writing which i think is a shame. but to my mind, journalism -- when journalists turn their attention to writing history, they do it with an eye to personality, they do to an eye for dramatic narrative. in some ways the kind of history that people prize is romantic history, i think. and there's a deep tradition of that, of course, in american history, not just among journalists, but going back to george bancroft and some of the earliest measure historians. >> who you have written about. >> not by george, no. >> not myself, no. but i think that one of the problems as we know for historians is who are mostly academic historians like most of the people in this room and one of the people on this panel, is how to retain the color, the romance, i think, of history, but also deeply analytical. which i learned a little bit from reading "time" and "life"

when i was a kid believe it or not. i won't go on very long here, but basically for me, reading "time" and "life" which came into the house every week and my mother worked at the time life building, so we got the issues earlier, was sort of a window was about how history was about everything. not just about politics or diplomacy or war. it was about sport, it was about high culture, low culture, it was about art. "time" and "life" were all about these things. so there was a vividness there which i perhaps unconsciously death wanted to bring into the history that i laid around and wanted to write. so for me, they were a tremendous goad, if you will, to writing better history. >> jackson, on the same area.

>> sure. well, i'll begin in the confessional mode also in that i also grew up with "time" and "life" like a lot of people of our generation. and i also found them i think in a subtle kind of way inspirational to the writing of a kind of encompassing version of history, not merely a narrow political or public policy oriented version. the time essay which appeared at some point in the 1960s, i believe, was also it turned out a somewhat superficial model, but also the kind of cultural criticism that i wanted to combine with cultural history. so luce was promoting a lot of ideas that he may not have had on his agenda. but with respect to the differences, i would have to degree with the underlying sub text of mike's remark that it's very difficult to locate that difference. the "washington post" used to call itself the first draft of

history. you were to read the "washington post," it was the first draft of history. now it's the first draft of the armed services committee for the pentagon. but once upon a time, they had that aspiration. i tell my students to get them out of their writer's block, get in your ben hecht mode, sit down and pretend you've got a deadline tomorrow morning. there is something about journalism and it is of course color and narrative and story, as well. but historians need to inhale in deep drafts, i think, to enliven

their work and to make it accessible to a wider than academic public. on the other hand, i think that there are things journalists particularly broadcast journalists, i won't exempt the writing press entirely, but i would certainly say this country eek is primarily in that critique is primarily in that broadcast journalists, who i think can learn something from historians and indeed from their own tradition of getting it right, of investigative journalism, of finding out what actually happened. and of defining objectivity not as balance, but as honesty to the evidence. and it seems this is something that historians have tried to hang on to. and i think the knows of notion of objectivity as impartiality or neutrality or balance has become a kind of scourge particularly with respect to broadcast journalism. i know there's a scandalous

remark available on the internet still from jim lehrer who win asked about this, what he considered his job to be, responded that it was simply to prevent -- to present the two different views on an issue, of which it was assumed there were always merely two. so here's one side that believes in global warming and here's another that doesn't. this sort of thing. so i find this to be a troubling tendency in contemporary journalism. i also think we have as historians longer memories. and that will be useful, too, particularly with respect to the recent history of the national security state. for example, the united states has not declared war on anyone since 1941, and yet we've fought many wars in that time. most historians and most journalists alive today have never seen or heard a u.s. president ask a congress for a

declaration of war and yet there's an important part of our constitutional tradition that i think is becoming largely invisible in these times. and there are of course journalists who are trying to keep it visible. we can talk about them, too, at some point. but i think that luce, he in a sense generated a lot of unintended consequences certainly in the likes of michael and myself anyway. but i think his captiousness was the great thing about him. his determination to contain multitudes and i think that's still an admirable aspiration for all of us. >> you've written by balance as either elusive or dangerous.

