time as chief speech writer to former defense secretary james mattis in "holding the line." look for these titles this coming week and watch for many of the authors in the near future on booktv on c-span2. >> and now live from austin, it's former u.s. ambassador to the united nations samantha power discussing her new memoir. >> hi. welcome to c-span2 booktv tent. i'm the editor at large of kirkus reviews, and i'm the host of the fully booked podcast, if you'd like to subscribe. and i am absolutely honored to be in conversation with samantha power today. [applause]

samantha power is a professor of practice at the harvard kennedy school at harvard law school. from 2013-2017 she served as the u.s. ambassador to the united nations and a member of president obama's cabinet. from 2009-2013 she served on the national security council as special assistant to the president for multilateral affairs and human rights. she began her career as a journalist reporting from places such as bosnia, east timor, kosovo, rwanda, sudan and zimbabwe, and she was the founding executive director of the carr center for human rights policy at the kennedy school. her book, "a problem from hell" won the pulitzer prize in 2003. she is -- yeah. [laughter] a big one a while ago. [laughter] she is also the author of "the new york times" bestseller "chasing the game."

her -- chasing the flame. her most recent book, "the education of an eyedist," was published in september, and i've just learned it is short listed for the irish book prize. of conch congratulations. >> thank you. [applause] >> and one more time, let's do it one more time, please join me in welcoming samantha power to austin. ms. -- [applause] if. >> there's a reason this is my third trip to austin in, like, three weeks. just for the record, y'all are incredibly warm, and i'm very grate. thank you. [applause] >> okay. so we're going to start off this session with a brief reading. >> yes. so i want to just set the stage for our conversation, and i thought the reading that i would do today is one that speaks to

the challenges that we are facing, figuring out how to engage with people who we disagree with vehemently. and so this is a scene from a chapter called "upside down land." and it's about my relationship with the russian ambassador. i had invested long hours in forging a constructive working relationship with russia's ambassador to the united nations. because russia held one of five vetoes at the security council, its vote was critical if we were to get the council to send peacekeepers to conflict areas, impose sanctions on wrongdoers or even just condemn a coup. in order for the u.n. to have a meaningful impact on the issues of war and peace, the united states and russia had to be willing to make deals. our two countries did not have the option of remaining at arm's length. vitaly had only recently gotten

to know me during our negotiations over the syria chemical weapons resolution, that was dismantling the vast majority of assad's stockpile, but i had known vitaly far longer having watched him in action when he served as the russian envoy to bosnia in the 1990s during the war. i had to occasionally been in the pack of journalists surrounding him in sarajevo, notebook and tape recorder in hand. vitaly always seemed to relish these engagements, eloquently delivering a predictably pro-serve line while simultaneously insisting upon his own complete objectivity. i remember being struck by the fact that his english was so fluid that he quoted lines from american movies and songs and even made english puns. but something else impressed me more. after the february 1994 massacre of sarajevo market-goers, tally had had been pivot amal in

convincing the serbs to move their heavy weapons away from the capital. this brought a reprieve of many months. to me, it also indicated a promising independent streak. vitaly became russia's u.n. ambassador in 2006 and seemed a permanent fixture. he had sparred with my predecessor, superrice, when she'd been -- susan rice, when she'd been ambassador, but they had become friendly. in their last u.n. meeting together, she had roared with laughter when he presented her with a mock security council statement expressing relief at her departure. [laughter] so mock-up also sent condolences to that other security council, the national security council, she would soon chair in her capacity as national security adviser. i'd already come to respect vitaly's talents as a negotiator. he brought procedural wisdom and textural creativity to our syria chemical weapons discussions, but above all, he listened with careful intensity. when he wasn't mello da

paymentically storming out of a meeting, he was good at bridging gaps. significantly, he also valued u.s./russia cooperation. from his time as an interpreter in arms control negotiations during the cold war, or he had drawn a lesson. even when russia's overall relationship with the u.s. was strained, our two countries could carve out discreet areas for progress and try to build momentum. i knew he often pushed for compromises that moscow was disinclined to make. vial hi and i always took each other's calls, and for the three and a half years we worked together, we would do our best to reconcile positions that on their face looked irreconcilable. as i got to know vitaly, i naturally wondered how he could stand working for putin and why he hadn't resigned somewhere along the i way. even though people who cross putin often ended up jailed or even killed, i didn't think he stayed because he was intimidated. instead, the most memorable

stanzas from tennyson's the charge of the light brigade was often come to mind. theirs not to make reply, theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die. vitaly had been a child actor in soviet films and had come of age during the height of the cold war competition with the u.s.. like many proud russians, he embraced putin's goal of raising russia from its knees, even if russia's leaders -- even if the russian leader's actions made him uncomfortable, he would go on serving his country. u.n. culture was drearily buttoned up. whether diplomats bloviated or spoke in monotones, they hued closely to generic talking points. some had been receiving instruction from their capitals for so long that they seemed to have suspended thinking for themselves. vitaly was different. he had a point of view on everything from alexander ovechkin's greatness as a hockey

player to what china's rise to greatness would have on the world. he seemed to delight in playing the role of underdog. he often had an irreverent sense of humor. what i once went on too long speaking, he responded, quote: after hearing all that the permanent representative of the united states felt she needed to share with us today, i am tempted to read my statement twice. [laughter] end quote. on another occasion when we were arguing after a council session, i told name i knew he had mixed motives; half sincere and half ulterior. no, he countered, we are fully sincere about achieving our ulterior motives. [laughter] i invited him and irina to my parents' home in yonkers for thanksgiving -- his wife -- making him the only u.n. colleague who ever entered my

wild irish family sanctum. when they arrived, irina immediately sat down on the carpet and began playing with my children while my stepfather and vitaly talked russian history and literature. when we went around the table to describe what we were most thankful for, vitaly said, quote: peace between our two countries. whatever happens, we must preserve that. it was no fun before, end quote. i liked and respected vitaly, but i also spent most of my time at the united nations in pitched public battle with him. thank you. [applause] >> thank you for that. i have two thoughts in my head, one serious, one not. where do you want to go? >> not. [laughter] >> okay. when somebody says to me 550-page political autobiography, i don't think funny. this is a funny book. why was it important to you -- i'm assuming that it was -- so

imbue this with your sense of humor? >> well, i think it -- i've never been asked that question before. [laughter] i was trying to offer a recounting of these various stages of my life and my career in a manner that was as true to life as possible, and growing up in an irish family where you can't get in a word at dipper if you don't have something -- dinner if you don't have something funny or interesting to say, recounting as true to life as i could entailed recounting the humor as well as sometimes the poignancy and the sadness. and i really wanted to render also the later phases when you get into darker topics, you know, like the policy issues we're dealing with when i'm in the obama administration like ebola or syria. but even as you're managing those issues, it's like all of you who are dealing with serious

things in your lives, there's still human beings who are attempting to figure out what to do, still human beings who, when you feel like you're about to tear your hair out, somebody will say something in real life that's very funny. and it'll break, lighten the mood and maybe even unlock sort of thoughts or banter or comfort that then creates a space where other people will feel more comfortable in putting forward ideas that they might have kept to themselves. so, basically, i was trying to make it as true to life as i could so that the story of whether growing up in a pub in dublin or being a war correspondent or being an activist or working in the government, that you doesn't have to be or do any of those things to be able to see the kind of universal truths in what was happening. so it was life, and i thought as true to life as i could make it, that meant including as much human as i could remember.

