recalling the details but i think there were some partisans involved that had an agenda. but in popular culture, you know, i think you can get at a broader truth about history in a well-crafted story that you can kind of excuse some of the facts that maybe were truncated and poetic license. i mean, just kind of quickly, you know, i thought that oliver stone did a pretty good job with nixon. i think that had a poetic truth about nixon that i think stands up. i think that "jfk" was a travesty, but if you weighed each on a scale, oliver stone's "jfk" it probably had an equal number of quote/unquote, mistakes or distortions. >> michael, you i read quoted

that howard zen's people's history of the united states represents a simplistic propagandaistic simplicity of american history, which startles me. not that i disagree. i was startled to see it. >> yeah, i've taken some flak for that from my left, quite a lot, actually. well, that would begin a whole other discussion about a different kind of history. zen's not really a journalist. he was not really a journalist. >> also not a historian in your mind? >> he was an historian who was trying or teaching a version of history which to my mind is simplistic but also romantic, you know, in a way which i think verges on almost falsehood. because for zen, the people -- he used the term the 99%,

actually, before that became popular. the 99% are always virtuous and right. the difference between them are relati relltively unimportant but somehow they always keep losing to the 1%. he has, to my mind, are outmoded and erroneous interpretations of american history like the civil war which he sees in beardian terms of the northern industrial interests vanquishing the south. he also puts abolitionists in there somewhere. you end up thinking the abolitionists were hoodwinked by the industrialists. that doesn't explain why frederick douglass was a republican until the end of his life, for example. again, just like a lot of popular journalistic versions of history, that sold more books than anybody on this panel will probably sell. probably anybody out there

combined will ever sell of their books. i think it's had a good impact of sort of young people on the left, encourage them to be activists because 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 everyone subscribes to. unless we have a coherent narrative, if it's all complexity, if it's all exceptions to this, exceptions to that, then people will be bored by it and 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 this period, but it's a narrative which is unlike zen, alive to contradiction, alive to irony, alive to tragedy of a sort of classic kind. but obviously his book will not

be assigned in many high schools unlike zen's. >> jackson, in the same piece of yours that i quoted earlier, you also say the public sphere is a mess. i'm wondering -- >> i saw that. >> to the degree that you still believe that, i'm wondering whether you think that either journalism or history, the profession of journalism and profession of historians can contribute to changing that. >> oh, shabsolutely. i mean, that's what gets me out of bed every morning. that this naive but persistent idea that if we do get it right, and by we i mean journalists and historians alike, then we can somehow contribute to a more

vital public sphere, one where points of view are actively and intelligently 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 with this continued dominance of, let's face it, you know, giant corporations in the manufacture of news which is often muddled with 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, and i think all of us with real sympathy, the internet, for lack of a better term, is a kind of

alternative public sphere and, in fact, it is the public sphere for many people now. and it's a mess, too. then there are a lot of other interesting things going on. i mean, i often think about this last 50 years of our history as being, as alan's book so brilliantly demonstrated, this shift from coherence to fragmentation. beginning in the 1960s. yet, one could also see it from a shift, the famous duality from mastery to drift. tryst is not always a bad thing, as you know. you can drift into interesting place places and configure public d

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 between journalists and historians, you can use tsp. timing, style, perspective profits. timing. i was a graduate student at oxford in the '70s. modern history was 400 a.d. to 1918. when i asked my tutor, why did you stop at 1918? he said totally straight faced, everything after 1918 is journalism. one perspective, many of you, all of you have written, you're doing op-ped pieces, but it's contemporaneous history.

it's contemporaneous events that mark the journalist. we venture into it sometimes, but we only do that if we're doing our own op-ped 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, and i don't mean that in a negative way. straightforward simplistic manner. where we're 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, but we don't write to a journal public. the final one is perspective and profit. we are, we do bring to the table a kind of perspective that journalists don't do. i would suggest as one of my friends who is the highest ranking woman in network news that when she gets invited to

journalism schools to talk, she's never invited a second time because she tells them nobody should ever be an undergraduate major in journalism because you learn no perspective. you should be a history major or if not that, at the very least, politics or international relations so that when you write a story, you have a sense of context. you have a sense of where this fits both at the moment and in the larger history. and 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. i mean, yes, it would be nice to sell 2 million copies and have a summer home somewhere, but this isn't what we're really doing. we're not guided by profits. right now one of the real -- that you guys were pointing to -- one of the real problems is single digit profits are no longer sufficient for newspapers. i've seen in my hometown of los angeles, your "chicago trib"

company has wrecked, wrecked our newspaper. because single digit profits were no good. my friend, a former book editor, left after he was told by the publisher and editor came in, brought all their little editors in and said, look, you guys think you're writing like "the new york times." you want to aspire to write like "the new york times,". we're telling you, our company wants you to write like "usa today." something has been lost here. also, again, the profits, the perspective and the time mark a critical difference between two fields. >> unless someone has a burning need to respond to that, i'm going to ask for other questions so we can get in as many as we can, if there are others. yes? identify yourself. >> david greenberg, rutgers