>> i'm awed that your students know who ben hecht is. that's the best thing i've heard all decade. but, yes, i'm actually quite come farther with -- i wrote down the definition of journalism as the first draft of history. but i want to propose sort of two models that have emerged to honor that injunction. the first is a kind of self-arrogated task of elite, like henry luce. this this city, someone like robert mccormick. i think the news executives in the golden age of tv journalism and anchor men and commentators, david brinkley first among those, who took it as their roll to address the national

community. as a national community and make sense of it in a way that may or may not have actually had a point of view, but it definitely had a set of moral valence to it. it was moralistic. and there were setting boundaries of what was permissible and what was strange and what was normal. of course that has come under a lot of criticism over the years. and what has replaced it is almost this pseudo scientific professionalized journalism in which there is this attempt to neutrally objectively report the world according to the ideology of balance. and i think it's an interesting and open question which model has done a better job of getting

it right. i as a case study -- first of all, i've been riveted by "time" magazine. but i grew up with it and that was kind of my window on to the world. but even more as a historian, in my two books, i've kind of considered in the back of my mind, "time" magazine as a character. this as a guy. because it had such a striking voice and told the story. always told the story about the events of the day. a grand story. a meta narrative. and for my first book, a big part of the story they told was about what to make of this far right movement that was emerging in the early '60s. people like the john birch society and barry goldwater. i wanted on get more into that later. and the second book which i'm writing about the '65 to '72 period, it's what to make of

these crazy hippies an anti-war activists. took on a very fascinating voice, one that was quite sympathetic actually. and "time" magazine took on its role in a confusing time of great cultural change as basically domesticating these strange things and how they came out of american vernacular. for example the idea that woodstock -- "time" magazine, "life" magazine loved woodstock. they considered it an excellent development. probably was a lot better than people burning down campuses. but they quoted someone saying the use of lsd is almost like a religious sacrament. so it kind of bundled it with

america's religious traditions. and lo and behold, very soon campaigners against sex ed in the late '60s and early '70s were waving around the special issue of "life" magazine as an example of how america's liberal elites have led us astray. so there's a long history there, but i just want to conclude by discussing this crisis i would say of balance. i was recently quoted as many of us are in a news article in the iowa newspaper. michele bachmann had gone on talk radio in iowa and it said something absolutely beyond the pale regarding the democrats and barack obama. i wish i remember precisely what it was.

it was part of what we've seen as an emerging republican discourse as sees democrats and illegitimate, not part of the reliable, trustworthy governing partners. and in the article, since they needed balance, had quoted something jimmy hoffa jr. said, the head of the teamsters. and he said something like we're going to kill them in the next election. and these were seen as violent rhetoric. and i wrote to the reporter, basically expressing my frustration that he wasn't getting it right. that reality was not being represented. and if i may, i'll quota few sentences wrote back to me because i think it's a really outstanding -- it's really an outstanding example of just how this normative shift looks like. in like 2011 or 2012 now. he said 50 years ago, the media

was empowered to create a reality which tracked the liberal consensus of the time, very much one that luce i think supported even though he didn't like fdr, supporting the welfare state, government intervention, investment in the economy, intellectualism and so on. some agreed, some different. now conservatives dictate the reality. in their formulation, government is a monster. rich people are martyrs. poor people are sinners and the whole world is out to get minute brave enough to say so. some agree, some don't. my question is what is the difference? in both, someone is successfully defining reality which means that someone else is unsuccessfully defining it. and is unhappy about it. to pick a side, speaking of himself, is a value judgment, an recognition of what is true true reality and what is a well constructed hoax. i'll stop and we can get into how the media has been defining and reflecting back the far

right to americans. i have some case studies in mind. but to leave it at that, let's think about how striking and how different these two models of representing reality are. >> lots of threads have now come out that i suspect others want to comment on. before doing that, i want to confess that in my house, "time" and "life" were unwelcome, it was "look" and "newsweek." that one subscription was a more idealogical statement. >> "newsweek" was more liberal. >> alan, i'd like to ask you to react in part to what you've heard in the way in which luce thought journalism should function. he didn't seem to have any difficulty in figuring out what side, if there were sides, to come down on.