and that was dependent a lot on my journals and my memory. so a lot more funny happened in my life than you'll actually see in the book, just so you know. >> do you want to share one of those stories with us now? >> the one that isn't -- >> yeah. >> well, maybe -- >> maybe later. >> maybe not -- i mean, part of the challenge in writing a memoir is i speak as if i know what i'm talking about. i've just written a memoir, so i guess on one level that qualifies me, but this was very, very new to me. you know, we have a saying that i've heard in ireland, you know, that irish people have trouble using the first person even in therapy -- [laughter] and certainly, that was my experience of therapy, as you'll read in the book, my challenges with therapy. but i, as i wrote, i was initially pretty buttoned up, and the idea of not only describing what happened at the time -- you know, i'm used to being in my former journalistic

days a narrative journalist. so i'm used to trying to make the plot move, and my books don't tend to be all that short, but they tend to move, i hope -- >> they do. >> -- and propel people forward, and i'm very sensitive to that as i'm editing and writing. so i'd always been kind of narrative-driven and make people compulsively want to turn the page. that had a always been my objective as a writer. but suddenly, i would hand these pages over to my husband or to close friends, and they'd say, you know, this isn't like writing for the new yorker or the atlantic. you have to tell us what's actually going on inside of you at the same time. and i'm like, that's bullshin. no, i don't -- bullshit. it just moves to move. luckily, i kept a journal for all these years, and so i had, it would have been very hard for me retrospectively to project backwards onto my past self as to what i felt discovering a mass grave in darfur or getting dumped, you know, in my -- from

someone i really liked. it would have been really hard. but i had these journals, so i was able in a way to be a reporter into my own subcopps or into my own emotional reflections at least at the time of these different things. so i, you know, i began to open up and began to do what you really, i think, do need to do in a memoir which is offer as much insight as you can into the person -- who happens, unfortunately, to be me -- but into one's inner life. so i did that. but then i lost complete sense of where the lines should be drawn. and then people are reading it, they're like, oh, no, no, no, no, no. [laughter] you know, there is a dig any ety constraint -- [laughter] you know, to this enterprise. like, really. and so when you asked, like, what's not in in the book, i mean, you know, as is famously said about memoirs just because something happened doesn't mean everybody else would find it interesting to learn about. just because it's interesting to

you doesn't mean it's interesting to be anybody else. and so, you know, subjecting whatever you're including to that criteria, you know, like i had thousands of humorous conversations -- or hundreds at least -- with my children about putin. but you didn't need to hear about all of those conversations. you just needed to get a sense that putin was an active part of how i described, you know, dynamics in my son's classroom. [laughter] you only need, like, one or two anecdotes for that to be evident. you don't need to be in my life entirely. i'll spare you -- [laughter] at least some of that. >> well, i see our objective as a duo today to try to entice everybody out in the crowd to read this book compulsively. therefore, i think i would like to, if we could, touch on some of the major, you know, parts of your life starting with something you breezed by a little bit earlier which was growing up in a dublin pub? >> yeah. and i didn't sleep there, so to

be clear, i was -- but my, i'm from ireland originally, both my parents are irish. and my mother, her whole life growing up in county cork in ireland wanted to be a medical doctor, but she at that age group, she was born in 1943, that generation was not encouraged or not even allowed to do science. and so when it came time to go to college, which she became the first in her, among her sisters in her big irish catholic family to do, she was told not to do medicine because she didn't have the science background. so she decided to get the sign background in college and in ireland you do medicine as an undergrad degree. that's when you start. so you become a doctor earlier. so she got her b.s. in, bachelors of science, and then he got a ph.d. actually, in biochemistry. scheft a complete trail women blazer, my hero, very funny it

must be said as well and a great athlete. she played field hockey and tennis and squash for ireland. so really a remarkable woman. but all he wanted to do was be a doctor and see patients. and so not long after i was born, what in those days especially was very, very late, she decided to go back to medical school. so because she was in medical school, this is in dublin, i spent a lot of those years with my father who was an immensely loving, full of opinion and ideas but was an alcoholic and kind of an alcoholic almost as a vocation. i mean, he would go -- his business, he had been a dentist, and his practice a had kind of fallen apart, and he just went to the pub, one particular pub which i write a lot about in the book called hardigan's, and i was his side kick. he would pick me up after school, and i would go with my nancy drew mystery involves and just read in the basement of

this pub. my mother was alert to the risk of this, but it culturally felt then than it would feel, i'm sure, to my mother then or to me. so as she was trying to do her residency and doing all that is required to become doctor, i was living a very close relationship with my father in this what, in retrospect, was probably not the ideal environment for a child. [laughter] >> what brought you to the united states, and what did you expect to find? >> so the alcohol took its toll on my parents' marriage, and my mother and father wanted to split up from each other, but my mother particularly was not a fan of the pub or the drink and wasn't a fan at a certain point really drew her line also when it came to me and my younger brothers spending so much time there. but also she had met a man she did want to be with who has been

my stepfather now for 40 years, his name is eddie, and you'll -- he's very, very funny. he's the funniest character in the book as a whole and a great irish sort of one of those storytellers who, before they get to the punchline, just the way they tell the story, people are, you know, have tears streaming down their a faces. she fell in love with him working at the hospital in dublin, and that all would be fine in most countries at that time. it at least -- in most western democracies, but in ireland you weren't allowed to get divorced. so the only way to really go further i think also in the field of medicine that she was most interested in, kidney transplants, but also the way really to separate, to sever from my father and the way that she wanted to to be with my now-stepfather was to move to america. if you're here for long enough, you can actually get a divorce. and so that was a major factor. and there was subsequent to that about ten yearses later this was a referendum on divorce in

ireland, and believe it or not that refer dumb failed -- referendum failed. it was close but not that close. and many of my mother's sisters, i remember my mother just pulling her hair out because several of her sisters voted against divorce, if you can believe it, even though they were very close to her and extremely sympathetic with what she had gone through. and their line, or at least one of their lines was i had to stay with my fella, you know? everybody else should have to do the same. [laughter] so there's a bit of that. but then, ultimately are, as some of you know, it did pass when it was given a second chance, and now people are able to follow their hearts and do also what at times is best for their children. but it was a combination of divorce and ambitiousing, professional medical am biggs. but when we came, i would have had no idea we were emigrating. i mean, it was -- i don't know if my mother, i think even she

would have been years later before she realized we're not going back. >> you achieved academically, you got a haircut. you practiced your american accent. you loved sports. you followed the teams religiously. any in particular? >> i moved to pittsburgh in 197 1979, my way of feting in was to chop all my -- i had a long ponytail, and i just went bof. and i memorized, learned everything there was to know about baseball statistics and rbis and era, and they didn't have slugging percentage back then, but i traded in baseball cards, i was a hustler in the neighborhood. my teeth rotted with the pink gum that some of you remember from the baseball cards. a lot of knowing regret about that pink gum. but it was -- i just threw myself into this american life.

>> fast forward a bit through this american life. what turns you on to the idea that current events were important? >> well, i'll share this story, and, you know, i would say even in my 20s i probably would have looked back on this moment as pivotal. but actually when i went back to my journals to really examine it in depth, i learned that the moment i'm about to describe at the time was almost swallowed up in self-doubt. so the moment was sitting, taking notes on a braves, atlanta braves/san francisco giants game at the cbs sports affiliate in atlanta, georgia, which is where i'd ultimately gone to high school. my mother, when she had finished her residency here which she had to redo, moved to atlanta to practice with eddie who was in the same field, and so they moved -- we moved. and the summer after my freshman

year in college, i went back to atlanta, and i got this dream internship. because i wanted to be a sportscaster at that point. so there i was in a dream situation taking notes on a baseball game. what could be a better way to spend your summer. and in a video booth, and one of those booths where you have the tv screens all around, and it was cbs, so it was all -- their feeds from around the world, from moscow, from london, from paris, from cairo and from beijing. and the feed from beijing had been in the previous days depicting these peaceful protests by students my age contesting, you know, the form of rule that the choi news communist party -- the chinese communist party was exercising canning for freedom of speech and freedom of association. some of you remember these protests. what i'd forgotten even was how long they were allowed to go on without being suppressed. but the day that i happened to be there taking notes on this particular game, the footage of

