to warn you ahead of time. there's no such thing of a happy ending. politics is constantly changing and it can go one way and go back the other we. but the twin, like rwanda, two ethnic groups, socially essentially the same. there was a third one that wasn't engaged in the struggle. the religion is the same, the language is the same. and by the way across the board there was no language difference between the groups in either rwanda or in the twin.

but in the twin they were engaged in the same kind of fratricide killing one side would hear the other side is going kill and than beat them to it. similar as what was going in the other side, but something changed in the twin. it didn't go down the genocide path. and you stop and say, okay, they had the malignant leadership, they had the crisis situation, they even had mass media that was demonizings the otherrer and blaming the other developing hate for the other. what was the defense? there were two things. one is they did not have an rtlm. that was all. they had competing frames. wasn't good. they u were killing each other. then a bunch of n tbrks o got

involved. some from the u.s. the search for the common ground. some from europe they set up a new studio and they'd we're going try a media experiment here. and these experiments included every news story is going to be reported on by one of each kind together. that means you not only have to grow on the information, you have to agree on the frame. that means you can't just blame the whole thing on the other side. and so now they found themselves trying to figure out what was going on. like why were people really killing each other? what was really underneath the conflict then they were going and realizing that the two groups of people were all people. they had been dehumanized for so long. they had been called fleas and

coach rock and ene festation now they're like, wow. then they started this radio program, and there's beautiful things that started to. happen. one of the radio programs they started having conversations about the role of bystanders, and the role of people who were rescuing the other side. before these programs, if one person was a certain kind -- i'm mixing them up. they should intermarry and make it better. one person from one side rescued someone from the other side, that person would be considered a traitder and would be marked for death. right? it's pretty common in wartime situations. traitor you can't help the other side. what happened on the radio programs is that they started to talk about what a heroic act it

was to be so humane as to are rescue somebody from being killed even if it was from the other side. and the more they talked about this, the more the traitor sounded like a hero. more people would call in and confess they were rescuing somebody from the other side, and then it became more and more common place. then there was another incident thapped that was quite something. the leaders of the factions were sending in communique, and the head of this journalism operation named alexis. i had the privilege of talking to him on the phone in compile. but they were send in the communique he would read them and say this isn't true. come back with something that is true. and so instead of getting like what we see in western media

they just say, you know, congressman such and such says that. wouldn't say that. i'm not saying that. come back with something true. or come back with something productive and constructive. and then i'll put on the air. it started to change how people responding. it started to change how people were thinking. m i went several pages and didn't look at my notes. now i don't know where i am. [laughter] an important part was a radio society. they had protagonist who were not identified whether they were either kind. you couldn't tell. there was some physical differences allegedly that the colonial settlers had suggested. but we don't know if they were

that different. and so you'd see the strife that these people went through in the drama they went through as a result of the war but you didn't know if it was your side or the other side. it start developed this kind of passion for the others. so these are just a few of the elements of a mass media that took something from the brink of genocide where next door it was a genocide, and managed to bring it to have a point of having a peace agreement. i would argue it has a long ways to go. most of us do. most -- human interactions we look out there we see that there's a lot of violence unfortunately. it's one of the stories where we saw peacemaking going on that

was generated partly through mass media and not just mass media. i don't add this. it's a role it can play. we have seen major trueness for makes -- transformations. two others i like to talk about. one is the south africa transformation. and, you know, south africa was as most of you know, an appar tide country. very brutal to the black south africans. it had a divided media within the country so the african language really never knew any other story other than what the state was telling them which was all their side nelson mandela was the token terrorist. where as the english language and the african language media

were telling a cleatly different story. and we're showing the abuses and the killing that was going on and the utter wrongness of an appar tide society. they couldn't solve that alone in south africa. there was too much lopsided power. over the years, journalists kept taking the story to the next level and the next level, and the next level untilrd businesses got involved governments got involved, sanctions, business sanctions, economic sanctions, until finally decades and decades and decades later we see the transformation in south africa. what if nobody knew that information? what if nobody ever challenged the apartied structure. what if nobody ever told the story of the go beaten to death

in the jail cell? nobody could have ability -- acted. this is one more example of how media plays a role in transforming something very importanten from appartied racism system to a multiracial democracy. northern ireland, we see journalists actually helping to bring about a peace process. i have to check the time. i want to leave time for questions. so -- i focused on a lot of the extreme cases, and sometime it is doesn't quite that extreme. but there are subtle things that occurring. so united states, for example, is very polarized right now.

