thank you for coming. [inaudible conversations] >> is there a nonfiction author platoon like to see featured on booktv? send us an e-mail at booktv@c-span.org. or tweet us at twitter.com/booktv. .. >> because we were friends of

carla and david cohen, we feel we were here at the creation of politics & prose, the incredible job that they did, and the idea that there would be a second act would be so creative and so exciting under brad and lisa just means a lot to us. i'm very, very pleased that you would come out on valentines day -- [laughter] i love you all. [laughter] and, in fact, i brought, i brought pens that are red. i will sign all books with red pens and put in a heart and an xo, hugs and kisses, as well if you wish them. [laughter] the ancient history behind this book has been largely told by brad in his introduction. i did come to brookings in 1972 after being on the white house staff of two presidents.

obviously, i was going to be the presidency man. in 1976 i wrote a book called "organizing the presidency" which, basically, said all i wanted to say at that time x so i had to look around for another subject. and i decided i would do the washington press. press is what we used to call the media. we called it the press at the time. and it was a survey of 450 and then got more elaborate. now, what is terribly interesting to me, this is very exciting. a young woman came up to me a few minutes ago, and she had this book, the original book, because she had just had it reprint inside the back of the shop. by the way, it looks better than the original. i am very excited. and she told me who she was, and she was one of the five interns in the summer of 1978 who did the basic study.

diane, she was from stanford. she was toed woman out. the others were all from harvard. and she told me how it changed her life. but she became a writer after that as well. i have several of my interns here now, and i just listen to that story. that's how life goes. and so it got me so interested that i decided that book, i would call it "news work." it would be the first of a series. and it has been such exciting -- the second book was the, took a year inside five government press offices; white house, state department, pentagon, food and drug administration, department of transportation. and you never know when you write a book. while i'm there with the department, at the department of transportation with the secretary and the snow is

falling and we look out the window, and a plane has crashed into the 14th street bridge. you remember that. and we're there, and i am there to write everything that the government does in return to a crisis. that's the way it goes. again, we did one on the house -- on the senate first. so it's a year wandering around inside the senate. senators walk a lot, you know? they have to go from their offices to the capitol and so forth. and i found that if i just instead of making appointments with them, if i just walked with them, i could get all of the interviews i wanted. and i just introduced myself and say i'm writing a book about the press, and i'd say, senator, you know reporters are going to put an adjective in front of your name. what add jekyll ty would you like -- adjective would you like in front of your name? they'd never been asked that question before, so they stopped and thought about it, and sometimes the conversation went on for 15 minutes.

you know what adjective they chose in front of their name? hard working. john melcher and that sort of thing. so we had wonderful times. we did another one on the house, andwet -- beth and i had ap opportunity to go around the world and do one on foreign correspondents, how they cover the rest of the world for the united states. i can remember being with "the washington post" in istanbul, just coming in from kurdistan for the weekend. i said, john, what's your trick for staying alive? and he said don't wash your car. oh. john, i asked you for a survival technique, and you said don't wash your car? he said, yes. if anybody's going to place a bomb under it, there'll be fingerprints on it. don't wash your car. we had a wonderful time. so obviously having done that on how we coffer the world, then i

did through their eyes how the rest of the world covers us, and we've now reached the point in 2005 where there would be a final book. clearly, after all these books the final book is supposed to be the future. but i haven't the faintest idea what the future of the media is going to be, so instead i went back to the beginning. by now i'm also a professor at gw, so beside my interns at brookings, i had these wonderful, energetic students, and we found 90% of these 450. but i should say, by the way, he were in 19 states beyond the washington area. they were in england, they were in france, they were in italy, they were in new zealand, they were in australia. 283 we actually did transcribed interviews with. all of this material, by the way, will be begin to the library of congress, will be in the manuscript division. future generations can go back, look at how it was now, compare it for how it will be in the future.

so one thing i should advise or warn you about, this isn't like your college yearbook, 50th anniversary yearbook, class of 1978. because these people were all different. the oldest was 80, the youngest was 23. what they had in common was that at a moment in 1978, they were all in washington covering national government for u.s. commercial operations. and that made it a little tricky in how you would organize it. so, basically, this book is a series of discreet essays on different parts of this mix. and then the end we bring it all together, and we count these people one by one by one and reach a conclusion which makes in the first book that is about career patterns in journalism. so let me start. the first book, the first chapter would be world war ii

generation, the g.i. bill people who came here. and it was a very clear pattern. today went out someplace to omaha, to des moines, they served their time, they were brought to washington, they spent the rest of their careers in washington. they retired. not that they had to, but they did at that time at 65. that's what it looked like. wrong book. [laughter] pick up where we are in the right book. give you just, i'm going to give you snippets from each of these particular sections to get a feel for it. this is in the first chapter about darwin olafson of the omaha world herald and how he came to washington in 1950. he had been assigned in omaha to cover the first big snowstorm of the season, and so he went out to get some image of the children playing in the white flakes and so forth, but he found that they were all cold