the crackdown in tiananmen square was broadcast on the beijing feed. and i was there. and, again, in my memory of this moment it was absolutely crystal clear that, you know, i was going to go forth and, you know, resolve to do something, try to do something bigger and different in my life. in fact, while i remember it like it was five minutes ago, my journals are all filled with this recounting of what i'd seen but very quickly followed by, but what do i have to offer, you know? no college -- just after my freshman year in college, you know, i'm not going to be able to do anything about this. but i was for the very first time in that moment asking the question of what the u.s. government was going to do, what the world in quotes or the international community, a phrase that i have foresworn long ago because it really ends up just being the sum of the countries and the leaders and

the social movements within it, international commitment. but nonetheless, at the time i was asking what is someone going to do. it wasn't at the time a moment of great resolve myself because i think that would have been just way too presumptuous and sort of would have been, involved me putting myself in a kind of galaxy far, far away. i was so ill-equipped to even know what was happening in the world, never mind to think that thering might be some pathway after college, you know, to make a difference. so all that really happened in the moment out of that is i went back to campus in my sophomore year, i became -- i actually did as a result of this become a more serious student, become much bookier, more interested in history formally and politics. i took classes of the kind i hadn't been taking before. and i ended my subscription to "usa today" -- [laughter] i know, in fairness, the only reason will be i'd even read it my freshman year was i used to clip with my fingers the red

section, which is the sports section, and i would toss the rest of the paper into the recycling bin which says nothing, actually, about the quality of what was in "usa today" at the time, it was more just my single-minded obsession with sports. so i changed my subscription to the new york times, and then -- and i wish i had some of these newspapers -- but i would underline every article and, like, the names of leaders. i knew geography well because in ireland you kind of always had to prepare for the fact that you were going to have to emigrate. like, it was just cultural alreadily -- [laughter] you had to know where the ore cups were. [laughter] but, like, world leaders or the history -- you know, i didn't know any of that. so i was very motivated to learn more. but, again, it would have been a big leap to imagine that one day there'd be a path to do something in this world. >> so it was -- the idea to learn more present, but the idea to see more took a little time to arise. and one note that sounds throughout this book whether

you're a war correspondent in faraway lands or you're working at the u.n. is the importance of bearing witness, actually seeing, like, feet on the ground with your own eyes or somebody on the team seeing, like, what is going on. why is that of such crucial importance not just at policy making, but to being a part of humanity? >> yeah. i mean, i really developed -- well, i should say that in my early 20s my first kind of really embarking on trying to do something at the margins to make some difference somewhere was to go off to the balkans and become, i became a freelance journalist. the story of which i tell in the book which involved doing a terribly unethical thing, stealing stationery late at night from the office building where i was working and basically forging a credentialed letter so that i could get a u.n. press pass in order to be able to go and do the right thing -- [laughter] so you can see the hypocrisy of

that and how single minded, again, i was becoming in this goal of learning more. and, you know, by then i was already trying to learn croatian and learn about what was happening. i desperately wanted to get over there. my only path was as a freelance journalist. i mention it in the context of your question only because i think in my early 20s to have that experience of witnessing what was unfolding in a major ethnic conflict, you know, with a genocide being perpetrated against people on the basis of their ethnicity and religion, once you've had that experience of seeing it with your own eyes you become, i don't want to say skeptical of secondhand reporting. i still devour every page of "the new york times" as i would have well before i went to the field. you know, i'm no longer underlining in quite the same way, but i do keep notes occasionally on my phone, i'll have you known. but i think there's just that standard of, you know, to

understand human consequences and to do so not by telephone, you know, not in a game of telephone where people are mediating, but when you can to be there and to hear those experiences yourself. and so when i was in government, and ironically here i was finally years later after we're talking about working for the obama administration as the president's human rights adviser, there i was at the white house advising this remarkable person who really wanted to integrate human rights at a higher level than human rights has tended to be integrated in foreign policy making. and god knows we were not perfect. and nor was the process perfect as i write about in the book. but nonetheless, he wanted that perspective. so there i am ready to offer that perspective, but i can't get permission. nobody at the white house will give me permission to travel. so i start going completely out of my mind. i'm like, i'll pay. they're like, sorry, ma'am, you can't pay, you know, if you're

traveling on behalf of the united states of america. the united states government, you know, has to support that trip. i'm like, but i can't -- what am i going to do? i'm here, and, i mean, how am i going to understand exactly how this refugee situation is playing out or what kind of peacekeeping unit is needed and what to do about the recruitment of child soldiers if i'm just reading, you know, accounts that don't ask the questions that i would have posed. so eventually i start getting permission and start being able to travel, but the spirit of get close, you know, it really did animate my work. when i was u.n. ambassador, it was much easier because i was in the cabinet -- obama was very much my boss, but at least with the u.s. mission to the u.n. i was my own boss and had more flexibility. when the ebola epidemic hit, i could bring that spirit and say, okay, let's go and see, actually, how our health workers and how our soldiers and how countries from all over the world are chipping in to try to deal with this epidemic. and let me bring that story less

even to the u.n., although there too, but also to the american public that is freaking out about the risks and isn't aware of the heroism being exercised by our aid workers and our soldiers on the front line. just one parenthetical just because you've read so many books and so many people here, i'm sure, have read this book as well. i gave a commencement address where i made "get close" the kind of, you know, the mantra in the remarks and gave a bunch of examples of using this spirit to try to enhance my diplomacy. ..

and answer period, is that -- you went from outside to insider and who would you like to see? >> well, going to become i hope a not theoretical question.

scientific core, you might call it the people and protection agency and elsewhere, these agencies, these on behalf of the united states, on behalf, the last nearly 3 years of president trump's rule. they are being ridiculed and challenged on the basis of testimony they're taking under oath. so many of us were surprised by the outcome. people made me look far better than i was.

number one sanction's expert had been negotiating with terms of the iran nuclear deal. international law in the shortest time, treaty had come into force and that matters because if trump does in the next week which is finally submit the withdrawal papers to the united nations had my staff not worked and others within the obama administration, not worked as hard as they did to make the paris treaty international law which required 55% of countries accounting for more than 55% of emissions around the world to ratify which is tends to be long process, had we not done that it would have caused the whole paris agreement to unravel so i had the individual who is worked

on that, individuals who worked on promoting lgbt rights, working 24/7 around the clock to get benefits extended to un employees who were same-sex couples, et cetera, the morning after the election, what the hell -- the people who have done all of this work and their values and their belief about how our interest, cause, i will have to buck them up to get them to stay. i called a town hall and they basically looked at me like i was a martian and said, what do you mean, of course, we are going to stay, he doesn't have a lot of expertise, the president elect around him in foreign policy, of course, we believe in those things but we understand that when election happens, we serve the constitution we serve the american people, we are going get in the room and make the case for why we think those things are in our interest in the same way we made the case against things you wanted to do or for things you wanted to do, they staid and they stayed throughout these very difficult

and dark times and one by one they are gone and they've left and so they will be so many opportunities to serve and one of the things we will have to do is convince congress which i hope is not a divided congress for many reasons but change rules and allow people from the private sector, people who are serving the peace corps and gone other careers and open our doors with careful vetting, of course, and to look for an alignment of skills and needs but we have a chance to build frankly the kind of modern diplomatic core that we should have been building anyway but as with all large institutions, it's very hard, you know, the turn to kind of aircraft carrier that one needs.

i think my own story of -- of finding it very challenging in the first instance to go from being outsider to insider but also who to trust and not make the same mistake twice, find expertise that you yourself lack and invite descent that's so critical, that experience that i've had is -- is one that is scalable. i do think that people who come from different backgrounds can enhance the diversity of perspectives and bring perspectives from the real world that sometimes get lost in these sort of bureaucracies. but we are going to need it.

