and luce was of course seen as a republican partisan and certainly saw himself as a republican partisan. but, i mean, i recognize in these pages someone who agreed with the broad governing consensus of the time that government can have an affirmative -- has an affirmative role in making american life better. and he was quite vociferous in pushing back against the right ring of the republican party. i'm interested in the business stuff. >> before you get there, jackson, did you have a comment about something that was already on the table? >> alan just introduced a key word which is authority and the absence of it. i believe, too, what rick and everyone else has been saying about the persistence of consensus. there's a kind of maddeningly baffling sense that i have when i go from one set of media to another. i go from one set of media which we on the left like to call the

mainstream media or the corporate media, to the internet. and i find there all kinds of views that are powerfully, i think, argued and well buttressed with evidence against austerity or against knee jerk interventionism abroad. but these kinds of ideas don't make it in to public discourse. and the consequence is there's i think a deep alienation in the population. i'm not saying anything startling or new here. but the consensus still exist with respect to foreign policy or with respect to fiscal policy. but they don't have the kind of public support that they did 50 years ago. i think there is instead a deep cynicism about how these alleged authoritative views are

manufactured and that there are other equally authoritative views out there that are just not getting that kind of influence. krugman is an influence. >> the other example is occupy wall street. the ows. and this could become a very important period of our lives. on the other hand, where are the organizations, where are the institutions that might allow them to build and become very influenti influential? i'm not sure how that will happen. i mean, you think of the civil rights movement and it really had traction over a long period of time. ows, i'm not sure yet. but it certainly raises issues that should be raised. and it's very hard now for people to create a space for

dissent. mike? >> also at the same time, ows was informed by a lot of media that was obviously not mainstream media. over the years a lot of people making kind of arguments that surfaced in zuccotti park in mid-september had been talked about "underground," "the nation," hundreds of websites both here and in other countries. that in some way shows people will inform themselves, if they're unhappy, they'll find ways to inform themselves from journalism and otherwise. at the same time, i think luce thought america was united by something. now america is united by a technology. perhaps not much more. and part of the problem with the people in ows, i think, they in some way are -- they think, we

have the technology, we have the meetups, we have ways to communicate on line, we don't need institutions beyond that. >> that's my cue to quote something that jackson wrote in a review of paul star's creation of the media. it is delusional to pretend that the lumbering behemoths of the contemporary media industry have preserved any of the old republican concerns for an educated citizenry. >> that's what i want to talk about. >> that is a concern here of course and that's lower case republican. >> yes. >> this is what of course i tend to believe is central to democracy. it's not about voting. per se. it's about an informed citizenry like the one that michael was

describing in the early 20th century. again, not to sentimentalize that but that sense that people were engaged with a variety of points of view that they recognize were coming from different ideological directions and that they were attempting on to sort out on themselves and in conversation with one another. so it is a question not merely of creating consensus, but of creating ripples of dissent within that consensus that can enlarge it or challenge it or deliberately fragment it. and one other point about the civil rights movement, it was much easier for the civil rights movement to be assimilated into mainstream american political culture it seems to me because this was a demand for a very simple kind of straightforward justice. this is our country, too, you

know? we want what everyone else has. you know, it was powerful. it was unanswerable. and no one has been able to dismiss it ever since. it's a moment that we keep returning to. i think journalistically, you mentioned taylor branch and others. because it's a heroic moment in our history when the civil rights movement succeeded. but the anti-war movement of course has never -- anti-vietnam war movement for example or occupy wall street, other movements that challenge more entrenched institutions and indeed challenge consensus have not faired so well. so i think that once again we're in this situation of where everyone talks of diversity, but everything seems the same. there's a certain paradox here. >> i want to think about all these broader issues in the context of the business of media

and the history of the business of media. and the broader question i think is one of authority. do media now speak with authority, can they speak with authority. did they used to speak with authority. of course now we're talking about even "the new york times" that have less reporting, more opinion i would say, more gossip, the "washington post" isn't the first draft of history, it's the first draft of "people" magazine. so what happened? >> nothing like a good sound bite. >> newspapers are going out of business. journalists are losing their jobs. they're becoming public relations agents. what happened? why did this happen? there's a narrative about why this happened that involves technology. people started reading blogs. internet destroyed newspapers. i think it's a self-serving narrative on the part of media barons because this happened before there was an internet. and what happened was newspapers generally family-owned newspapers, were bought by media