and shriveling in an elementary school playground. so he was an enterprising reporter. what he did was he started a snowball fight, and the kids loved that. but as soon as he got back to his office, he told us before i could get back in the newsroom, the school principal had called our executive editor and accused me of threatening the health and welfare of an entire new generation. [laughter] shortly thereafter, the executive editor called me in and said he thought i would do better in an unstable environment. he was sending me to washington. [laughter] so that, that was a first. now, if you move on to women, this becomes a difficult and a different chapter because there were only 20% of the original group were women. you could not do the same thing of just measuring them. so our brave researchers went out and kept interviewing women right through tul we got a pattern -- til we got a pattern

of women from 1978 to the present. now, let's get to -- this is what it really sort of looked like in the beginning. and it's pretty dismal. um, okay. this is, this is judy woodruff, and she graduates from duke in 1968. and she says, my spring break i went to atlanta. i interviewed with all three affiliate news directors, two of them barely gave me the time of day. the third, an abc affiliate's news director -- this was a station that was doing one newscast over the weekend -- he said i could use a goer if, a newsroom secretary. you can answer the phone, puck up some of my mail. i worked for them for a year and a half. the last six months, they hired me to do the 11 p.m. sunday night weather. it was like a cinderella story,

she says. [laughter] during the week i would be a secretary in the newsroom, and on sunday night i would come in at 6 p.m. and for five hours por over the weather wires, and then i learned how to do the weather. yeah. right after that i say nina totenberg who was trying to break in in boston, and she would go in and say, we have our woman. that was my favorite. we have our woman. that was all the time, we have our woman. but i'm going to give you, we're going to get to the end of that chapter because it's a valentines story, and you'll see why in a second. because this is what happens after you go through discrimination and family and balance and a really remarkable career of a woman named june of "the wall street journal." and she started in the dallas bureau of "the wall street journal" in 1976.

very macho place, she tells us. five years later i was sent to rhodesia, and i liked africa so much that i was dpiive the african beat. then i was asked to develop a beat on third world issues. in '83 i came back to be bureau chief in boston, in '85 i went to hong kong to be bureau chief, caught the revolution in the philippines and returned to washington to be the deputy bureau chief in 1987. now, here's a unique twist happens. she marries an american diplomat and leaves journalism for seven years. now, she says to her interviewer, you're going to get married when you fall in love, you really are. you're not going to decide, oh, i'm going to wait 15 years to get married. you know, you're going to do it when your heart tells you to do it. so it just happens that i didn't get married until i was 40, and i add my children at 41 and 42. it's not because i planned it that way, that's just the way it happened.

1997 she returned to "the wall street journal" here washington, and when we interviewed her in 2006, she had -- her kids were 6 and 17, she had adjusted to a schedule of four days a week, and she says we've got college night tonight. so i go home around 6:30 which is a little early for me, you know, you just have to set your priorities. this is a fairly family-friendly place. and no one will raise an eyebrow if you have to take off to do a college tour or something like a kid's baseball game. everyone recognizes that when your story's hot, you work hard at it, and you don't watch the clock. and when your story cools off, you can take time if you need it. it's what being a woman is all about. by the way, let me say something. every interview that's done by one of our students is chronicled in the back with the name of the student. this particular one was done by christine grenaldi, and i don't

think i could have gotten that information from june, although i've known her for many years. that was clearly something she was saying to a young woman who wanted to be a journalist. and it's really quite nice. i like that. okay. we now go from the world war ii generation to the boomer generation. and here things are really starting to change in a measured way. remember, the first time today stuck with one job, one employer and retired. now they start to change jobs. now they start to change types of media. and i'll give you two examples of this quickly. okay. this is karen elliot house who went from the "dallas morning news" to "the wall street journal" in 1984. and she says: one of the stories i did that i think made the journal want to hire me was during watergate. there was a young man named bud crow who was working at the white house wolfs one of the

low-level people that got in trouble and got sentenced to prison. the day he was leaving the court, i called up the white house and asked to speak to him. of course, you're from the morning news -- "dallas morning news", so nobody wants to talk to you. so i said to him i'm that woman whose picture is in the paper standing behind you, and i want to talk to you about how you tell your kids you're going to prison. he said, well, i don't think i want to talk, and he put me awe. and that evening i was driving down 17th street past the white house at night with my boyfriend, and i saw him walking. and i screamed, stop the car! [laughter] and i got out of the car and just went up to him and said i'm that woman that called you today, and i want to talk to you. he said, well, i'm taking my last walk around the white house. so i just started walking with him. we walked down 17th street past the ellipse, around the ellipse, back up again. me quizzing him the whole way. i mean, last walk around the