[applause] >> thank you so much for the generosity, if we can extend the generosity to q&a of the program. >> of course. >> anyone who has a question for samantha power, please go to the microphone. >> i did not, sir. [inaudible] >> again, sir. [inaudible] >> 2003 on chris matthews show hardball, 9 days before the iraq war you said, quote, an american that improved the lives of the iraqis, you support the libyan

intervention, hardliner on syria , are you ever going to neo cons? >> first of all, it's becoming very common practice. second of all, power sharing with somebody who gassed his people, that doesn't seem like a very good idea to me. assad is responsible for the deaths of 500,000 people. [applause] >> thank you so much. >> thank you. >> next question. >> one question per person, please. >> hi, samantha, great admirer of yours, my question is now

that we are withdrawing from northeast syria and we kind of are abandoning the kurds, can you reflect on, you know, your sense with you would have done differently in syria and moving forward with the next president, what they could do with american powers in the region to make it more stable? >> thank you, sir, what i would say is that a lot is made and i go in great lengths of the look to red line moment for president obama and people define that moment differently but, in other words, some people say he should have never issued the threat to use chemical weapons, red lines, others believe that he should have never come out and said he was going to use force right after the gassing of 1400 civilians, i get into that and try to bring people into the situation room of how challenging it was for all of us

but particularly for him given that we had no domestic support for using military force in part because people are so disillusion by everything that had gone wrong to the logic and lead-up to the execution of invasion of iraq because of war in afghanistan, assad gassed people, had gone 111 years and now, of course, today at 118 years, so all of that is in the book but i actually think when i look back i wished that the kind of diplomacy that secretary kerry attempted in 2014, '15, '16, that we had gone for broke before the war had factualized, before terrorist fight came, before assad was using chemical

weapons routinely against his people and it's so obvious, why wouldn't that have happened, a major challenge was that we had no diplomatic dealings other than in a very low key way on the nuclear file but we had no diplomatic dealings with iran and iran was a major stakeholder, to do that kind of diplomacy became possible after we had sort of broken the seal and broken with decades of history and established not diplomatic but ties enough where kerry could do what he did and didn't work in part because i think things were too far gone and that's one thing, but second, you know, we -- we -- i haven't commented here on just the grotesqueness honestly of the betrayal of the kurds who the president said northern syria, dismissing it, just sand

and it is blood stain sand because the fighters took 11,000 casualties to be ground force for the united states so that our soldier to the earlier question about u.s. overreliance on military and war and the new way of trying to deal with threats without having to put u.s. forces in harm's way and combat role had been ground partners and the way of drawing down and trying to get out of these wars when the threats are real because isis was a profound threat to the american people was to develop these kinds of partnerships and when you develop them, though, you have to keep your word. i do think along side the partnership with the syrian kurds that it would have been important at one point, the obama administration had equipped program with sunni,

syrian sunni opposition fighters, you can agree or disagree whether that could have ever worked but the one way it was never going to work was we in effect, the required people who were part of the program to agree to only fight isis and to have nothing to do with the assad war and the reason that would have been very difficult for them is most of them had muslims killed or their homes burned and destroyed by the assad regime and that led to having only one ground partner, the kurds, i mean, given this administration even if we had, you know, a more diverse segment of the syrian population fighting isis, i don't think that would have stopped president trump from betraying them as well. >> thank you for your question, we have time for one more long one or two short ones, i believe there's a woman waiting in the time and, sir, if you have time you will be last.

>> hi, samantha thank you for insightful and first-person book and i really enjoyed it and i saw the powerpoint a few weeks ago. i was wondering why in the face of all that you felt compelled -- >> so compelled to what? [laughter] >> oh, my goodness. wow. >> okay, so first context for those of you who -- so i -- i mean, one theme that i'm trying to address in the book and that i feel, maybe i'm just projecting what goes on in me but the slide you're talking about has a picture of president xi and president putin, it has migrants in the mediterranean on

a boat, it has rip, newspapers of photos, basically i'm showing all the problems in the world, me in the corner saying, but what can one person do, and i think how a lot of people feel right now, it's just -- just overwhelming and so the book is encapsulated, it's all about making social changes and shrinked the change and thinking how am i going to solve crisis and displacement of 70 million people around the world, is

refugees in austin, in boston who is landing in hostility environment, probably since, you know, arguably since world war ii when -- when, you know, people were trying to ensure that jews were able to find refuge here. can one give such an individual or such a family ride to school or job interview or bring them linens and how do you take the big thing, for example, that's on the powerpoint and turn it into small small. i guess i have another line in the book that i borrowed from someone else. it's such a good line, but from great partner inventing kind of behavioral economics and behavioral science at the field for which they won nobel prize.

why he was an optimist, suppose why one feels notwithstanding all the problems going forward and answer was why would i be a pessimist, if you're a pessimist you suffer twice. on one level, the darkest, possibly level of dark as you can say but so for me i guess i i'm not giving up, i don't think we have reason to give up, i think whether it's seeing what people are doing on climate science, bringing it into the hard of politics for the first time, i was just in idaho last week, by the way, the governor of idaho, republican, you know, he came out in public not that long ago and was totally unshy about talking about the catastrophic effects of climate change on workers lives in idaho, whether that's farmers or the ski industry, i'm old enough to remember when we used to have

winters in idaho and so things that feel like they're trending in one direction, i guess to me just never feels -- both are going well, i'm always waiting for the, you know, something to happen and something to change but also in moments like this, you can see all of the activation that has been incited by the the highest office in the land, by the corruption, by the abandonment of our allies and abandonment of human rights, by the neglect of science and people are moved by this and i was in collin county last night where the democrat dinner and even places like collin who have not been able to score the big one, they're a hair away and as the head of the democrats said to me, it's not about persuasion, it's just about turnout in terms of where we need to get, if it's about

turnout, that's on us. i want my kid to be part of the turnout effort. [applause] >> sir, thank you for your patience, please ask your question. >> i'm always impressed with the people in foreign service, seemed like we have qualified people, i'm wondering from the inside if you can give a sense of how the institutional knowledge kind of evaporates, foreign policy decision, i think about arming and i think about overturning the iranian democratic election, you can go back to banana republic politics, this institutional knowledge i think is there but doesn't seem to rare up that

inside. >> it's a great question. a few associations number 1 there's applied history initiative being run out of the harvard county school out of stanford, number of historians are involved but about just really asking your question which is how can history in all the knowledge that exists in books and minds around the country but better get injected into government decision-making and that was true i should say well before president trump and the larger, your point was valid in the obama years, well before it in the sense that those perspectives are just -- are no more than the perspectives of offer human consequences of the decision-makings, you're fighting a fair amount of gravity to bring those into the rooms where decisions are made even if you don't have a president like trump. so your point is an evergreen point and there's an initiative aimed at resolving that which

could involve fellowship for people who are more steeped in the history to be part of the decision-making and vice versa decision makers getting time to leave to go and really seep themselves in history, et cetera, that's one thing that you might want to look into, second, though, people in the government are really smart and very knowledgeable of history and many of them are extremely bookie and -- and -- and have that kind of insight to bring to bear but you do in any institution have to have somebody at the head of the table who is interested in hearing it and, you know, sometimes there's a parrel, there's a parrel in historical analogy, i'm a history major and great believe in history and utility but the old mark twain expression about the cat who sits on the hot stove, you know,

when he sits on the hot stove, he will not sit on the hot stove again and also not hit on any stove again, right, so figuring out how to learn from history but not robert jarvis's work talk about parrel where it became about minic, iraq became all about, you know, how easy it had been allegedly easy in bosnia, the totally not circumstances. we have to be careful about the misappropriation of analogy and the kinds of questions you need to drill into that are very time and culture specific and so that's what -- and seeing how mistakes are made in the past,

it's a set of questions that you can bring to the next crisis or the next set of circumstances but above all you have to want to have voices who come from different walks of life and bring different forms of expertise in your decision-making process and that's what we have to get back to, okay. >> thank you. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> the book is for sale, samantha power will be signing books in the tent immediately after this, it's called the education of the idealist pick it up, thank you. >> thank you all for being here, means a lot to me. [applause] [inaudible conversations]