conglomerates or companies that didn't specialize in media at all. and were publicly traded and suddenly these newspapers had to show double digit profits every quarter. and how that played itself out was newspapers started dumbing themselves down and they started eating their seed corn. they started abrogating the very qualities that made them valuable to their constituencies, which was giving you something meaty to read and hold on to. "the sun-times," not to insult them, it's typical, it's barely a newspaper. it's a little scrap of a thing. and what's striking to bring it back to luce is that he provided a different model, a different business model. that he had a confidence that quality would out, that if he used the best paper, the best journalism, didn't cut corners

and didn't write down to his readers, especially in the case of someone like fortune, which are collectors' items because they're so beautiful and rich and wonderful, that he could make lots of money. and he did. he became one of the richest men in america. the model of how you make money now is very different. it's how we can cut corners. it's the same austerity that's resonatie ining around our cult. it's the bean counter mentality. the idea that journalism isn't different from any other business. so let's run a spreadsheet and look at our costs and let's get rid of these bureaus that are drains on our resources. and lo and behold, what do we have? no one reads newspapers any more. is it a coincidence? i think not. >> is the idea that the press

serves a public interest first and profits follow from that, is that romanticized and dead? >> yeah. i mean, i think that it died because of a shift in the norms of capitalism. it's the same reason steel mills died in the midwest. they made 5% quarterly profit instead of 15% quarterly profit. so let's liquidate them and figure out ways to divest workers of their pensions and manufacture our steel in japan and financialize the economy. there's only one way of thinking how profit works. not enough to have a set of multiple stakeholders, the community you're answerable too, in the case of a steel mill, the south shore of chicago, in the case of a newspaper, the civic public that you're addressing. there's only one model of value.

and this is a broad shift, and in a sense it's a shift away from luce-ism in its broadest sense. >> not to repeat myself at all. aren't we in danger here of playing -- being nostalgic a little bit? i mean, after all, capitalism is a, you know, creative system and inevitably when the new technology came online, young people especially were going to adopt it and businesses would have to adapt to it. i hear all the time of rich individuals not unlike luce when he was richer just spending $5 million on a new website and hiring ten people on their website. now we can say the quality of the journalism of the website is not as good as it would have been 50 years ago if the famed five people had started a newspaper in some mid-sized midwestern city. but that's not going to happen, obviously. so one thing i'd like to raise

maybe, not to get away from perhaps the agenda you've got, marty, but is the question of the visual. you know, both in journalism and history. it would seem when i was a kid reading "life," and "time" covers, especially, too, was how much you learned from the visual of those. and i think i ran across, when i used to be a labor historian, an incredible series of articles about a steelworker in altipa, pennsylvania, named lopata. i forget his first name. who was earning $3.50 an hour, and the steel union mecame, he made $5 an hour. and alfred was hired to illustrate this guy's life and there were photos of lopata at

the door, his wife who was barefoot, giving him his box lunch and him walking three miles to work and being totally exhausted at the end of the day and lying half contentedly on the lawn outside his little shack then being washed off by his wife from the outdoor pump because they had no indoor plumbing. ten years later, he finds he has a brick house, he has eight kids now, he had three kids before. life isn't wonderful, but he can make $10, $11 a day. he's worried about inflation, but he has a secure job. this to me illustrated what the union could do for people much better than four or five wonderful texts. in some ways. about that. and for me, that's -- i think -- my students, as we all know, people see me here and out there in the audience as well. you know, they often learn more from a good power point slide which i then talk about than they do from a wonderful journal article. so i wonder whether in some ways