white house, that was a great face in the beginning. but then he talked about how he used to run out there, and then he got into how his children had seen him on television and what he was going to tell them. you know, if i do say so myself, it was a great human interest feature. the "dallas morning news" ran it, the dallas bureau chief of "the wall street journal" saw it. myway, i went to "the wall street journal." oh, by the way, she retired as publisher of "the wall street journal," okay? okay. the next one from lisa meyer. and the difference there is she didn't go from one job to the o specifically, she went from one type of media to another. she went from print to tv. and here's how she tells her story. i never at any particular point decided that i was going to be on television. i was invited to do a couple panels on "meet the press" and "face the nation" which i found very nerve-wracking. in fact, i could hardly breathe.

i think that really made the difference is there was a news conference in september of '80. i was covering the carter white house for the washington star. i hadn't been covering the white house long. perhaps president carter may have thought i was a sweet young thing. it was the very end of the news conference. president carter called on me, and i asked him about some allegations he'd made about governor reagan having injected racism into the presidential campaign. the president basically blew me off and said, look, i never made such an allegation or something like that. i stood there and re-asked the question. at this point he totally denied that he had ever said such a thing. after the news conference, he'sly staal ran up to me and said tell your parents to watch tv tonight. on all the evening news shows, there i was asking the question of the president and him basically providing a not terribly straightforward answer. then the networks, of course, roll the tape of him saying

exactly what i said he had said. so that was the moment that propelled me into television. lisa meyers became the chief investigative correspondent for, what, nbc? nbc, right. okay, we move on. a chapter that i call -- 84 -- call "in the right or wrong place." and it has to do with whether you happen to work for the washington star or "the washington post." whether you happen to work for upi or ap. and it starts with another -- it's interesting that so many of these, i hadn't realized what i was doing, were by women who were saying these. they were just more interesting. how about that? the washington star, which had once been the pape per of record

here, as you know, ceased publication on august 7, 1981, and this is what roberta hoenig draper said. aside from my husband's death, the day the washington star folded was the worst day of my life. i had no notice. my boss called at 6 a.m. to tell me so i wouldn't hear it on the radio. so i walked in the kitchen and made myself a manhattan. [laughter] i thought, how many times do you have a death in the family? it was intense. i had been there since 1957. i started out as a copy boy. it was a wonderful place to work even though it was conservative, because they gave reporters absolutely free rein. no one ever told you what you had to do. she then says a friend from nbc called with a job offer. i became their senate producer, which is a euphemism for off camera. i did all the tuesday lunches, all the interviews, all the press conferences, wrote memos

and told the reporters what to report. i stayed at nbc for nearly 20 years. now, that's in the right or the wrong place. i thought i'd also say when sometimes you're in the right or the wrong place to write a story. this doesn't happen often, but it can happen. and this is ike pappas, cbs. dallas police headquarters, 1963. i entered the pacement of the dallas police headquarters. you know where i was going to stand to try the to report the story of the departure of oswald, so i found a little spot by the fender of the chase car of the armored truck, and i squeezed in. i didn't realize it, i was squeezing in right in front of jack ruby. suddenly, there's a bang and a flash ons wald's sweater and a moan, and he goes down. my god, what is happening now?

the thing that crossed my mind as a reporter, could this possibly be the assassin of the united states president now being killed? put that in words, and that's just what i saw. okay. i'm going to move on to networks. i hadn't planned to do this, but i happened to see somebody in the audience who happened to be there and happened to be a very good interviewer as well as friend. just a snippet from somebody named marvin kalb. you may be wondering, if you have a long memory and you're into the sidebars, why marvin kalb who was cbs' chief diplomatic correspondent in 1980 suddenly switched over to nbc. now, the true story, and he -- if he wants to correct me, he can, but these are in his words. in 1975 i was out of work for

eight months because of a bad back. bill small, the bureau chief for cbs, used to visit me at home. after a couple of months, i said to him i want you to take me off salary because i'm not doing anything for your network, i'm just lying here. of and he said, no, that he was going to keep me on full salary. and i said, well, do it on half. nope, full salary until you get better. and that was eight months, and i never forgot that. and in 1980 when he became president of nbc and he called me and he said i'd like you to come over here, i knew that i owed bill, so i went. that's the story for. by the way, his brother who i had hoped was going to be here tonight, we exchanged e-mails today, bernie, he also went with, to nbc at the time, and he told me he really did it to be with marvin and called it sibling love. [laughter] bernie kalb. bernie appears constantly in this book, because he does so