>> live from first day at the texas book festival, the final author program to have the day is on big tech, but starting in a few minutes former obama administration secretary of state richard stingel will look at impact on disinformation on political discourse and movement s. >> a look at books being published this week in best christmas ever, second lady karen pence and her daughter charlotte, can be seen through the eyes of pet rabbit in the truth will set you free but first it will piss you off, author and feminist activist gloria provides quotes throughout her life. historian andrew roberts, from napoleon to dwight eisenhower in latest book leadership and war, in the american story, washington, d.c. businessman

david profiles american historians, also being published this week hymns of the republic, final year of the civil war in how to be trump, provides advice from political strategist on how the democrats can win the next presidential election. and recounts his time working as director of communications and chief speech writer and look for these titles this coming week and for many authors in the near future on book tv on c-span2. >> gordon chang offered thought on south korea. >> moon jae-in is a korean nationalist, not south korean one. his goal is the unification of

korea, there's no surprise then that during his summits with kim jong un the north korean ruler, moon has emphasized the union of the two koreas. now since the division of the korean peninsula in 1945, every korean leader north and south has advocated beautification but moon accepts unification and doing his best to achieve unification as quickly as he can, to pave the way for unionfication of the two koreas, he is trying to make south korea's form of government compatible with the north. most fundamentally moon's democratic party of korea in 2018 try today amend the constitution of the republic.

they tried to remove quote, unquote liberal, moon failed, the south's conservatives turned back the effort but moon has kept on trying. ministry of education has been trying to change the textbooks, trying to take out this concept of liberalism, they have succeeded in part because in the textbooks with the middle school as my best friend pointed out, they did delete the word freedom. remember north korea thinks it's democratic so south korea is a democracy, it's not liberal, it's not free, then it looks a little bit like north korea in at least theoretical terms. moon jae-n, what's the name,

it's the democratic's people of korea. >> to watch the rest, visit our website booktv.org, search for gordon change or title of his book, losing south korea using the box at the top of the page. >> on monday, we will be at lamiria books in jackson, mississippi, for study of the final year of the civil war. then on tuesday, look for us at the center in new york city, for eric cay washington's talk on james williams, chief porter of the grand central terminal cabs in early 1900's, the face of african american workforce and campaign upward mobility. on wednesday in new heaven, connecticut, barber, report on the life of william boyd outlaw and journey from a convicted flown to community advocate.

then on friday at the san francisco public library for the presentation of the 40th annual american book awards. all of the events open to the public, if you're in attendance take a picture and tag us at book tv on twitter, facebook or instagram. >> our live coverage of the texas book festival continues now with former obama secretary richard stingel discussing misinformation. [inaudible conversations] >> good afternoon.

we are going to get started, welcome, what a wonderful crowd, thank you for coming out. how about this weather? pretty great. [cheers and applause] >> when has it been this nice in late october in austin, texas? all right. i'm evan smith, i'm the ceo of the texas tribune and i'm pleased to be here -- thank you. [cheers and applause] >> thank you. >> and i am so pleased to be here today with richard, author of information wars, how we lost the battle against disinformation which was published earlier this month, the subject of the book is one rick knows well from 2013 to 2016 he was under secretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs in barack obama's state department, no one has served longer in that post in american history. from 2006 to 2013 top editor at time magazine, publication where he worked on and off as writer and editor dating back to 1981.

rick's previous books include "the new york times" best seller mandela's way and you're too kind, brief history of flattery. [laughter] >> born in new york, rick is a graduate of princeton university and studied as scholar, please join me in welcoming rick stengel. thank you for having you in austin. >> great to be here. >> congratulations on the book, it would be a great success, it's so interesting and could not be more of the moment and that's where i want to start, with the part of the moment that feels like you know where we would be sitting here today, like everything else these days all roads run through ukraine. [laughter] roar right. back in early 2014 this is a very important part of this book, the beginning of the story

of this information is told at least in modern telling of it, newly installed in the state department, russia annexes crimea, vladimir putin lies about it and the next thing we see in your words is tsunami of disinformation. and then hillary clinton calls. [laughter] >> take it from there. >> yes, by the way one of the great heros of contemporary journalism is evan right here. [cheers and applause] >> thank you. >> counter to disinformation. >> that borders on disinformation, what you just said. >> so tell us a story of hillary clinton calling you around the time that russia annexes crimea and everything goes to hell. >> yes, we all hear from samantha power, samantha power -- it took me 9 months to get confirmed which is a vast amount of time in those days and i got

confirmed on a thursday and i wanted to start work on a monday and i called samantha who had been ambassador at the un, can you swear me in new york where i'm from, but the story was that evan said, in february of 2014, russia annex crimea for all kinds of bad reasons right, putin lied about it, he said there were no russian soldiers in crimea, crimea is the most southern part of ukraine, ukraine is incredible by part of the modern world and bridge between east and west between russia and europe and -- and so i was in the office and i just -- i didn't know what to do about it. i thought i'm head of communications, what can do i about it, i can tweet about it and i tried to get everybody else at the state department to tweet about it too which was not very successful because foreign service officers don't like to put their heads up and -- and get on social media so i started

tweeting about it very bland tweets, you know, i was in government, when i was in media i didn't know very much and i tried to make as much controversy as possible, when i was in government i tried to make as little controversy as possible. the tweets were like putin needs to do the right thing about crimea's part of ukraine and i started getting hit by these russian trolls and boots and calling me every name in the book and names by the way which they couldn't spell properly and -- and so it was sort of new to me even though i had been in media my whole life, i hadn't seen architecture of disinformation and about 3 or 4 weeks into the job after samantha had sworn me in i was home on a saturday and i got a phone call from the state -- it's the entity of state that coordinates where everybody is and says can you hold for the secretary, i thought my boss secretary kerry was calling. >> you thought it was john kerry calling you.

>> and i picked up phone and it was secretary hillary clinton and i thought she was, and i've known her for a long time, she knew i was going to the state department, i thought she was belatingly calling to say congratulations. >> but -- >> but i picked up the phone and she didn't even say hello, she said the russians are beating the heck out of us on social media, people don't understand how they have a big engine and we have a small engine, she went on and on, i was holding the phone like out here, and her final line was something like putin is rewriting history and we are still releasing press releases, you need to do something about it and she hung up the phone. [laughter] >> the irony, of course, 2 years later she knew more about this than anybody and she became victim of it and shows insidious that even hillary clinton was aware of it wasn't aware of what they were doing really until the very end. >> knowledge of it is not enough, that doesn't equal

protection from it, you can know about it but it's a significant problem. i want to understand from you the difference between disinformation and misinformation. >> so disinformation is deliberately false information that is meant to deceive or mislead you for a strategic purpose, misinformation is something that is just wrong and can be wrong by mistake, it can be wrong for all kinds of reasons. i mean, you and i have been in media business for a long time. you make mistakes. >> you make mistakes. >> that's misinformation, a lot of people use misinformation in a different way, the third category which is controversial is propaganda and propaganda is information which may be true, may be false that's also used for strategic purpose, not necessarily to deceive you, there can be good propaganda and good propaganda, the word comes from the propagation, the

church, 15th century. >> the difference between disinformation and misinformation has to do with intent. >> right. the deliberate use of falsehood. misinformation is accidental. >> you refer to president trump as the disinformationist in chief, right? >> yeah. is he just wrong all of the time but it actually -- [laughter] >> it gets not to whether it's right or wrong but whether there's an intent to deceive and that lands back on the bucket of disinformation as you see it. >> i guess if there was some kind of a excuse it might be that he doesn't know the difference between facts and fiction and what he says is how he wants the world to be rather than the way it is. >> right. >> that's the most benign explanation, there's actually much more nefarious one and -- and the thing is -- one of the things i wrote about in the book is the eerie similarity between

how putin lies and how trump lies and the kind of history of russian lying which they call active measures that goes back to the cold war, think of the things that they do, they use projection, whatever you call them and they call you, they use what aboutism, hey, you invaded crimea, and they will say look what you did in iraq, does that sound familiar? all of the techniques that trump mirrors and even during the campaign, he mirrored a lot of these strange philosophers and thinkers who are around putin which we can get to later, but i don't know what the connection is. i mean, here is how i define collusion. collusion is if somebody offers you help in this case the russians and you accept the help, that's collusion. >> so stay with --