the media has become very polarized. and people are going in to what we call echo chambers they only listen and watch and read some media, and they hear the same story over and over and over again. and other people watch endless and read this other media. that's not 100% true, by the way, there is some people crossing over. there is a large enough section of society that are doing that. one of the most important issues facing us today is the issue of climate change. now just this week, we heard something like 98% of the green land ice sheet is melting. we have been seeing drought across the country, massive drought. food prices are shooting up. they're expecting ocean levels to really rise quite a bit proceeding the coastline.

extreme weather getting worse, and no policy action. why no policy action. what's going on? why aren't follows makers doing? why aren't people getting out of their suvs? climate change is really hooping. well, to some people it's not really happening. in fact it's worse than not really happening because scientists are scam artists. and if you listen and read and watch and watch particular media, this is repeated over and over and over and over again. the scientists are scamming you. dozens and dozens of news arms so what do you think it does? it's not just if people no longer understand the issue of climate change, it's that they

hate scientist and they don't believe scientist anymore. and if we take our faith out of science completely, we might be in to more trouble. so this is something that is right here right now. it's upon us. it's upon the entire planet, and it's something that mass media are confusing the issue on. there are two ways we are hearing it reported. most of the traditional media are doing a he said she said. such and such scientists said we have nine of the ten hottest years but such and such scientist whom by the way is not a research scientist. i'm not going to tell you that, says there's no such thing as climate change. this is a problem pane the worse problem is the vilification effect where it takes the faith out of science so i think i'm

going close this saying a few i think i think if things. one is that there's several main media effects. one is information. if you don't know, if you don't understand, if people don't hear, read, comp help, they cannot act in a responsible way. and then in a democratic society, you need to able to know and act. you can't do anything about things you don't know. there's information another one is a agenda setting. what people think about is often what they hear and read and learn from some form of media. it's changing what social media. we'll talk about that. it brings certain things to the forefront and there's only so much you can have in the forefront. it moves other things to the back. there's the framing effect which i talked about.

and in cultural effects, this is one i wanted to emphasis a little bit. what are cultural effects? what are the things we care about? what are the things that are right? what are the things that are just? what are the things that are acceptable down to the clothes we wear? well, some of that is perpetrated through a mass media thing. there's a social law that gets established and political scientists who found that social laws are more towerful than state laws. so, you know, how we sped to get here? if we break the state laws, but, you know, people don't violate social laws very often. so whf the last time you saw a man wearing a pink skirt? unacceptable. what would happen if he did

that? that's a social law. and you can't violate them. i have a chapter in here about scheduling of very important social law which was the female gent genital cutting. in ten years say that completely almost, it's never completely eradicatedded. it's almost completely eradicated. they don't it because it was a powerful social law. nobody would talk to a girl much less marry a young woman had she had the been what they called cut. but through a social action campaign with mass media, they got people to unthe custom, chaffs going on with the custom but also what the cost of it was. people's health, people's well being and democratic choice. so now with new media, with the internet, how is it changing? for good and bad.

for good and for bad is a gate keeping effect. so for many, many years, traditional mass media told us what to think about how do think about it. not that we all obeys. they gave us this news and frame and it was what we got. good news about that was it was usually fact checked two source, and it wasn't usually ripe with misinformation. here in the u.s., the bad news they kept out a lot of stuff neighbor we wanted to know about. that's changing. now the gate keeping is coming both ways where people are taking thins and making a big issue out of it. it's spreading all over the world and the traditional mass immediate a are taking it further. we saw it with the arab spring,

right? people were -- they were tweeting it and blogging it, they were posting it, they had been in there for many years. capturing some of the changes going on. but then it becomes the exchange between them. the other good part about this there are certain part of the world we can't get information out of. with the social media, we with are getting it. i don't think -- a documentary about burmese video journalist. he was capturing all the oppression they were facing on little cell video and uploading it to the internet. they made a movie of it. and iran, with the grown revolution of attempted and there were beatings. people were capturing it and putting it up on the internet. there's an open window here because of the internet and