many things at so many points. i want to do a little more. on networks because there are some tricky things -- how we doing on time? okay. not everybody was happy, particularly those who had, who were specialists. and i happened to interview the three specialists, all of whom were lawyers and all of whom were covering the supreme court and all of whom turned to be out of sync with their networks and all of whom left. i'll just, i might read to you, i'll read one. carl stern, who was at nbc. and he said: the principal problem was what had been a reporter's business became a producer's business. the principal producer to whom i reported in new york had very strong views as to what she thought the court was doing which occasionally did parallel what the court was doing -- [laughter]

but not all the time. she would change my copy, and i'd say, well; they didn't say that, and she'd say, well, it means the same thing, and people will understand it better. frequently, it reached the point where i didn't believe half the things i was saying on the air. not that they were blatantly false, but it was inaccurate. i had this phone call from stephen friedman, the evening news' senior executive, he's bawling me out. he says i've had this bullshit up to here. what matters is not whether we're fair in this story or fair in that story. what matters is we are fair overall. now, i ask you, says carl, as a rational human being, how can you get to be fair overall? it's sort of like the guy with one foot in boiling water and one in ice water, does it average to be comfortable? i was relieved to go on to be something else. he went on to be the spokesperson for the attorney general, janet reno, and to a

professor at george washington university. i won't read the others, fred graham and tim o'brien, whose stories are equally troubling. i want to go on to "the new york times" which is really by far my favorite chapter. and is the most, the chapter that is truly sort of studs terkel. it just goes from one story to the other. i interviewed 17 out of 30 reporters there, and so you get the whole going from hedrick smith, bureau chief, on to rick burt who covered the national security council, steve roberts and marty -- [inaudible] who were alternating congress and white house, bernie, the diplomatic correspondent, phil who was doing the environment. and they weave in and out. i'll do a long one of marty

primarily because it tells what it was like there without exception if you started in "the new york times" at that time. marty said, i got a bachelor of law degree, and then i went into the service for two years, and i came out and took a va course called how to get a job, the burden of which was something, to go for something you're really interested in. so i wrote 110 editors and had six interviews, four job offers in 1954. what i was offered was copy boy jobs, mail room jobs. i took the one at "the new york times." then when you got that jobs, according to the va course, consider it a foot inside door, and make yourself useful to the people who are doing the kind of work you want to do, and someday a task will come, and they will need somebody, and they will look at you, and they'll say, well, what the heck. he knows how the prick us coffee, he knows how to rip

coffee off the teletype machine. give the kid a break. i followed that to a tee, and it worked for me. and he goes on to say how he moved from copy boy to semireporter at the u.n. bureau to covering the women's to page tonight rewrite to finally being sent to washington as the regional correspondent, that is covering new york, new jersey and connecticut. and then finally moving over to cover, to be part of the bureau where he'd cover congress. so that had taken 40 years, 20 years in new york, 20 years here. and then he said i left the times because new york finance ier asked me to start a newspaper. i turned him down several times and he kept coming back and coming back. it took me six months for them to give me what i wanted which, basically, was a piece of the action.

i would not do this if i did not have an equity interest in it. i had spent my life as a reporter. i had almost no managerial experience. i had to find an office, a printer and a distributer, then i had to hire personnel. the hardest thing was in advertising. it was really harrowing. people tell me two things about a start-up: you'll never work harder, and you'll never have more fun. and in both cases that's been true. i was then 68 years old when i started "the hill," you know, the paper, a time when i, by rights, should have been in a nursing home, right? [laughter] it took three years before we made a profit. we launched in september '94 and just lost $100,000 that year. the next year we lost a lot of money, about 800,000, but the third year we made a modest profit, about 200,000. and now it is really a cash cow. it's raking in multimillions,

multimillions, multi, multi, multimillions of of dollars. [laughter] couldn't have happened to a nicer person. there is a second story that i'll abbreviate because it's sort of different, and that's bernie who goes from being their chief diplomatic correspondent here, he goes to new york as foreign editor, and now he's just turning 60, and the editor, joe, asks him to look for something else, and he figures, well, this is the end of his journalism career. but he says my oldest son james was at harvard and majoring in computer science. he said, come look at my computer lab. so i went into his computer lab, and he had the this big machine that looked impressive to me. i had a mcintosh at home. he said, let me show you something, dad. this was the first time i had seen the worldwide web. it showed some exhibits and pictures and text. i said to him, james, if you can