[applause] >> hands for collusion, that's great. applause for collusion. >> t-shirts made. >> stay with putin; you said putin lies, often when we hear about disinformation from russia, internet agency, we hear about people outside of putin's office say, but you make the point in this book that these attacks are coordinated, and that's what they are, they are attacks, right? and it's not just the ira but it's typically everybody in the russian government, this is an effort on behalf of and on the part of the entire government. >> yes, so the russians are opportunistic and we do things and we think there's a grand strategy and in foreign policy people putin checkers player or chess player, now, you know, compare to trump who is a go-fish player he seems like a -- [laughter] >> like a chess player but i think he's -- i think he's just

chess player and the agency created in 2013 by the crony of putin and i don't think it was done because putin knew he was going to annex crimea but when he went aan exed crimea they went into overdrive creating all counterdisinformation and what was different about creation of disinformation that they do and even whenever, you know, everything that we try to do, they -- it's hold of government for the russians. >> i mean, we've never seen anything like that and everything in between, russia

today, all of the russian state organs, they all work together in a way that is -- is pretty powerful and hard to combat, once upon a time in the old days when they did active measures in the cold war, it was a lot harder because what did they do, they had to bribe a reporter at newspaper in india to write something about the cia creating aids and then russian state media would pick it up and they would hope it would seep in the blood stream of european and american media. now, there's no barrier to entry, they can do that on twitter in a second. >> very quickly, it occurs to me that i should ask whether there's any doubt in your mind that russian is the bad actor that russian si seem to remember up until about middle of last year, the president had to be dragged, kicking and screaming that russia had done what people know on his face russia did, russia may not be the only bad factor in terms of

disinformation in the world, russia did it, there's no question. >> yeah, absolutely indate mutable, the mountains of evidence, even the ip addresses and they bought time on american servers so it would look like they are american, they stole american handle. >> anybody here went to heart of texas? heart of texas, somebody must have, it had 400,000 likes. >> right. >> created by the internet research agency to be a conservative texas skype, heart of texas base, content talking about how bad hillary clinton was, they organized demonstration in houston and the title of the demonstration was the islamfication of texas, this

was all done by people in st. petersburg russia. >> we have seen evidence in presidential campaign, same song, different verse. >> bipartisan reports richard burr is the chairman, recent report a couple of weeks ago said that the russians have done more in the u.s. since 2016 than they did during 2016 and they're also on platforms that we hadn't realized. only like a year after the election, you think with like nothing, you can't -- you lose nothing in the internet age but yet nobody realized for about a year that they did more on instagram than they did on face book. >> there was an announcement that they came back targeting joe biden specifically, right?

>> see, it's hard to say, this is why it's so insidious, they mask their identity, it's hard to know at any given time what they are doing, i mean, they are doing something right now while we are talking. i'm serious. we are not necessarily aware of it. >> yeah. >> same kind of russian trolls that attacked me, attack me now as i'm speaking, you don't necessarily know that they're russian or americans, by the way they could be americans too. >> even mark zuckerberg allude today this that the russians and other bad actors are renting facebook and say, hey, you're not using your name, let me use it, that's really impossible to -- >> what do we do about it, do you fight fire with fire, do you become the thing that you despise? do you fight this information with disinformation because certainly we are capable of doing to them what they've done to us. >> evan, i think you put your finger on the scale, don't you think with your question.

>> what do you mean? >> seriously, what do we do? >> we don't fight disinformation with disinformation, one of the themes of the book that after having been in government for 3 years and content creator my whole life i came to the conclusion that government is not the answer in terms of creating content, people in government don't like to do it, people don't care or look at government content, it's just not the answer, we are fighting some state actors but those are autocratic and -- >> even if it were possible for us to do it, if government were situated or constituted to do it it's not something that we should do even if we could do it. >> yes, i agree wholeheartedly, terrible for the brand of america, we talk about freedom of speech and freedom of expression, by the way, we did -- part of the book is about countering isis. we thought about creating and the equivalent of troll factory that isis had something like 10 or 15,000 of the digital

jihadists, we thought about doing something like that, but everybody decided no, that's not what america does, our whole, you know, country is about trying to truthful about things and we try to do that as part of our foreign policy, it's not who we are. >> yeah. >> you mentioned nonstate actors -- [applause] you mention nonstate actors, the information war is not a war of the states and nonstate actors and regular people and a lot more complicated. >> not government versus government only. >> and the information as a whole is actually it has hard end and soft end, the hard end is cyber terrorism and malware and things like that. the hard end is the chinese government stealing personal information from the office of personal management of 14 million people, right, the

hard end is the fact that the defense department, announced this a few months ago gets attacked 30 million times a day, the defense department servers, so the quantity of this kind of stuff is just unimaginable, that's the hard end. the softer end, you know it's not very soft is this disinformation which is hidden in plain sight, camouflages. >> and if it's known to you, the pentagon servers are hit that many times, if it's known to you, it's known all across government that we are susceptible, vulnerable and even through our passivity inviting these kinds of attacks, is it technologically to rebuff the attacks? i think about government technology as dot of matrix printers, right, social media to people in government is probably -- the people we are talking

about are way behind the curve technologically and i wonder if we have the capability technically to rebut this stuff. >> well, good question and i mean, i talk about in the book how old fashion, the computers were that we had at the state department and i had a blackberry for my first two years and i had to wait 10 or 15 minutes every morning for the computer to boot up and that wasn't even the high side computer, the classified computer takes 45 minutes and i used to think, how much is the american taxpayer paying for people like me to wait for my computer to boot up, but when it comes to kind of the harder end and solidifying it, congress has appropriate, this is where -- in a bipartisan way, hundreds of millions of dollars have been appropriated to secure election systems, you know, the agencies, the defense department has a lot of dough, they spend a lot of time, i don't know how secure they are but i know they are

aware of it and the problem is it's on the other end, softer end, government doesn't really have a role and i do talk about except for this idea of some legislation, i don't know that i should jump into it. >> sure. >> now i'm going bore you with something, the communication act of 1996, section 230, the underpinning of all of social media and it was passed for a good reason by congress, they wanted to optimize the rise of these new kinds of media companies that use third-party content, content that you and i created. >> by third party company you're talking like facebook, right? >> facebook. >> aol, napster. look, we don't want you guys to be liable for the content on your site, texas tribune is,

time magazine was or is, because it would den put damper on the rise of the content, so you have complete immunity, maybe that was a good idea in 1996 but the idea that facebook is not a publisher and has complete immunity from everything that it publishes is crazy. facebook is the largest publisher in the history of the world, just because they don't publish professional content doesn't mean they should be -- shouldn't be liable for the content they do publish. >> so you think that facebook and the other -- [applause] >> facebook and the other platform companies which you say are really more publishers, they're not platform companies should be held accountable for disinformation, for deep fakes, for content that's false, they should be required to take content that's false off their sites? >> i think that's true, that's why the --

[applause] >> so. >> and you also make the point importantly that hate speech is something that should be policed more and that these folks should be held accountable for having it on their platforms. [applause] >> by the way, the truth is which -- which the sites don't promulgate this very much but if you look at the announcements that facebook does made last week, facebook does take hate speech, speech that attacks people and insults people and attempts to hurt people according to race, ethnicity, religion, color, gender, you name it that is not tolerated on the platform, they do take that off. but they don't like to tell people they take it off because when they take it off someone in congress can go, oh, you must be editor if you're taking down content like that, well, they are editors, algorithms are editors, algorithms the fastest and biggest editors in the history of journalism, to say that a human being isn't using red pencil doesn't mean they are

not editing, they do take stuff off, they attempt to. the exception that he talked about is political speech, first amendment, political speech has a higher threshold than regular speech. he made the argument that an ad, political ad that contains a verify by false statement, should still be published because, why, everybody here in democracy, we should make the judgment. >> we believe in the first amendment, we believe in free speech but you also make the point that facebook and the other platform companies are not government. >> yes. >> people don't always get is that the first amendment applies to government not the private sector, what are the first 5 words of the first amendment, congress shall make no law. doesn't apply to private companies, private companies can decide that if you are wearing a red shirt, that, you know, you can't even post on our site, i hope you can because it's a beautiful lovely red shirt.