that is sort of an intersection between what's happened in journalism and to a certain degree what's happened with at least history teaching. >> i'd like to pursue that, but i think alan had a comment you wanted to make. were you gesturing? >> no. >> okay. before we continue along that realm which i think also brings us to popular culture and the visual story telling, it raises the question of who are the educators of the educated citizenry? whether intentional or de facto? and politicians in some ways are among them and michael, i just wanted to quote the title of a piece you wrote in "the new republic." it was called "newt gingrich: american's worst historian." so do you think there is a sense

in which american citizens, some american citizens, get their history from political figures like newt gingrich? >> definitely. i think the bestselling historian in america was glenn beck. at least last year. i'm not sure how his sales are doing this year. if you ever watch glenn beck's program, which maybe who watch c-span haven't done much. many people in america have, at least when he was on fox. i mean, he was using a whi whiteboard and giving history lessons, history lectures in a very dramatic way often with tears in his eyes. and of course for him the progressive era was the beginning of the dissent into hell for america. and so, yeah, we have -- of course, we've always had people like that. i mean, back in the 1890s there was a coins financial school, you know, which was the key work for populists. and it was a work of history.

popular economics and history. so that's not new. but in many ways i think conservatives now probably have a more, how should i say it, coherent narrative of history than people on the left do, in part because of people like glenn beck. >> a lot of our politicians, i won't specify party, are really poor historians and our journalists are very poor fact checkers of that history. i actually recently wrote a blog post for a blog, we're talking about whether or not the media is ideological and divided or not, the blog i write about is called crooksandliars.com. no objectivity there. and i wrote about rick santorum's victory speech in iowa. which was hailed by among others the "woest washington post's"

e.j. dionne, as the best speech of the night. and i pointed out that in arguing that to the american dream is alive and can be restored, and that america is a place of freedom and opportunity. he told the story, a typical one, of his immigrant grandfather coming to america for freedom and opportunity. and the implication being because he did that, he, rick santorum and his family is able to enjoy freedom now. in between these two polls, he mentioned that his dad -- his grandpa was a coal miner in pennsylvania and he was paid in what he called coupons and what historians know as scrip. which means that his grandpa lived in a company town. he was probably kept in something close to debt slavery. and he had no freedom to move because he wasn't paid in cash. he described his grandpa coming from mussolini's italy to something in america that resembled futilism.

and then he went along and said barack obama and the democrats want to destroy the freedom of this great american system that created this wealth and prosperity for my family. i was the only person who noticed this. so, you know, i don't want to toot my own horn, but, okay, historical claim was made. it was a soleacism of the first order that exposed a profound fallacy at the heart of what rick santorum was saying about freedom and liberty. ideally a democratic politician would point this out. it involves the fact when you have things like debt slavery and things like the inability to move without getting jailed because you owe your soul to the company store, democrat -- that the government can step in and actually establish liberty. and that untethered property often violates liberty. no democrat did it, no journalist did it. so we have a crisis of

historical representation. >> jackson. >> i think that's an excellent example and i want to rise to a slightly more aerial view here on the question of journalist versus historians and the accounts they give of the past and the present for that matter. but it seems to me there is a conceptual issue here that is very troubling to me and i think it affects self-described conservatives and self-described centrists. as well as people farther to the left. liberals as well, i guess. and that is the addiction to technological determinism. and rick alluded to this earlier in connection with the innovation of the internet as the explanation for the decline of newspapers or the explanation for the decline of the post office when in fact we're talking about shareholders and legislators making decisions. of course i agree there is a

consumer demand out there for the visual, for the internet, for all of the things that we know the young are craving. from our classes, if nothing else. nevertheless, there is a tendency, i think, and this is particularly true of journalists. tom friedman, is in my mind, the main offender here. he maybe is the most inconspicuous. which is to invoke technology as an explanation for inevitable change, to which we have to adjust, whether we want to or not. this goes along with the celebration of freedom and choice that santorum and others are always referring to as well. so we have to love to do, we have to want to do what we're going to have to do anyway, which is embrace this future. self-described conservatives

like jeb bush, for example, and others are in the vanguard of, you know, promoting online education in ways that will, in my view, my dinosaur-like view, undermine what is after all at the heart of the educational relationship. which is the face-to-face connection between teachers and students. it seems to me that people who call themselves conservatives, in fact, are quite willing. gingrich is another good example of this. he likes to present himself on being on the cutting edge of technological change and everything that he is proposing is, of course, dictated by the inevitability of a certain kind of cyber future that he is shaping in his own fantastic and disturbing way. but this seems to me something else, that historians have an opportunity to challenge.

