kind of quickly, you know, i thought oliver stone did a good job with nixon. i think that had a poetic truth about nixon. i think that stands up. i think "jfk" was a travesty. they had a equal number of mistakes. >> michael, you i read quoted that howard zen's history of the united states represents a simplicity propaganda of american history. which startled me. not that i disagree. i was startled to see it.

>> i have taken some flack for that from my left. quite a lot, actually. we will begin another discussion about a different kind of history. he was not really a journalist. >> and also not an historian? >> he was an historian who was trying or teaching a version of history to my mind was simplistic, but also romantic in a way which, i think, verges on almost falsehood. he used the term the 99% before that became popular. the 99% are always virtuous and right. somehow they always keep losing to the 1%.

he has, to my mind, are outmoded and erroneous interpretations of the civil war which he sees in beardian terms as the northern industrial interests vanquishing the south. you think the abolitionists were banned. again, just like a lot of popular journalistic versions of history. that sold more books than anyone on this panel. probably anybody out there combined will ever sell of their books. it has had an impact on the people on the left to be activities. it gives them a narrative. all the time that there were a lot of people in our profession who were dumping on the master narrative.

i was never one of those people. not that we should have one narrative. unless we have a coherent narrative and it is all complexity and if it is all exceptions to this and exceptions to that, then people will be bored by it. only scholars will want to read about it. i was so happy when, you know, jackson wrote his wonderful book. "rebirth of a nation." this is, i think, the best narrative of the period. it is unlike zen, alive. tragedy of the classic kind. obviously, his book will not be assigned in many high schools. >> jackson, in the same piece of yours that i quoted earlier, you

also say the public sphere is a mess. to the degree you still believe that, i wonder if you think journalism or history, the professional of journalism can contribute to changing that? >> absolutely. i mean that's what gets me out of bed every morning, i think. that this naive, but persistent idea that if we do get it right -- and by we, historians and journalists alike -- that we can somehow contribute to a more vital public sphere where one is debated and not merely dismissed or excluded because they don't fall into the current conventional wisdom. i'm not sure what the context of that sentence was.

i'm sure that it had to do in part of the continued dominance of, let's face it, giant corporations in the manufacture of news, which is an often muddled entertainment or misinformation and the challenge to that, which i think all of us have alluded to in one way or another with varying degrees of sympathy. i think all of us, with real sympathy, the internet, for lack of a better term, is an alternative public sphere. it is the public sphere for many people now. it's a mess, too.

then there are a lot of other interesting things going on. i often think about this last 50 years of our history as alan's book so brilliantly demonstrated. this shift from coherence to fragmentation. it could be a duality to drift. drift is not always a bad thing. you can drift into interesting places and reconfigure public discourse accordingly. that would be my hope. >> i will invite questions. there a microphone which will come to you. though it won't amplify your voice.

don't use it as a reason not to speak loudly. also, please identify yourself. steve. the microphone is there. you are good. >> steve ross. i have a comment and you can respond, if you want. getting back to marty's original question about differences between -- fundamental differences with historians and journalists. timing and style and profits. timing. i was a graduate student at oxford in the '70s. modern history was 400 a.d. to 1918. when i ask my tutor why you stopped at 1918. he said everything after 1918 is "journalism." all of you have written op-ed pieces, but it is contemporaneous history and events that mark the journalist. we venture into it, but we only do that if we are doing our own op-ed pieces.

otherwise we are looking at a more distant past. second, style. journalists are being read more because they write better than we do. they are writing for a larger audience. they are writing in a more simplistic manner. we are never taught to write. we pick it up on our own and either we write to each other or maybe we write to a broader audience. we don't write to a general public. the final one is profit. we are -- we do bring to the table a perspective that journalists don't do. i would suggest as one of my friends who is the highest ranking woman in network news when she gets invited to journalism schools to talk, she is never invited a second time. she tells them nobody should ever be an undergraduate major in journalism.

you should be a history major or politics or international relations. when you write a story, you have a sense of context. you have a sense of where this fits at the moment and at the larger history. finally, journalists are still working for companies that are concerned with profits. we are not concerned with profits. either as professors or in our own books. yes, it would be nice to sell 2 million copies and have a summer home somewhere. this isn't what we are really doing. we are not guided by profits. one of the real things you were pointing to, one of the real problems is single-digit profits are no longer sufficient for newspapers. i have seen in los angeles, the "chicago tribune" company has wrecked the newspaper. single-digit profits were no good. my friend, the book editor, left

after he was told by the publisher and editor came in and brought all of their little editors in and said, you guys think you are writing like the "new york times." you want to aspire to write. we are telling you our company wants you to write like "usa today." something has been lost here. also, again, the profits an perspective and timing is a critical difference between the two fields. >> unless someone has a burning need to respond to that, i'll ask for other questions so we can get in as many as we can. if there are others. yes. >> david greenburg, rutgers university. a couple of comments. i'm sure all of the panelists know. i want to pick up on the idea that we are talking about earlier.

