political force that it was. my argument is that this was a radical unfolding with revolutionary possibilities. >> did the revolution play out? certainly not in the manner that they had hoped for by those who participated in the counterculture. i think that's obviously the case. but again, the impact nevertheless of the counterculture was huge. and it remains so today. >> book tv is on the campus of california state university at chico. this university is the second oldest university in the california system. come inside to hearabout the future of journalism . >> this is "media smackdown: deconstructing the news and the future of journalism" and

the book is the brainchild of a commodore, he was a reporter for the indianapolis hartford 25 years, he's a prolific author in retirement and aid had continued the manuscript and brought in jim kuyper and me toward the end of things to bring adifferent perspective . but the book is kind of the brush of the history of journalism, there's a nice chapter on the history of journalism but the basic idea is you have these factors that transformed journalism in the past 65 years so we had the rise of corporate ownership in about 1946, we had the rise of the internet, we had the rise of the world wide web. that takes almost everything and allowed individuals to participate and then we had

global economic collapse during 2007 and along with that we had our smart phone apps and social media. you've got the perfect storm where you havecorporate ownership of the media , declining returns because of competition and economic issues. and you have a result, a flood of information and bad economic times which really crippled corporate media and took a lot of journalists out of the industry whether willingly or not. >> so media smacked down really traces the evolution of newspapers in particular from a partisan press to a nominally objective press, in fact that's part of arguably becoming a partisan press. so the book in the introduction we talk about if there is a far left press, and a near left press,

there's a far right press, there is a conservative right press but the book points out there's a huge loss in the middle of people who are not being reached by any of those things and that's lost is the problem, people who are drawn to political ideology tend to gravitate toward those particular outlets. but you have a bunch of people in the middle who need something from both sides, and want something from either so gravitating toward one or the other because of political ideology heavily. and so you end up with at this point in time we had a nation where people can tune into things they already believe, things that interest them, things that have already interested them that they need to hear and things they need to know about both sides you get polarization and that's the nature of part of the press. so the partisan press is a funny thing because the partisan press existed until

the 1880s at which point frank get at and others said you know, we can't make as much money if you got partisan press and yet you can sell two advertises on the side, you can sell to advertisers from this side and if you have an objective press, you can sell advertising on both sides so the real goal was to make money. so i think it's kind of funny norm that reporters say they believe in objectivity but it's impossibly objective so the norm of objectivity is this sunny thing that's been replaced by advocacy journalism on one side. it's been replaced by you know, neoconservatives on the side so you have more of an opinion either press then an objective press. >> i had people i knew who i gave them the read and they

were working for corporate groups, and they were very offended by the book because the corporate perspective is we are saving journalism, not hurting it. and i think it's you can look at two different ways, one of the things that corporate media tried to do for journalism is tries to systematize, room and isaac, making a product to be duplicated from place to place. that's really a foundation that agency, that is a product to be marketed and it's not like milk that has an expiration date but news is more like milk, it has an expiration date and it's also anchored to one flight before pasteurization, milk had to be made in the community where it was going to be distributed because you couldn't spread out so the

corporatization of the media was sort of like pasteurization, we just make it homogenous and spread it out and community journalism on the flip side is more about purpose. it's really about being a community of record, it's about covering a community better than anyone else. and making a difference so two conflicting kind of ideas for corporate journalism is advancing, just how it's executing and how it's difficult to homogenize media. there are two ways of looking at the trust issue and the public. one is that we had more trust because people trusted the institution. they understood that there was a process, that there was a reporter who would do the interview and write the story and then there would be an editor who would look at it, and there would be a multiple touch process so that what came out was this fixed form,

thing that had been carefully researched but part of the historical record. we are now in a point where we've got a 24 seven news cycle. we've gone from a two day, 38 cycle to a 24 hour news cycle at cnn to a 24 second news cycle with twitter. 24 seconds is a long time if you're talking about twitter. people's attention spans have gotten very short so they tend to one thing and move on to the next. though there's just a lot of information and it's hard to, it's hard for people to process everything in a headline or a tweet and all this reading headlines in our newsfeed so the process is, the trust is based on i'm not sure what. we just have a flood of information and when you're given so much information and so little time to digest it, you don't trust any of it. and you onething here and one thing here , you stop thinking about, you stop

thinking of it as being trustworthy. how do i trust the new york times when i'm hearing the opposite thing to seconds later from someone else. in the book we do talk about public perception of what constitutes liberal press, what constitutes a conservative press. a great example is npr and cnn have taken over the more liberal press in the public's mind, even though they tried to fight that perception most of the time and then fox has cheerfully embraced the conservative role and today fox has shifted toward the middle of a obit and there are other organizations that have stepped in to the farther right, they are self identifying and i do think we are at a point in history where strangely enough, we are having a self identifying part of the press. as hard as the new york times

and washington post try to hang in the middle, they are being identified as part of a liberal problem by our conservative administration, among other things so the choices are being made by our politicians, they are being made by individuals, these systems. there are being made by what shows up in your feed like what to follow so individuals are identifying what they see as politically conservative, politically liberal. i think journalism is still working well and it's still working best in small communities, in communities and the flyover states where no one else is covering what's happening in those communities. journalists are critical in those communities, their critical to the life of those communities journalism is so hard to survive as a journalist given the fact that advertising has declined. if you have a small town and

local advertisers you can still do okay but journalism is still being done very well injured newspapers across the country. it's the big dailies, it's the big corporate newspapers that are part of the problem, big websites. news is not a finished, fixed, finite project. you have skin when a story is published, this is the media that function for a long time in the united states. the public has to be involved in the conversation, that's the way you save journalists and journalism. the location of an article used to be the end of the process for the reporter, the reporter would write the story, and it in, move on and now it's the beginning. it's where the conversation starts and the public has to be involved but we have to be

a trusted filter, we have to be listeners and as i was a journalist for 12 years, i was raised in the business so it's hard not to think of it that way. i think that it's okay that journalists are branding themselves, i think it's okay journalists are building their own credibility and that they are building followers and that people find them and say i trust this person, that's very much walter cronkite model. this is something someone i found we seem to give me good information on a routine basis and gives me hope. that's not a bad thing. i would say that would be a good thing. quite this book approaches journalism predominately as being something that's practiced by newspaper reporters and in broadcasting. that journalists are reporters and one of the things that we do in this program is we emphasize this very vital , relevant skill set of doing research, interviewing, writing, publishing across multiple

platforms that basically what you're doing is being a multi-platform storyteller and the story is going to dictate was going to be told whether it's 140 character to, the blog entry, a facebook post, 1000 word story, a photo essay, a video or some combination including some platform that does not yet exist. we are teaching our students that this story dictates how it's going to be told and told in multiple forms so we are using the skill set, the same skill set, the classic skill set and our students are getting great jobs. they're not all working for newspapers but they're doing really interesting things with that skill set. the other thing we do is focus on a set of values that includes ethics, diversity, professionalism and free speech. again, values that are official across the board and for us to do going to

journalism, staying journalism, become journalists, we have people who are adding content out there that is critical and trustworthy and necessary for a functional democracy. a functional democracy needs a free press. facebook, google, twitter need a free press. they need a democracy and journalism will survive because they very much need journalism to survive . >> while in chico we caught upwith darren hurley, author of the book lost causes in which he claims a system of blended sentencing in texas and its effect on juvenile crimeoffenders . >> the name of our book is lost causes and blended sentencing , second chances in the texas youth commission that we wanted to take basically 3300 offenders from 1987 to 2011 that have received suchsentences . >>