[laughter] >> the reason is because they have terms of service, if you violate the terms of service, whatever the terms of service are, they have the right to police you. >> yes, i actually think they should be liable for not fulfilling their terms of service by taking off hate speech, false content, things like that and i think -- i mean, i appreciate the applause but part of that is everybody has to register that with people, you're on all of the platforms, right, you need to tell them that that's the way you want the rules of the road, plenty of other things that i recommend like the transparency of advertising, political advertising, you should know why you got a political ad, you should know who paid for that split call ad, all of that stuff and, again, they are moving in that direction, but, you know, 2 weeks ago the senate republicans rejected the honest ads act which has a lot of bipartisan support and which explicitlies that all political advertising has to be completely transparent that was voted down, actually held by mitch mcconnell fellow.

[laughter] >> the second of what we know top happening to us, attacks that are coming our way from bad actors elsewhere, we know that the 2016 elections were compromised in some way by outside forces, if we know that why has there been resistance to the kind of legislation in congress that would insulate us against those similar attacks in 2020? seems to me to be basic principle of democracy. no bipartisan things anymore. shouldn't congress be racing to step up, not limping toward but sprinting toward some legislation to protect our elections and yet it doesn't -- we are nowhere near that. >> absolutely. a bunch of democratic bills including the honest ads act that are out there that haven't been brought to the floor, fair bipartisan funding for the harder end of election security,

to the help states and localities solidify their election integrity, by the way, the reason our system cannot attacked in global centralized. your vote is not on the internet, none are connect today each other. it's a distributed old fashion network it's hard to actually attack. >> yeah. >> so i want to transition in the last couple of minutes before you open it up to the question of journalism and how all of this relates, do you think the social channels, social media companies are undermining traditional journalism? >> i'm a journalistic exceptionalist and, i think,

yes. >> you can get content from regular people. do you need a paris correspondent if they are posting about protests? >> not even this foreign example that you gave, i heard you say that in the old days the reason there was a paper in kansas city because you couldn't read the chicago paper. [laughter] >> you were using kansas city example that papers in smaller areas because you did not have access to bigger city papers, now we all can read the chicago tribune, la times on our phones. >> yes. >> does that mean that we are going to see a dwindling of more local news sources, is journalism going to be undermined ultimately by the advances in technology, that's the question. >> do i think the few hour is a combination of -- of big

journalistic entities like "the new york times" and the rise of hyperlocal journalistic entities like the texas tribune. one of the things i say in the book is that we don't have a fake news problem, we have a media literacy problem and what do i mean by that -- [applause] >> is that people are not good at all kinds of people but particularly older people like on facebook which is the largest growing of cohort people going on facebook telling the difference between faction or fiction, where it came from, what's the primary source, what's the secondary source. i actually think one of the proposals that i make in the book is that journalism online has to become much more transparent and show all of those things, show the text of the interview that you did with the governor, show the reading and the note that is you took on the history of the governor's office, so that people can see what makes up a story, then they get a sense of, oh, this is

reliable. there's other things that can be done. [applause] >> digital literacy and media literacy, in that announcement that facebook made last week, facebook makes tens of billions of dollars a year, earmarks 2 billion for media literacy. [laughter] >> it's really interesting. journalism should be more transparent, of course, i think about david's reporting in the washington post which ultimately won the pulitzer on the trump foundation where he was tweeting out pictures of tablets, like a fourth grader in math class he was showing his work and at time when the public's trust in the

media is at historic or near historic low it's probably a good idea for us to be doing that sort of stuff anyway, if see through transparency the processes that we go through they'll have less to distrust, isn't that right? >> absolutely, 100%, i love what he's doing and uses the wisdom of crowds, hey, i'm doing the story about trump employing undocumented immigrants to work at his golf clubs, anybody seen one or talked to one or did you play golf at one? i mean, i think that's a great thing to do and also makes people invested in the stories. >> old fashion advance at a new fashion time. so you and i were editor at glossy magazines once upon a time, i stopped that ten years ago, you stopped at 7 years ago, it is a different world as far as that goes, is it not? >> yes, i mean, we are kind of dinosaurs, i guess, and i'd love the world of magazines, i mean, i just always taught a magazine was a beautiful thing, still a beautiful thing but do i think,

again, people have to adapt to technological change, information has always adapted to technological change. it no longer is, right, you know, if the internet was invented 150 years ago there wouldn't be any print newspapers or magazines because it can be delivered to your phone instantly. i mean, i'm a digital exceptionalist, somebody asked me the other day, do you think there's more disinformation relative to information now in 2019 than other times in history, it's a really good question and actually made me think on the podium, i drew a blank and -- but the more i thought about it is the amount of true information, factual information now is exponentially greater than in human history. >> access is so much greater.

>> the easier it is for you to pull the information, the more widespread you think it is. so i think the fact is that we can find disinformation easily that we think it's more -- it's more in the bloodstream of the ecosystem of social media. i'm not sure there's more of it now than it has at other times in history. we would love to bring the conversation into it. >> i'm going to put a marker down and say, no speeches and no bull shit, okay. [applause]

we will police these questions, so go ahead. [inaudible] >> thank you very much for joining us today. >> thank you. >> sir -- >> by the way, that is protected free speech, okay. you're allowed to do that. [applause] >> i want to thank you for coming to austin, texas, i'm a reader of your book. >> thank you, you match the book too. [laughter] >> so reading your book i seem to see that you're frustrated with losing the information war to russian troll boots and isis media and even donald trump and so forth and, yes, you have solutions for it and one of those solutions is a crack-down on social media and the government is going to help out by doing this, what do you say to a person who says to you why should we crack down social media when the mainstream media -- you work for time magazine,

your parent company bought the rights -- >> what is your question, please. what's your question, please? >> the question is time magazine bought the rights to the film which posed jfk got snot the head and not the back and sat on it for 12 years and never showed anybody -- >> what is your question, please. >> so why should -- can you hear me? >> yeah, we can hear you. what's your question? >> okay, why should an average person believe the mainstream media over -- over the average -- over alex jones or a russian troll bot. >> is the mainstream -- is the mainstream any trust worthy than social media or alternative sources of information. >> just a point of clarity to your question, the film was brought by richard, correspondent for life magazine, wasn't bought by time magazine.

[applause] >> time life is a holding company, two separate magazines that compete with each other, so i mean, the other thing about your question, i mean, one of the many false premises of it is about, for example, isis messaging and what can we do about that, you know what we did about that, the obama administration led by john kerry and people like john allen and bret mcgutter who assembled coalition of 80 plus nations that defeated isis on the ground, when you kill those guys, when you remove them from their caliphate, that really hurts their messaging, that was a lot better than anything that we ever did in terms of countering messages and that was incredible by successful policy initiative by the obama administration which was continued by the -- by the current administration. i mean, i think the cites that

you mention, info wars, russian trolls, they don't have any of the infrastructure of truth that mainstream journalism does. they don't check facts, they don't have copy editors, they don't spell things correctly. [laughter] >> if that's a disqualifier we will have to expand this conversation, i think. [laughter] >> you can correct that on the internet, by the way. they don't have multiple sources for their stories. you analyze that story and you go through it with some degree of media literacy, you see that the things are made up out of whole as opposed to washington post, if you read the story it's all completely backed up with facts at each stage. i just think there's no comparison, by the way, let people compare the two because if you compare the two you'll see that the traditional media is a thousand times more reliable. >> excellent and serious answer.