social media. but then you have the other side which is a lot of misinformation that is get on there. it's not getting vet forked factual data. and t not getting vetted for the framing. and some of it can be very dishes. doctor video getting sent around that really really what happened. we saw this happen here in the u.s., we see it in other places. so how are we going deal with all of this? the other thing that i'm hope willing occur more is a result of new media is cross-border collaborations. so people can actually learn from each other, curl churlly when they can't afford to fly over there or there would be other restrictions about going learn other cultures and learn what's actually occurring and

exchanging information. it would be a beautiful thing. it's start to be have things with some of the blogs. we i think we are hoping to see more of this. so in closing, i want to say that we have great potential to have our media both our social media, and our has media start to stand for the thing we care about and stop being a tieder to be more of a uniter. the us v them frameses that we are fed, sin very early in movies, sports, in war, they're just a frame. it's really all us. there really is no them.

if we can start to -- thawbl the frame and start to understand what's going on and build more of the media we like to see, more that supports the growth of human potential, peaceful societies, protection of human rights, and we can do that several ways. one that i am advocating for is interconstitutional media. traditional implead are facing strugglings. competing with the internet, funding it in the future. newspaperses are closing down. but the institutions like the educational institutions can start to work together and build a media that is fact checked and has depth and scholarly material in it to help people understand political phenomena more. other models that are emerging from other countries are things like cooperatives for journalists are building media together so they run it and not

an executive tellable them what do. so they can be based on journalistic principles. can be because an what we see in places like the twin of rwanda where both sides have to check the frames. and i have great hope, i great hope that we can build this if people stay vigilant and committed and the bottom line is, we are part of media now. all of our twitters and facebook and blog and internet. collectively, you never who is reading them and getting them to. when we choose the frames that

guard what we would like to see in the world and we correct the factual misinformation and we share what we know to be true, and we start to see a change gradually as it builds, for more we get ahold of it and we share the other way around too. so thank you so much. i'll take a question or two. [applause] [applause] i'll just take one. [laughter] doctor? yes. i have a question you mentioned that in rwanda there was a [inaudible] process where one frame becomes

the dodge nant frame. where do you think a individual person is often the president of the country or something like that? actually helps in that process of footing the frame from on to the other or . >> you're asking the role of leaders. >> how do they relate? >> i think they matter a lot. there's different -- "kill the messenger," the idea was was to kill the paradigm that was destrective and sometimes often the paradigm that is destrective is lead by a malignant leader. it was in rwanda. it wasn't a free media. it was a media operated by a particular ideological group. it was privately held. it wasn't government. we can't say government media bad. in some cases, government media can actually do god thing. the bbc is mostly great.

not so great in the northern ireland case and lot of other ways. with if slips, and i didn't mean imply that in rwanda it didn't flip. it gradually went there and of it the same thing in nazi germany. the flip in rwanda was when in plane went down that all the blame landed on the one group of people for taking the plane down and then it became increasingly hateful in the message. and usually it's gradual. nazi germany was gradual. take these rights away. take more rights away, call them awful names. isolate them in to the corner in these ghettos and, you know, gofer it by saying they're destroying humanity. they're part of international

spears. start killing them and maybe don't tell anybody because a lot of what was going on in the nazi germany press they were just creating this positive morale around hitler and turning the country around and hiding what they were doing even while they were saying all these awful things about jewish people. does that answer your question? so leadership does matter. if i got your question right. just for a second. i didn't talk about this at all. in the wars of yugoslavia, part of the war was about seizing mass media. the certain forces were grabbing television stations and transmittedder and putting their messages in there. again, killing the journalists while they were at it, by the way. it was an awful thing.

but that was again to control the message. and that would be a slip. one minute you have ethical journalism one minute you have ma little nantd leader controlling the message and dead journalists. it was awful. i really appreciate you. [inaudible] reports about the genocide or the jewish hall cast -- people who don't believe who landed on the moon should silence reports feature them. so where is that line and who determines it really? >> that's a really important

question. i mean, there's a line in my book where we say we don't question gravity anymore. it's established. we have gravity. there are serve things that are factual. i don't think that it is a perspective. pan that tries to counter the fact such as the haul holocaust or climate change. if there was a legitimate finding that could challenge a fact, you know, now we know there's a -- [inaudible] ask i say that right? okay. it was a new finding. for all in time we adopt know there was -- does everybody know what i'm talking about? it's a subatomic particle that