a false balance as a guiding light of journalism. i would suggest this emerged earlier as soon as the moment as objectivity became a moment of reporting. there is a large literature on joe mccarthy in the press. he would put out an outrageous story and people would deny it and would you get both accounts without really time or the capacity to investigate the truth of his claims, but he would continue to maintain the media spotlight. this is not something that is just a failing of individual journalists today, but an inherent occupational hazard of the aspiration of objectivity. on a similar point, i wanted to ask about the notion of consensual narrative of existing today.

particularly rick's example of wmds in iraq which turned out not to be true. i would challenge the notion that those were consensual narratives in the way that anti-communism was. i read lots of people who take that perspective. reporters put this in their reporting for the good papers. maybe not so much in the broadcast sphere, but i would say the difference is those arguments, which i think we tend to support. that is a more economic perspective and the skeptic on the claims of iraq in the administration.

it did not carry the day. partly because the leadership in both cases embraced to the republican positions. so the journalists kind of taking the two parties as their proxies for the two sides of the debate would give less voice to the dissenting views. if obama is talking austerity and the republicans are talking austerity. it is in the time line. it is there, but not framed by the political leadership as central. i think that distinction is important. it may not be a failure of journalists, so much as a failure of our politicians to maintain that robust debate. >> rick. >> i want to talk about the mccarthy thing, actually. what's the difference with the false balance that mccarthy exploited and the false balance now is where is our edward r. murrow.

the elites who almost by the fact this they were so confident in their position and were able to intervene and make a moral claim. let me give you an example of how "time" wrote about the john berg society and then about glenn beck a couple of years ago. this is from "time." among the u.s. brotherhoods fighting against communism, nothing is like john burke. it promotes communist style organizations that do not use the name. avoiding the political action. it estimates the u.s. is 60% communist controlled.

other times, the americanists as they call themselves admits it's a joke. nothing there that -- that is good reporting for one thing. that is how the society works. there was that quote/unquote editorializing. it was the same with glenn beck. but it looked different. he was the hottest thing in the political ranks. tireless, funny and self- deprecating. he has lit up the 5:00 p.m. time slot. what is missing is the moral confidence to say we are willing to risk a judgment. you know, as reporting was terrible, they did not report a

big part of glenn beck's following -- he has a following and supports oath keepers where cops and military members sign an oath not to, you know, not to carry out unconstitutional orders when obama institutes martial law. we have something that is different here. i would say you don't want to falsely align the organization which got us into vietnam. there is something missing here that we don't have. i think we feel that loss profoundly because our elites are very morally unaccountable are very morally unaccountable to each other nowadays. >> michael. >> the thing is nobody cares what "time" thinks about glenn beck. they cared in 1961. other people were exposing back mostly web sites, certainly. just a very short anecdote about that.

politico asked me to evaluate glenn beck's view of history. they wrote a long article. they tried to get balance, too. even conservative historians will not defend glenn beck. politico was not my idea of the next "new york times." they had a certain sense that this guy is a fraud and someone has to say that. of course, they didn't do it in their own voice of authority such as it is. they did it in the voice of people like me who were assumed to be authorities about history. the piece as a whole was pretty damning. maybe this -- again, i'm trying to be anti-nostalgic. i think the fact that beck went up and down, perhaps not unlike mccarthy. mccarthy had much more power.

it is a lesson that people do learn through one media or another. >> other questions? yes. >> i thought it was refreshing to hear a conversation about journalism that used words like balance and authority and consensus. but none of you used the "f" word. by that i mean fox news. and talking about a journalism that is agenda driven and distorted and highly partisan. i wonder where that fits in not just in a historical term, but a lot of the power of fox news is creating a history. i want you all to talk about the "f" word for a minute. >> let me turn it into a question about the "m" word and ask alan. is rupert murdoch our muse? >> i don't think so. i think they have similar issues

in they both had a big empire. rupert murdoch's empire was larger than luce's ever was. i don't think murdoch, although i'm sure he has a political view, that's not really important to him. it's really just a moneymaking institution in the fact that it's generally conservative and sensational. it is mostly because that makes money. so, i think murdoch is not like luce. i think luce had a vision. i think murdoch had a company.