have text on that computer, why can't we have a newspaper on the web? i said that to joe, and he said, well, maybe we should do something like that, and then one thing led to another, and the times started a task force op online journalism. that task force put out the first times web site in january '96, and i became the first editor of the web site. so i changed completely from the traditional journalism to a web site journalist. that was quite an education for me. how -- do you want me to just keep going and going? tell me, boss. >> [inaudible] leave some time for questions, so maybe a few more minutes? >> okay. let me, let me tell you a little bit about the conclusion. i shouldn't tell you too much because i really do want you to why the book. [laughter] -- buy the book. [laughter] this is what happened. to have a book like this, you expect that you're going to have, you're going to know where

it comes out. where it would come out is about where the reporters at the time told me we were going to come out. and that is that this journalism was a high energy, low-paying profession. it meant that there'd come a point where you'd look a little ahead x there are your kids about ready to go to college, or you were thinking about it, and you better get out and pick some money. and what really i expected to find. now, instead, in the last chapter when we do this adding up one by one by one to 450, we find something that is totally the opposite of that. rather than getting out, they stay in. two-thirds of them are in there for 30 years, 40 years, even 50 years. and you say how could this be? well, there were tw reasons. two reasons. the main reason was that a the world had changed for them and for everybody else as well. and during this period spouses, in this case mostly women -- you'll remember it was 80/20

when we started on this -- were the same sort that they were. that's who you marry, somebody like you. so now their spouse was a psychiatrist or a lawyer or a high government official or a lobbyist, and now you've got two upper middle class salaries or income, and together you could send your kids to college. and the second thing you find out that runs right through this is that these people loved what they were doing, love loved it. most people love the things they do after they leave the office. these people were looing what they did in the office. and if you didn't have to leave, they didn't. and that, basically, was the final story of it. so is it different than today? well, they told me that it was a golden age. they told me that in both print and television. they were there at a moment when

important things were happening in the business. obviously, important things were happening in the world, but there are always important thing happening in the world. it was important things that were happening in television, in print and so forth. so was it a golden age? well, we'll see. there, this is one person who thought so. bruce morton, i always thought -- who was cbs and then went to cnn -- and for a television person i thought he had the most elegant sense as an essayist. and bruce said, you know, i think all old guys always this think the good old days were better. but the good old days were better. [laughter] okay. [applause] shall i -- obviously, oh, excuse me. if you have questions, go to the microphone. is this the only one? right there.

and if it's not clear, i'll repeat the question for our viewers at c-span. yes. >> so i'm -- [inaudible] and i've watched from, you know, where you started to where it is now. >> uh-huh. >> do you think or did the people you interview hi that these day -- the think that these days with a completely different type of news, a 24/7 blogging which is much less formal than the kind of reporting you did, is it a different kind of person or the same kind of person doing a different thing? >> i've talked to young people in journalism schools and so forth and, obviously, they're going to have to learn different tools if they're going to stay in this business. but you see the same spark. these people will adjust to this just as the people i interviewed would have adjusted to it if it's their world. and that's why, actually, this is a very optimistic book because it says there are always going to be people who will want to be reporters and will somehow be reporters.

and it's a tough transitional moment, but it will adjust. it always did. it's already starting to see things. every day you see different attempts to change journalism. so i would say to answer your question that it's tough most for the people who are moving out now. >> right. >> for the people moving in, in some ways it may be quite a remarkable future for them. how many of you read ezra klein, for example? yeah. he's 28 years old. what did he do? smart guy, obviously. he started a blog. >> right. >> anybody can blog. and you notice him and he's got something to say, before you know it things happen. so in that way it's opened to young people if they can get a foot in many or create their own way in. so i'm an optimist. >> thank you. >> any other thoughts? anybody else?

the person. >> be and thank you so much. you refer to me, i was the researcher my sophomore year, and it was quite a pleasure, and it was life changing. so all the interns with you now are quite fortunate. >> tell me, tell me -- we can afford to do this, we don't care about anybody else here -- what did happen. you say it changed your life. what did you go on to do? >> it was an incredible summer. the contact we had with you and at brookings led me then to go from stanford to columbia and international affairs and then a world of research writing. i was the korean prime minister's speech writer and director of trade at u.s. chamber of commerce and just many -- and wrote a book that was here some years ago on parent advocacy. >> i'm so happy to see that. >> and i'm still in writing, but i still admire you greatly, and it was a wonderful -- >> four of my interns have been in president's cabinets. isn't that a great feeling? [laughter] i won't even tell you who they

are, it might not look well more me. okay. >> and in those days we sat at a desk with a phone plugged into the wall with index cards with names like pa patina gregory, ad you would pull out ten a day, and we would go through the list and make phone calls, and many said you're working for stephen he is and brookings, they would answer these questions. it was unbelievable. you'd go home and pinch yourself. >> thank goodness i'm a pack rat. i saved all those. that's how i was able to go back to the beginning and -- >> and we wrote our thoughts on index cards. not even typewriters. so, um, in the office at the time. so my two questions would be research m.d. dolling. >> yeah. >> how that's changed. >> yeah. >> and then moving from quantitative to qualitative issues, looking at the press and the reporting that's available to people in this information age where now i can, you know, new york times everything here. but what do you think of the