scientists have been searching for years and years they finally established, well, mostly established their not 100% established that it exists and that it gives mass. what gives us mass. enough physics. but, you know, if there's evidence that's one thing. if there's no evidence, then should this be dedeseminated? this was the problem in climate change. the scientist community and the peer review journals 100% agreement that what is happening is planet is warming, and it is warming as a result of human activity. the scientists, shouldn't put in quotes, they are scientist, but most of them are working for think tanks that serve, you know, the fossil fuel try and

the coal industry and such. the journalists were portraying them as ?ition and sciences. but the second batch we're doing climate research should they be given equal ground? no. should the holocaust denier be given equal ground. should we argue there is not gravity. does that answer your question? i don't see anything wrong with, you know, for entertainment purpose to be able to explore something to some degree, but, you know, i don't think misinformation is a good thing. joyce, fellow commissioner? >> you mention the early on about the

and i think, you know, here in the u.s. it's a different situation than what we see internationally. internationally we see, i mean, it's a lot of it is power. internationally we saw these malignant leaders using mass media to get control and kill others. here in the u.s., we see corporate companies trying to make as much money as they possibly can by feeding us the lowest common denominator which is often emotional. they adopt believe it. rupert murdoch believes in climate change. he is proud of making fox news the leader not just fox news, news corporation the leading green media company. the leading. news corporation!

the same one that's on there and three dozen news segments that called scientists scam are tyes. yet rupert murdoch himself the ceo, brags about how much he's doing to combat climate change. how do you explain that? that is in the book. how do you explain that? it's a publicly traded company. it's a flawed mogd. i don't think there's anything wrong with people making money. but there's got to be some kind of balancing with the public god. i think "the new york times" does a good job that have. iraq war, you know, if we don't talk too much about them not fact checking the iraq war and all the people dead as a result of that. but, you know, generally speaking "the new york times" has a mission which is to provide a public service, and they're for profit. can you do that? i guess can t can be done. i know, i went off your

question. >> thank you. [inaudible] what were your trusts news sources for information? >> first thing i did to write the book i went in to the preer review literature. the reason i went there first is that most people now the peer review process. s it is a what academics use when you submit research, you submit it without your name our institution it goes to a body that fact checks it before it can get published. once it passes a fact checking and if they really all agree in the blind process, that you are saying something that is a a contribution, and b is not, you know, hogwash. it can get published that's where i started with the peer review process.

and there are floss in ever system and there are flaws in the peer review process too. but at least it's, you know, substantiative in terms of fact checked enough that it can trust it as a foundation. some of the chapters in bosnia was one in particular, they were competing journals that were two different narratives about what happened in bosnia, i got on a plane and went there. and i went and talked to people around the different sides and talked to judges and prosecutors and i talked to professors, and settled in that actually the side that had the most journals who were the ones that most people i interviewed agreed with. in other words, the side with without going too much in to the chapter, most people agreed on what happened in bosnia. in terms of the professors and

the academic and the researchers. there were a handful that didn't. but there were people i respected. and that's why i went back. i found that the majority of people the story was more aligned with boss bosnia intellectuals and people on the streets agreed with. so that's basically what i did. is i started with the peer review and if there was a conflict or a problem, then i -- not just yeah. i mean, what i was in bosnia, i spoke to -- like i said, judges, prosecutors, deafen lawyers, people on the street, professors, students, people who had parents that lived through, people that lived through it, and it was a task. but that was one that was the big tough one to resolve. the rest of them -- i would say there was a solid understanding

about what it actually happened in each of the conflicts. in the academic community. does that answer your question? okay. [applause] for more information visit the author's website. here are the best selling non-fiction books according to the ?ie times. the list reflects sales for the week of september 9th. first is the "glass castle." a contributor to msnbc.com recounts her does functional childhood in the second pot details the story of an olympics runner time as a prisoner in world war ii "unbroken." third is "wild" explains how the

travel changed her life and mental health. next the the president's plans for a second term in "obama's america." unmaking the american dream. fifth is "killing lincoln." the shocking assassination that changed america forever. edward argues that president obama is unbenefit for the united states prosecute sei in the "amateur." number seven is the "immortal life of renner rei yet that lacks." leading to break throughs on research on polio and cancer. next is the biographer of former penn state football coach joe paterno. followed by double cross a true story of the d day story. which chronicalled the allies attack on norm city from the point of view from double agents. number ten is