>> let me include roger ales in this and see if anyone on the panel wants to take up the question. >> i want to steal a march on my friend mike over there. >> i want to steal a march on my friend mike over there. my "m" word is mccormick. here we are in the shadow of the tribune tower. this gentleman, robert mccormick. he was the publisher of the "chicago tribune." referred to franklin roosevelt as a dictator with regularity. trying to keep america from getting into world war ii. when martin luther king died, he said he had it coming because he told people they did not have to follow the law. "the chicago tribune" was as powerful as fox news. in that it was the newspaper of the midwest. it was the "new york times" of massive parts of the united states. so, it was always the

reactionary publishers acting in the interests of the 1% and i think that it's easy to forget how -- you know, how hard it is to create political power in the country. >> the last quick question in the back. yes, sir. >> gary gurstohl. i think this is mostly for jackson and michael. maybe for rick and alan, too. both of you spend a lot of time every week editing a small journal. and i wanted you to reflect on that in american journalism. the role of small journals has had a long and distinguished career in american journalism.

our conception of journalism is of the mainstream institutions. over the course of history, small journals have had a big role to play. i would like to hear your role in the process. where you stand in the longer tradition and also the way the media revolutions of our own time are affecting the role of the small journal. i think i would like to ask you to reflect on this not simply from the left, which is your own experience, but the example of william buckley on the right. >> it is a tall order. because each has a maximum of two minutes to do it. >> i'll stop there. >> thank you for that set up. i actually did have a few notes written about the margins and where the margins even are these days.

given the diffuse and pervasive use of the internet. it doesn't feel like a margin, but bears a margin compared to what we are talking about with the consensus narratives. it produced by policymakers as well and journalists. i inherited the journal that i edit from dick portiet. i was trying to steer it to history and politics. every issue has a couple of topical pieces. the current issue has a piece by toby jones which i want you all to know will be available online on our new improved website. the name of the journal is "raritan." i did not bring my copy.

this is very important to me. it is one reason that i did take on the job. i did view the journal as an instrument and a vehicle for intervention in public discourse in the largest sense of the word. that includes literature in the arts as well as politics. we do have the problem that steve alluded to which is that we are a quarterly. i can write a topical editor's note or toby jones can write a piece about saudi arabia and the arab spring. and two months later, it will be taken over by events and we have to get on the phone and say, sweetheart, get me a rewrite. you can't always get rewrite in time. the pace of change is sometimes outruns the quarterly. nevertheless, i think there is a

place for quarterlies or dissent comes more often. is it quarterly? it is reflection. that is what i like to talk about. reflection. stepping back a little. just as there is a place for magazines like my friend joel "in these times" which is published right here in chicago and appears more often than quarterly and is astonishing to me that anyone can do that and still has a life. but it is a great challenge, i think, because i do think there is a great tradition of small presses, you know, little magazines as they are dismissively called. the great moment of partisan review of the late '30s and early '40s. i don't want to recreate that. they are both tough acts to

follow. you have to come up with a different act. that is what gets me out of bed in the morning. >> knowing there is more to say, i want michael to have a chance. >> i want alan to have the last word. he should have a last word here. if he wants to have it. first of all, i'm co-editor of "dissent" with great political activists. i don't get out of bed all by myself, so to speak. you know, it's a little different. the history of "dissent", as many of you out there know, was always a political magazine. it was founded in 1954 as a socialist magazine. we are still part of the social democratic tradition. by irving howe. the first issue, they said what is socialism? they put a question mark on it. they kept trying to figure that

out for many years. i think gary's comparison to national review is very interesting. i hadn't thought about that. national review had a lot of money in the beginning, which always helps. buckley's family had oil money. also, i think, it was a magazine and rick knows a lot about this for a group of people out there who felt the consensus was a liberal consensus for "time" and "newsweek" and other magazines were not speaking for them. in fact, they opposed everything that appeared in the magazines. they wanted to break the consensus. so i think that gave national review a lot of its excitement. of course, they got some very good writers at the time to

write for them. a lot of former leftists among others. including the guy who wrote many of the best scripts for the marxx brothers. it was funny and humorous. something in which "dissent" has never been accused of being, unfortunately. what i think about and what we try to do in 30 seconds or so is to provide people on the broad left in america with reflections as to use ways to think about what is going on in the country and world in a way that is not possible in a weekly magazine and in a way that is not possible online. and to do it with, i hope, some style of prose and some sense that things are complex and

political morality and decency to use michael walter's terms. we have a great website updated daily. it is beginning to be as important and certainly more popular than the quarterly. we are five toes and maybe a couple toenails into that new world as well. >> great. thank you. i will give alan the last word and you can either answer this question or not as you choose. at a certain point in the book, you quote henry luce as saying in a mission statement that the news magazine will justify journalism in our time. do you think that project of justifying journalism in our time is a project that exists now? >> well, i think luce had a vision of justifying journalism