quality of news to the american public on washington -- >> well, let me, let me play with the first one, the question of methodology. the amazing thing when i decided, hey, i want to study the media, when you think about the shorenstein center at or harvard, when you think about pennsylvania and the university of southern california, an enberg, there was nothing there. you have to start with the literature. in 1977 when i started looking, there was no literature. the last book was a ph.d. dissertation from 1935 from the university of chicago, later published as the washington correspondence, by leo rosten. hesmart enough to get out of tht business because it sold about

500 copies. so you had to invent your own methodology if you were going to do this, and partly what we were doing, diane. and that was really sort of fun to go along and figure out the best ways to get the answers that you needed. now, of course, it's become far more, far more social science, and the methodology doesn't change. the question of accuracy and to forth, obviously, the joys of the old way were that you had editors. you had somebody who was looking over your shoulder. that's what's happened. and in a sense maybe you're your own editor, and you better have a sixth sense. but there are other thing that are happening that are sort of interesting. i can remember about 20 years ago -- i was doing, i think,

"the diane rehm show", and a call came in, a young woman, and she was very upset that a she didn't feel she was finding, getting the information she needed to be a responsible citizen. and i suddenly remember saying to her, you know, diet books, diet books are big. i think i should become a media diet, write a media diet book, you see? i'd ask you, i only need to know three things. i only need to know how much money you're willing to spend on your media, how much time you're willing to give to it and what your interests are. and i could put together a diet for you. because there's lots of stuff out there. nice idea. today we do that. we do that. i do it, you do it, we all do it. we know what's in the computer, we know the aggregators that we like to go into it, we know the special columnists we go into, we are our own editors.

it was always the problem was not for people like you, frankly. that's what this first book showed as well. because there was always news out there. the problem was for the people who only had an opportunity to dip their toe into the news. i don't know how that's changed now, how people are doing more dipping their toe in or not, but they sure have that thing on their desk oren on their pad, and they have the opportunity to do that. so we tend to hear washington where the reporters are all former reporters or colleagues of ours and friends and are worried about what's happening. but you turn it around from the other side, and the consumer really is much advantaged. the consumer of the previous generation unless that consumer was a person who truly was involved and wanted to be involved. it's more at your finger tips

now. i think that's more or less okay, but you pay a price for that. as i say, it's unfiltered, you've got to do your own filtering. oh, i'm sorry. >> you mentioned when you did the original interview, 20% of the reporters were female. um, what about in terms of ethnic diversity? how was that then, how much has it changed now? >> good, good, yeah. >> and has the female diversity or sexual diversity changed over the years, or is it still 20%? >> no, no, no, no, it's 41% now. it's doubled. that's not -- and it depends, again, on the medium. news magazines have always had more, for example. so there is a chapter on diversity, but it's largely about blacks. and that is, that's not good news. there's about 4% at that time, and i now estimate that it's about 4% today. this is very troubling, and when

you go through it, you see some things. you see that the talent is clearly there. you see that affirmative action programs have been in place and what's happening. you get the ones that the bold print, like when you say reliable sources and what's in bold print. the ones who win pulitzer prizes are there at the top. it's when you to below that that you start running into an absence of the reporters you want there. and i think what happens, because many of these organizations are really quite good at picking young people to be on a fast track, and the people are good. and they get to a certain point. now, some of them, of course, are now in demand, and they get better jobs or better offers. but also they look one step higher above them, who's in the executive suite. and they suddenly see that that

person doesn't look much like them. and at that point, i think, they start leaving journalism. so that's as i wrote in my diversity chapter. by the way, it's on african-americans. i don't get into other minority groups, because they weren't there in my original study. yes, ma'am. >> hi. i'd -- i know you mentioned that part of the reason why you wrote this was because there budget any previous literature on it, and while that's a compelling reason, i'm interested in what drew you to write about and put in the time to interview so many people to record the stories of so many journalists outside of their not being information there. why is it important that we have the careers of journalists studied and chronicled, and what is the significance of this? >> yeah. well, as i say, you see, i stumbled into it. didn't want to keep repeating myself on the presidency. the week -- the book i wrote was