[applause] >> ma'am. >> hi, i noticed that that's the media keeps using trolls which is a term to discuss both people who are trying to destroy our democracy, people who threatened to kill women online, white supremacists, is there word that we can use to describe these people? and can i challenge the media to stop using this term? >> no, it's a really interesting point, you can call them information terrorists, something like that. but the other point you bring is the troll isn't necessarily human, there are bots and humans, one of the things that i also propose that social media companies need to do, is they need to let you know something -- something you're reading was created by a human being as opposed to a bot, by the way, part of the incredible echo effect that happened with protrump media from internet research and agency during the campaign, what came from bots, 80, 90% came from bots and not

human beings, people need to know that, we need to know when you see something on twitter feed, facebook feed that that comes from a human being or a bot. >> they have the technology that enables them to do that. >> right. >> sir, hi. >> thank you. yeah, we know that you can't yell fire in crowded theater because -- unless the theater is on fire which is an example of disinformation. and you can prosecute that person, would you all as journalists be opposed to see prosecutions against people who deliberately distribute disinformation rather than misinformation? >> yeah, the fire in a crowded theater line came from case of 1919 which was an originally free speech case. that has been outdone by the brandon v. ohio, 1955 which basically said that the one type of speech other than, you know, pornography or whatever that is

not protected is speech that directly or indirectly leads to violence. that is not protected speech. that -- you cannot -- you cannot urge someone to violence right now and have that be under the first amendment, that's a good thing. i do think as i was saying before that the terms of service of the platforms that they should be taking off speech that even indirectly leads to violence, one of the things that changed my mind when i was in government is, i don't know if people remember the charlie massacre in paris, the magazine put picture of mohamed on the cover, well, i got involved, tried to help the french embassy to talk about free speech, let's see, charlie had put pictures of mohamed on the cover twice before, each time caught spasms of violence not only in france but around the world, when they put a picture of mohamed on the carbon a third time,, do you not think it's going to lead to

violence? >> i heard you talk when you were a journalist you had something called absolutist view and in your time your view of what should and shouldn't be permitted has evolved a little bit? >> our standard, our free speech standard is outlier around the world. i traveled a lot in the middle east, i went to sunni allies, talk today very sophisticated prime ministers of the countries but each one would say to me, why did you allow that wacky, sodo -- pseudoo minister to burn the quran. you know, that's an insult to 1.6 billion people who don't necessarily understand what the first amendment is. states should start looking at hate speech statutes and maybe goes up to supreme court to be questioned but i do think in our society that things are so

vulnerable we should be looking at state legislation locally and states and counties. [applause] >> hi, how are you? >> good, good, i wanted to get your take on the rise of these online news sites which try to pretend they are like the onion and be funny but don't make it clear they are a fake site and really spreading propaganda and fake news and trying to get people to believe one way or the other, so really it's just spreading lies in -- and sort of disguise. >> there was a whole bunch of fake news sites mascaraing and it was in the state of michigan, we really don't have the ability to stop anybody from creating something that they intend to look like a real news site, there's nothing we can do about that and by the way, one of the other things that the russians did was they created a host of

news sites, they would use abc, nbc and cbs and attack a modifier, another word and make it look like those sites, so that to me is obviously content that needs to be taken down. i mean, the exception is written about history of first amendment legislation. i mean, i would want it to be funny, when it sunt funny anymore, then i don't know what use it has. >> good luck policing that. about the most objecting thing to have to police, but does get to the question among the many other problems that we talked about today there are people who are putting up sites designed to look at independent news sites that are not. >> that's why i think that the platforms need to be more liable for the content, they are hosting it an not publishing it. i think the terms of service

that have to apply to those things too. >> hi. >> hi. so as a part of generation d which is one of the primary users and social media, i've been noticing more and more misinformation on the side of the liberals which is concerning to me, so do you think as a young liberal i should feel just as obligated to call out misinformation on a meme or something that is furthering climate change awareness if it's not completely correct? >> 100%. [applause] >> i mean, misinformation and disinformation isn't the province of just the right or conservatives, it happens on the left as well and i think to show your own credibility, you need to expose it too and by the way, but what i would say about mainstream journalistic organizations they do do retractions, they do issue

apologies, that do do corrections, has info wars ever done correction, i don't think so, bright bart doesn't do a correction, part of it which is liberal media is they also expose their own flaws. that's one of the virtues and glories of journalism i would say. >> russia has talked about the most but china is technologically light years ahead of where russia is, i was wonder if you could talk about how russian use of -- or how chinese use of disinformation and misinformation is similar to and different from the russian use? >> yes, very good question and -- and one that's appropriate, so my information is a little bit out of date because i -- what i'm talking about is stuff that i knew when i was in

government, one of the things that the chinese do is the fact of theft of intellectual property, identity theft, chinese attack corporations, they look for copyright infringements, this is something that they do more than anybody else in the world. my knowledge of what they were doing in the other realm on disinformation realm comes from a few years ago and they didn't do very much in that realm, they weren't trying to influence points of view of people in america, they do have hundreds of institutes and the chinese weren't trying to do propaganda and misinformation in the u.s., that may have changed and one of the things that i have read about in light to have protists in hong kong that there's been a lot of chinese state disinformation about the

protesters which is exactly where the russians started with the protests in ukraine, so that may have changed. maybe you'll find out the answer. okay. >> i'm afraid i'm being told it's 3:45, our session has come to an end and the session has to get out and the next session coming up, please give richard stengel a hand, thank you for being here. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> and our final program of the day, live from austin will begin in a few moments, it's an author

discussion on silicon valley and the role of big tech, you're following us on social media or on facebook, instagram and twitter at book tv. you will behind the scenes video and pictures from the texas book festival. >> while we wait we want to show you a portion of a program that's airing tonight on book tv, it's syndicated columnist jackie gringrich. >> now it's no longer about who won and it's about what team wants and i call this politics, it's no longer just about politics, it's now like a sport and actually interestingly enough the data backs this up, now you're all engaged, i'm not talking about you're engaged active republicans, you're in the issue if you know what's happening, but for a lot of people they're not engaged in

issues, what they are engaged is identity, who they belong to, who are they a part of and accident research where they've switched positions between parties and said do you agree with that and they'll say, yes, if it's their party stance even though it's not. what this tells us is it really isn't about ideology, it's about who people think they are and how they identify themselves within that group. it also tells us we have a lot of work to do communicating who we are to the vast majority of the middle. we've got to think about that because if they don't think that they belong to us, we have to think about we know that they belong with us so what are we communicating wrong, we have to fix that. so i'm going to challenge you in the last few things and then open up for questions, our broken america started off a year ago, incredible by worried about the future of our country because of polarization and, yes, politics is the, you know, it's no civil war, civil war

through words and, yes, politics is important and, yes, we need to make sure that we support and understand and back up our foundational values and we talk about what is not right, but we also have to talk about what we can do together. i think in the long term we have to be optimistic, not only for our party but for our nation and so i'd like to think of a framework that i'm going to give you, how i try to think about things. i challenge ewe to think about gratitude over grievance because the left has a lot of work on grievance, let them have it, let them grieve about what belongs to what group and how terrible things are, let them have grievance, let us have gratitude and let me tell you why to be grateful. we live in the best nation in the world, hands down. come on, do you agree? [cheers and applause] >> not only want to move here but people want to come here illegally because they are such

great countries and they live in horrible places, there's a reason they want to come here, let's be grateful for that. >> amen. >> we have a great structure, we believe in god and god gave us rights and we loaned them to government, that's amazing, be grateful for that. i had nothing to do with that, i was just born here. be grateful we have a place with we have free speech, yes, they are trying to ken sorry -- censor it, that's fine, because we have free speech we need to use it, not to yell to the other side but articulate more clearly why we are the better party. [applause] >> wing we win best when we win with clear communication, exchaining to people why we are the better choice, understanding what we can bring to