>> i think luce, although not a very popular figure among journalists in the mid 20th, century, he did certainly represent a period of journalism in which there was an effort to create some kind of consensus in the way most journalists thought about the world, including my own father. and i think if we look back across the history of modern journalism which began in the mid 19th century, and continue into our own time, in the 19th century, journalism was not consensual at all. newspapers were partisan, they were regional. they had great difficulty gathering information in the way that in the 20th century became much easier.

and journalism in the 19th century was not a consensual operation, it was what in fact we are moving towards today. in the 20th century and especially the middle of the 20th century, there was a belief that you could have a kind of -- the "new york times," "time" magazine, many, many other -- "washington post," many very good newspapers. and they all had pretty similar views of how the world worked. i think what we're seeing today is the unraveling of a consensual journalism. newspapers are in trouble. some of them have already died. others of them have gone entirely on to the internet.

others are weekly instead of dailies. and it's not just the economy that that made this so difficult for journalism to thrive, although the economy is a big issue for journalism. it's also the way much of the world has become an anti-consensual culture. so i think thinking about journalism today, it's hard to be optimistic. lots of things have emerged on the internet and elsewhere that are really brilliant. but it's getting harder and harder i think for ordinary people to find a place where they feel that they can find the real truth about the world.

maybe there is no such thing as a truth about the world. but i think there's been a fragmentation of the way journalism now works. i don't know whether that's a good thing or bad thing. but as we look ahead, i think we'll see a very different kind of journalism. i'm not sure exactly what it will look like. but it's certainly not going to look like what it was 20, 30 years ago. >> rick, you wanted to add a comment, but first let me ask jackson a question. you mentioned honesty to the evidence. can you unpack that a bit? >> i realize both of those key terms are problematic. both honesty and evidence can be argued about indefinitely. but as an idea, it still seems to me more productive and right than some vain goal of impartiality or neutrality. and i'm thinking of really the muck raking tradition among others in journalism as well as historians' own commitment to

research, which is you recognize that what you found is partial, is incomplete, that you can even take the post modern view, as i do, that everything is text and open to interpretation, including apparently, unproblematic data, census data, et cetera. everything is open to interpretation. nevertheless you still have this notion of going to this text and being trues as you can to what it says and getting it right. whether we're talking about, if you'll excuse the expression, returning to the title of this event here. and so that's what seems to me not to have been lost by historian, but to have been lost by journalists. i agree that during the era of

consensus, the managerial consensus that both rick and alan have described quite well, there were boundaries of course rick and alan have described quite well, there were boundaries, of course, to, you know, what was admitted into legitimate discourse. just as there -- i would argue there still are today in spite of the fragmentation that i agree has occurred. i think that -- i'm certainly not looking back to the mid 20th century as a golden age when journalists really were committed to getting it right. some were, some weren't. luce was committed to getting it right according to his ideological commitments which often led him strikingly astray with respect to the communist chinese versus the nationalist chinese, for example. and other events.

so it is -- i'm sure he believed he was being honest to the evidence. so i'm not suggesting that that phrase is a kind of magic bullet. but i throw it out as an alternative to what seems to me the much more dangerous shallower and destructive notion of balance and neutrality which is truly unattainable and not desirable either. for that matter. >> yeah. >> mark, can i make a quick comment? >> is that okay, rick? >> sure. go for it. >> go ahead. >> i was going to say, i dissent strongly from the idea that we no longer create consensual narratives. and that we're living in an age of fragmentation. it would be foolish not to admit that that's the way the media looks now. especially from the days of

networks and three great newspapers. but think about something like the consensus that was shared in the republican and democratic party that saddam hussein had weapons of mass destruction and that the smoking gun might be a mushroom cloud. think of the consensus that our economic problems are the result of deficits and debts and that the answer is public austerity, transnational, transideological consensus certainly shared by barack obama and socialists and boehner and all the rest. now, what's different is who constructs these consensual narratives. i'd point to the very important work by the media critics john nichols and robert mcchesney who have done some fascinating empirical research using census data, figuring out the ratio of journalists to public relations professionals. as the world of journalism collapses economically, it's becoming even worse.