quite successful. it was book of the month club and all of that, and i could have spent the rest of my life giving keynote addresses. [laughter] some do. i didn't want to do that. i looked around for something else. but i wasn't a journalist, and i wasn't a communications person, and it's really nice to find something that's open like that, virgin territory. you run with that. but basically wafs i? i was a writer. and i talk about journalists having fun, i had fun. it really was joyous. i don't think i have to justify it. i think journalism is a pretty important part of our community, part of our life in a, particularly in a democracy. and it was stunning that they weren't there. they weren't being taught in political science. in journalism schools, they were trade schools. political science wasn't teaching them in part because it didn't have the tools to teach them with. hope any, my books contribute to

that. so it's amazing the degree that they weren't part -- i went at some point up to the kennedy school, and i commuted for three years. and before marvin set up the shorenstein center and so fort, and there wasn't anything else up there. and this was the kennedy school. this was teaching people to be our great future leaders, and there was nothing in the menu for them about dealing with journalism. and that's the huge gap that marvin and the shorenstein school filled at that point. but that wasn't all that -- in our lives, that wasn't all that long ago. >> yeah. and i also wanted to ask, um, my friend kelsey and i are visiting students here this semester at american university's journalism program for the washington semester, and i wanted to know what you believe that young aspiring journalists or students who are interested in communications could glean from a lot of the stories that you've

list inside there? because there's so many wonderful stories, but it's a really different landscape from the time when a lot of these individuals start today where we are, and what is important -- >> i'm going to push that aside for this reason. i want you to get the book, i want you to come by and visit. my present intern who's there is probably in your program, and so you don't even need an introduction to me. you'll come, and you'll join the two of us for lunch, and we'll go into why you should want to be a journalist. is that fair enough? i wanted to get to the lady behind you or man. i'm sorry. oh, okay. [inaudible conversations] >> good evening. over the past several months, there have been a considerable number of polls taken. >> yes. >> and one of the things that was polled was the approval rating among the american people of the media. >> yes. >> now, the good news is that congress polled more poorly than

the media did. [laughter] so that's the end of the good news. >> doesn't that make you feel good? >> now, what is your explanation for this? where well, i think there's several explanations. one, that is almost a statistical answer, one. and that is trust goes up and down for all of these institutions at the same time, and it relates importantly with things like the state of the economy. and as things get better, we will love the congress, the media, the president better as well. i think probably other things are involved. for one thing as far as congress goes, i think there's a pretty good case that this congress and the last congress has been less productive than any congress i can remember. and so if you want to applaud that, fine and good. but i think the polls reflect the outcome. on media there are things that

are happening that not only is the future, it's been the past now at least since fox, since cable news. fox was '96, cnn was '81 and so forth. and that is the idea that we factionalized it. we came into this, and we had three choices, nbc, cbs, abc. they were competing with others, but they were giving us a centrist view of the world. suddenly when you could break it down into these all units, and the units were going to be on 24 hours a day, and it was cheaper to hire somebody to hold forth each evening, you started to, obviously, to divide the media but also divide the audience. and you see, you see that too. so it's going to take a lot of work to put the audience back

together. it's been very productive financially to separate it. i think that's happening as well. any behind? okay. yes. >> be hello. i, like alyssa, am also a student at american university for the semester, and i find it fascinating that you were able to be embedded in the agencies for so long and really be there and listen to the stories and see how things were working. do you think that access would be given today, and -- >> i don't think it needed to be given then either. all of the things i've done is to take advantage of what i have. now, i did, i went into those agencies in '81, first year that ronald reagan was president. after all, i had been on the white house staff of two republican presidents. it's not the same as anybody else knocking on the door and saying, excuse me, let me in. so i had a degree of entree. once i got that, something happened that was very interesting, particularly in the

state department and the defense department. i had the to get security clearance. i was irritated because it took a while. but once i got that, i was considered part of the team. and very often the worse thing that happened was you had to watch out, because they started to involve you into the conversations, and you had to separate it out. but in other words, what i'm saying is you take advantage of what you had. okay, the same happened with congress, particularly the senate. the senate is very scholar-unfriendly. they don't just let you in and run around. but it did happen that my closest friend was dan yell patrick moynihan who by that time had become a united states senator. so what he did was give me staff credentials. he didn't pay me anything, but i had staff credentials that allowed me to run around. so you do the best you can with what you have, and that's what i've donement -- done. yes, ma'am. >> well, i was working in the senate when you started this

project, and it seems to me that was rather a golden age. and, of course, the people you're talking to are well established now, but it just seems to me the news has been dumbed down so much. the 30-second sound bites, the fact that, you know, why is it more important that what's his name reached for a water bottle, and do your people -- maybe you didn't ask them this, but do they really think with news being cut back especially in the foreign bureaus, do they really think the profession is still in good shape, going many a good direction? -- in a good direction? >> not interviewing them today. but i can tell you a few things about what happened with the media in that period and the adjustments that were made.