historians, in precisely the ways you've both done with respect to these narratives of laboring men of previous generations. we do tell stories and we love complexity. complexity is the historian's truth. right? every time a historian comes to a conference, a social scientist, he gets to be the one who says, well, i like these models very much, but -- >> and are journalists addicted to simplicity? is that the implication? >> they shouldn't be. ideally, i would argue the tradition of investigative journalism would be keep digging. and, again, getting it right, means getting it in all its complexity. of course you can get tangled. in self-contradictory assertions and the like. you have to come up with a clear conclusion at some point. it does seem to me that by

complexity, we're often talking about human agency. we're talking about unintended consequences as well of human actions. we're talking about purposes mistook fallen on the inventors' heads and the like. these are things historians have engaged with which is why i tell my students history is tragic, it's sad, because it often is, but it's about the history of unintended consequences and precisely those that don't fall into neat deterministic formulas. >> alan, as were you working on the book, how did the notion of getting it right play out, if at all? is it something which is clear to you, controversial, irrelevant? >> well, of course, i tried to get my own work right. did luce really try to get it right? i think he did try, but he was -- you know, he lived within

a world in which a whole range of areas of american life were completely out of sight. luce didn't make much of an effort to find them. for example, at one point, he did a -- or i say he. "life" magazine did a piece on middletown in transition. the second volume of the middletown. they had a series of photographs of how people in muncie, which is what the town of middletown represented, muncie, indiana. they had pictures of all of the levels of people in muncie, indiana. and they had the balls at the top, the ball family was the big wealthy people. and they got all the way down to people who lived with chickens

in their kitchen. all the photographs were the same. the surroundings weren't the same, but there was the same sort of happy family sort of vision from the wealthiest people to the poorest people. everybody was the same. so, no, he didn't get it right. he didn't get it right because he didn't really want it to be what it was supposed to be. and i think in our time, we don't always get it right either, but at least i think we do see the differences that luce didn't see. there were so many areas of life. sexuality, feminism and for a

long time race. was just out of sight most of the time. i think, you know, we've -- it's much more difficult world when all of these things sort of came up into the culture, but i think we're better off in that way. the idea of a large consensual journalism is, which is what i grew up with and what i, of course, believed in since i was in a journalism family. if you think of -- and the idea was the larger the audience, the more important the television news was. the most important television news in the world is cctv in china which a billion people

watch every day. and i don't think we would like to live in a world in which cctv is the model for what we have. so i think we're better off than we may think we are. you know, at the same time, the nightly news has withered to a level. if you put together the audience for the three major nightly news shows, nbc, cbs and abc, you put the audience for those three together. are less than any of the three nightly news where any one of the nightly news had more audience than the three all together now. there's nothing in those nightly news shows anymore.

so, the challenge, i think, of getting it right, is to find ways in which to make sure that people have access. it's not going to be as easy access as it used to be when everybody thought "the new york times" had all the news that was fit to print. i think the danger is that news will disappear because there won't be any money for people to create it. i don't think that will happen. i think what we'll have is a fragme fragmented, but much more thorough way of learning what the world is becoming. >> in a moment, i'll invite questions from the room. i have three quick questions. one for each of you. rick, you and -- excuse me -- you and michael were signers of a letter about an abc mini series called "the path to 9/11"

in which you said that the your you complained of the falsification of history by a responsible broadcast network, abc. how important to you think that is, to have popular culture get it right? >> that's an interesting question. i am personally not a stickler for a pedantic historical accuracy and representations of history. i say if it is good enough for shakespeare, it is good enough for me. you know? i do think there's a different conception of truth that has to be honored in any representation of history and that's a sort of poetic or moral truth. what offended me in that particular mini series was just made stuff up about the culpability of the clinton administration in 9/11 and that it was also, you know, i