there is a funny boxing movie in the '50s. a sportwriter becomes a publicist. that's the career path of choice now. people become very sophisticated among our elites in creating stories about reality that are unquestioned. and in the case of weapons of mass destruction, it was a literal conspiracy, you know, by people acting in concert with media professionals like judith miller. in the case of austerity, you have a billionaire like pete peterson setting up foundations and having people write op-eds and all the rest. so what we see as a result of the decline of this sort of civic minded journalism that i think with profound exceptions, henry luce represented i think nobly is something in which the interests have taken over from the public interest. >> michael. >> i guess i'd like to just stay

a few words of dissent again. i'm not advertising my magazine. that's not the meaning i'm giving to you. from the idea a little disagreement i guess with alan, also with rick, about the idea there was ever anything like a golden age of journalism. they didn't put it that way. ever a time when there was really an opportunity for a much more balanced reporting and jackson mentioned the muck rakers, too. i think to my mind, golden age journalism is when the press was as popular as it ever was probably which is roughly from the 1880s to the 1920s, i think, in the sense that i think readership went up by a factor of 10 times or 15 times.

what the gain of the population was. there were a lot of ethnic papers. there were eight or nine dailies in new york city and others in major and minor cities as well. what was important about that period, i think, is there was, as alan said, there was no objectivity. there was great popularity. and there is tremendous diversity of opinion in all these papers. and you often find people sitting down to read the papers. not just their paper, but they realize that if they were going to read the paper called the "republican" or another one called the "democrat," perhaps one called the "socialist" they they were going to get different points of view on the same stories. and that was what it meant in part to be an educated citizen. a real participant. in my mind, i'm not saying we were true to that now. obviously people look at

"huffington post" just to see the pinups are not getting some of the richness that is there in the "huffington post" and other places. but i do think in some ways the media world now is quite lively. yes, we have consensus, but we also have paul krugman on the "times" helping to mobilize people against it. we have good investigative reporting in places like "the new yorker." so i think it's important to realize that we are still in the post-modernist movement and we will be for most of our lifetimes and we should make the best of it in that sense, i think. historians, william james brian, who on his passport asked to list an occupation. it said journalist because he spent all his life writing journalism. in some ways no one would think of brian as an objective reporter of anything. and more power to him in that

sense. i think we should encourage multiplicity of intelligent journalism rather than be railing its fragmentation. >> alan, michael mentioned you as someone he was dissenting from. is there any daylight between your conceptions? >> well, i think i do agree with rick, but there certainly are consensual views on many issues at various points in our age. and the iraq war is a very good example of it. and people do race to what seem to be the obvious points. i think, though, if you think about not so much about the way in which americans understand their world at the time, i've been thinking more about what

the journalist -- what journalism is becoming. think about "the new york times" which has been the greatest newspaper in the united states for many decades and still is, i think. but it's sure not the same as it was 20, 30 years ago. it's not just because the time has changed. it's because they just don't have the money anymore. they have about half the number of reporters that they had, there's much more opinion and much less reporting. and that's "the new york times." it's much worse in much other newspapers. so putting aside the consensus issue, i think the future of journalism is going to become more and more fragmented. that may not be a bad thing, but i think not. i think it -- having newspapers

that have authority are something that we should hope will survive. even though there are many other forms of journalism that are important and powerful as well, but i think -- i worry that the great newspapers are disappearing or becoming much less important. and somehow i think there is a space for great journalistic institutions that help people understand a broad view of the world. >> rick, it's a testimony i think to alan's capacity to encompass all of henry luce that you might describe henry luce in any way as noble. >> yeah. it is interesting because he was seen as this liberal and i think the democratic party was not liberal enough.