university. a couple of comments. one as i'm sure all the pan panelists know. i want to pick up on this idea that we were talking about earlier as false balance as a guiding light of journalism. i would suggest this emerged much earlier, even at the moment that objectivity, itself, became sort of an ideal of reporting. there is a large literature on joe mccarthy in the press. this was preceasely how mccarthy would manipulate the press. he would put out an outrageous story and people would deny it and you would get both accounts without really the time or the capacity to investigate the truth of his claims but he would kind of continue to maintain the media spotlight. this is not something that is not just a failing of individual journalists today but an inherent occupational hazard of the aspiration of objectivity that we all tend to think is

valuable. doesn't mean it has to be so egregious as it is, it seems to be today. i also wanted to on a similar point ask about this notion about consensual narratives persisting today and particularly rick's examples, both of the wmd and iraq, turned out to be nonexistent, and austerity. yeah, i would challenge the notion that those were consensual narratives in the way that, say, anti-communism was. i mean, i read, and a lot of columnists, reporting, questioning whether that stuff was there. i read now lots of people besides krugman who take a lot more keynesian perspective. you know, reporters put this in their reporting for the good papers. maybe not so much in the broadcast sphere. i would say the difference is those arguments, which i think we tend to support, that is a

more keynesian economic perspective, skepticism about the administration's claims on iraq. didn't carry the day in the debates that were had. partly because the democratic leadership in both cases embraced or capitulated, however you want to put it, 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 because, you know, if obama is talking austerity and the republicans are talking austerity, the keynesian view gets somewhat sideli sidelined. it's very much there in the journalism, it's just not framed by our 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, did you want to comment? >> 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? i'm talking about, again, in the tradition of morally self-confident elites who almost by dent of the fact they were so confident and so secure in their cultural position were able to kind of make a, intervene in the public sphere and make a moral claim. let me give you an example of how "time" wrote about the john berg society in 1961 and how they wrote about glenn beck when he was on the cover a couple years ago. this is from "time." among the u.s. brotherhoods fighting against communism, nothing is like the john burke society. 20 to 30 members a piece, take orders from society headquarters, promotes communist style organizations that do not use the john burke society name. avoiding normal channels of

politic action. the society accepts a hard boiled dictatorial direction of one man who sees democracy as a perennial fraud and estimates the u.s. is 60% communist controlled. other times, john burke americanists as they call themselves admits it's a joke. nothing there that -- that's good reporting for one thing. that's how the john burke society works. there was that quote/unquote editorializing. there was editorializing when "time" magazine wrote about glenn beck but it looked very different. they said, he was quote, the hottest thing in the political rant racket. tireless, funny, self-deprecating who lit up the 5:00 p.m. slot in a way never thought possible by industry watchers. right? what's 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 -- glenn beck 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 and that sort of thing. we have something qualitatively different here. i would say you don't want to falsely report. there's something missing here that we don't have. i think we feel that loss profoundly because our elites are very morally unaccountable among other things to each other these days. >> michael? >> the key thing, though, nobody cares what "time" magazine thinks about glenn beck, whereas they cared in 1961 what "time"

magazine thought about john burke society. other people were exposing beck, mostly websites, certainly. just a very short anecdote about that. pretty owe asked me and other historians 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." believe me. 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. it was nevertheless the piece as a whole was i think pretty damning. so, again, maybe this sort of, again, i'm trying to be the anti-nostalgic here, but, you know, i do think the fact that beck went up and went 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 ruppert murdoch our luce? >> i don't think so. a lot of people have said that to me. i mean, they do have similarity in they both have had a big empire. although rupert murdoch's empire is hugely 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's mostly because that makes money.

so i think murdoch is not like luce. i mean, 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. 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. he wasn't around then, but his influence was felt. basically 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. there are always forces against it. >> 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 american history, small journals have had a big role to play. i would like to hear your role in the process. both 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. >> but the small journal in its place in the larger story we're talking about. >> thank you for that setup,

gary. i actually did have a few notes written about the margins and where the margins even are these days. given the diffuse and pervasive influence of the internet, which doesn't feel like a margin, and yet in some ways bears a marginal relationship to what we've been talking about as these consensus narratives, which i agree, it produced as much by politicians and policy makers as by journalists. i inherited the journal that i edit from dick portiet, who was primarily a lit rather critic. 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 my colleague, 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. sorry. 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 topical 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. that had big impacts. everyone thinks of the golden

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's what i'm trying to do. 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. i'll be as quick as i can. first of all, i'm co-editor of "dissent" with great political theorist an ad activist, michae walter. 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. just as much as the left wanted to break the consensus a few years later. 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 marx brothers. who had become a conservative, for example. 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 jackson's word, 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 yet still a 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?