with my wonderful class at gw, we always had people passing lu and helping us out -- passing through and helping us out. i wanted to show them what television, network it's news would have looked like many 1978. this is all stored at vanderbilt. and so i looked through it. i wanted a particular day where there wasn't a great crisis and a day that was comparable to the days i was using in the book. and i chose a day in april 1978, and it just happened that bob schieffer was substituting for walter cronkite. so i called up bob schieffer, and i said, hey, i'm going to show you in 1978, you want to come over here and watch it? oh, yes. and so he came over. he was prepared in his own mind to tell us how it was different. and largely, he was going to say that because of the competition with the clickers, you were going to have less news because they were going to have to feed

into the commercials. you had to hold people, people,u were going to get a minute, minute and a half less news. but that's not what happened. well, 2457d that happened, but additionally what happened was that the technology was so different. it budget a technology -- it wasn't a technology, it was a technology in which films are spliced and put together and all of that thing, and every 90 seconds has 12 people in a lot of little pieces. and this is done in part because these are craftsmen. they have the ability to do it, and they're trying to make an interesting story. but the previous story that bob schieffer was watching with us, you had a person, the reporter, talking actually for 30 seconds maybe. and today had, you know, they had something to say. and so it wasn't a back and forth and all the little pieces, and it was much more understandable, said bob schieffer, watching bill plant talking instead of two seconds of bill plant back and forth.

and the funny part about it is that i invited bob, and then he was suddenly going to replace dan rather. and so the person sitting in many our class was the once and future anchor of cbs. and he watched that, and he said, yeah, i'm learning something from that. i think i'm going to do some things differently while i'm there. so that was quite wonderful. now, what was happening on the print side was equally interesting. if you went back to "the new york times" at that time, you would have seen -- and analyzed it as we did and broke it into pieces -- it looked, the coverage looked the way you studied it in elements of political science. it started in the subcommittees, it went up to the committee, it went up to the floor, it came together with the other side, it went out, it was exactly the way we learned it. okay. for some reason the editor

someplace thought that this was boring and instead, they just wanted that final vote when it got to the floor. and it didn't look at all like the hand and glove work that goes into it. and at this point manager else happened. -- something else happened. niche, there's a whole chapter on niche. niche goes on and niche becomes famous and niche is now bloomberg government, and niche is now politico, and niche is now, um, the roll call, so fort and so on -- so forth and so on. so there's something that's being put back together for those people who need to know more than yesterday there was a 51-45 vote on an act. so it is different. and it'll be different again in the future. all of these things adjust and readjust as i see it. >> that's it. >> that's it. ms. . [applause] >> you're watching 48 hours of

nonfiction authors and books on c-span2's booktv. >> you know, the election's over, and the president has been reelected, and the new congress has been sworn in. and we have, basically, what we had before. other than the fact we spent $4 billion to have a president be reelected, the senate remain in one party's hand and the house remain in the republicans' hands. we have, we have effectively, we have gridlock. we have now, we have variations on these new terms like sequester. and so last week in washington they called the snow that never came the snowquester. we have things like the fiscal cliff that we would have thought you jump off of and die, now it's just related to the inability to find common ground on the budget. so we're going from crisis to crisis, and nothing in the election really changed that. pause our -- because our beloved nation is divided, the direction we should take is undecided as well, and meanwhile, the power of compounding is not our friend.

our recovery is the weakest it's been in modern times. our entitlement programs, everybody recognizes, are unsustainable, literally unsustainable and grow in magnitude without change. our regulations are outdated, they're complex, they're costly, and they're certainly creating way too much uncertainty. our education system duds not help enough -- does not help enough young people gain the power of knowledge to be able to pursue their dreams as they see fit. our debt levels are way too high, and they're rising rather than declining. our tax policy has gotten way too complicated, and it punishes savings and success. and our social and economic mobility, something that used to define america, something that we've been proud of for legitimate reasons that irrespective of where you start if you work hard and play by the rules, you can achieve great things, that has diminished. we, in fact, amongst the developed countries of the world, we are least, we're the least economically mobile now. our country has changed, and our

political system which is so important for us to begin to break through is not capable right yet at least of being able to solve these problems. >> are you interested in being a part of booktv's new online book club? this month we're discussing "immigration wars: forging an american solution." jeb bush was recently on booktv presenting "immigration wars." you can watch that program online at booktv.org. as you read the book this month, post your thoughts on twitter with the hashtag btv book club and write on our facebook page, facebook.com/booktv. then on april 30th at 9 p.m. eastern, join our live moderated discussion on both social media sites. have an idea for next month? send your suggestions on which books you think we should include in our online book club via twitter, facebook or e-mail us, booktv@c-span.org.