so in general, we have the events that are happening. and journalists of course are that. then we have sort of the midterm thinking where you look at stories, you look at issues in a deeper way, more sustained way. and journalists and investigative journalism has done that. then you have the sort of long-term, really researched things for several years, maybe many, many years. and universities have done that. great parallel between the role of universities and the role of the press. that you need institutions as part of that. citizen journalists are fantastic. it's a great new thing. but you must have institutions. just imagine if universities were to close down and it were said, look, you can get a course on plato if you want on the internet. so get it when you want it. read your plays and listen to lectures on shakespeare when you want it. why do you need to come and be part of an institution that's a university? and the answer is, it's the culture of the place.

it's the professional standards that develop. it's the ability to shift some of those resources. it's the give and take of ideas. >> we should note some other elite universities are toying awfully close with the model that you just described. as a tiny fraction. >> tiny fraction. >> you're not going to do your reading without a deadline anyway. >> let's look at one more video. this is from greece. i think you'll get the picture here. i'm beginning to see that the large crowd demonstration, maybe with security forces nearby, is to sort of viral news videos what the fire at night is for the 11:00 local news. this is the basic scene. let's roll from athens here. this is ironic. because we're looking at this as it happens. right after greek election. which the parties that have endorsed the austerity deal with

europe had lost. 60% of the seats are with parties that oppose greece's deal with europe. oppose austerity. and actually, a party of the extreme right that was giving nazi salutes the night before the election is now in the greek parliament. your sense, one might be confused as to what the swastika is doing in this demonstration. this is an anti-german demonstration. it's a demonstration against the country's creditors. those demanding austerity. at the end we see the scene that the riot police are fairly testy. of course, as police would always say from every story one ever does, we didn't hear what that person just said to the riot police officer before things got a little nasty. film, not journalism, not reporting. but video. we see something. is it calculated to just make us

sympathize with whoever is being victimized for those five seconds? what do you think of this? krista, value? >> yeah, definitely a value. and we've been -- here we are in washington, we've been very much talking about this from the developed democracy perspective. but wherein i see the very greatest value is in authoritarian regimes. we've been talking about syria, you see the huge impact of social media in russia right now. i think it's going to make not impossible but much harder for fierce repression. sure, part of the reason is whenever they beat somebody up, it's immediately on live journal. and it can actually be counterproductive for the regime. >> lee bollinger, you had a forum on these issues at columbia in which a singaporean government minister spoke. and he made some very crudely

this case against the american notion of a first amendment. he basically said, look. we're an island, we're a city-state, a small city-state with big neighbors, we have a very fragile ethnic balance, we prize stability. we have a very open economy. these groups that rate freedom of the press rate us below guinea and iraq and zimbabwe was the other one. singaporeans aren't killing one another, this is a stable society, as long as the media operate within certain constraints, so be it. singapore is a very small place. but that seems to be -- this seems to be a view out there, certainly in the far east, that you can develop your economy, moving people in larger asian countries like the ones that rebecca covered by the tens to hundreds of millions out of rural poverty, is more important than having an argument about which person should be running which provincial government. we don't need your -- your ideas

are culture-bound. what's our answer to that argument? >> well, i think the episode you describe was really i think the highlight of the conference, as you can imagine. in free speech in the united states, free press begins not at the very beginning when the first amendment is put in in the 18th century in the constitution, but in 1919. no supreme court case in the united states until 1919. and at that moment, three cases come to the supreme court. one of them involves a candidate for president of the united states. eugene debs, socialist party candidate. he gave a speech in ohio, he praise the people who resisted the draft, he's thrown in jail. the supreme court of the united states, in the first case they ever considered, oliver holmes write writing the opinion, say no free speech there. he goes to jail. while in jail he gets 1 million votes. the united states then develops over the next 70 years the most robust protection of free speech in the united states. but it doesn't always live up to it. so we have the mccarthy era and

so on. we think that we have the best system. but now we're in a world where we have a global communications system, and censorship anywhere, like singapore, is censorship everywhere. it's not human rights for people in singapore any more, it's our interests in knowing what's happening in singapore and our interests in knowing the world. so when the minister of law of sing por says, look, we completely reject your notion, and the reason we reject it is on the merits. it's not because we want to be a regressive government, it's because we believe that you are showing by the way in which you've constructed your free speech that you cannot have a functioning system. look at the polarization in your society. look at what happens when you let people say anything. look what happens when people can say the judiciary is lying or corrupt. look what happens when people speak disrespectfully about the

government. you're getting what it is that that free speech system you like is. and we have a different view. that means -- and singapore minister of law, that's not the only country that believes this by any means. we have to engage with the world on these issues and we have to begin developing a case for why this should be the norm, if we believe it, as i do, this should be the norm for the world. that's a very hard thing to do. we have to do for the world actually what happened and we did for this country in the last century. >> david ensor, your voa must be full of newscasts about log jams in the congress and budget deals that fall through constantly. is the voa making an active case on behalf of america's approaches to debates and liberty? >> i think there's no more powerful expression of the power -- of the value of freedom

and to display it in all of its messy glory. we have audiences in africa, in asia, that are very, very interested in what's happening here. they're also very interested in hearing what's happening in their own countries. we cover in intimate detail what's happening in northern nigeria for an audience that doesn't get it in a straightforward kind of way from anyone else. so we feel that we're doing something that's valuable for them and that it's in our interests for them to have the real story. >> the issue doesn't break down nation state by nation state. pakistan recently. pakistan has had a huge debate going on within it recently about censorship. and the government proposing a nationwide internet filtering regime. and a bunch of nongovernmental

organizations and activist groups finding a way to band together with business and other interests in the community to say, no, this is actually not what we want. despite the fact that, you know, everybody's afraid of porn. you know. so a robust debate is going on amongst -- and in india, next door, the indian government is trying to impose increasing amounts of censorship on social media companies and requiring google and facebook and other companies to take down content, to hand user information over to the government and so on. there's a whole -- there's a growing segment of people in the country who are pushing back against this. so part of it is, and i've seen this through our global voices community, there's this global community of people who share certain values about freedom of expression that are increasingly linking together and strategizing to push back. but another thing i just want to say about kind of the american value that i'm hearing a lot

from the communities i'm connected with around the world is that while we're quite good on first amendment, freedom of expression, on privacy, on surveillance eh. you're hearing -- >> we're not a credible model? >> i'm hearing from people in egypt, i'm hearing from people in a lot of different chinas, who say, my government is using the patriot act and is using this legislation that's getting passed in the house of representatives as an excuse for why blatant, unaccountable surveillance is completely standard international practice and why we should do it too. and with american companies creating the technology that governments, authoritarian governments around the world are using to surveil their citizens and put them in jail. and you talk to syrian activists about this, they get very exercised. and we need -- and this kind of

comes down to what is internet freedom? what is free expression on the internet? without reasonable amount of privacy from surveillance? it's going to be very difficult to use the internet as a medium for empowerment. >> there's got to be, there must be, a larger global discussion about what free speech and free press means on a global state. it has to happen. because we have now the technology. it's only very, very recent. we're sitting in the embodiment of the first amendment. i bet the number of people here who actually know what article 19 of the universal declaration of human rights says from the late 1940s would not be able to describe it. and yet that is the foundational legal document, that is the equivalent of the first amendment on the global stage.

and our ignorance about how to make this debate happen on a global stage i think is very troubling. >> so we're talking about debates, values, ideas, laws, all very good. but i think we have to remember it's also about vested interests. so it's not just about nicely, 92 clear language, with good arguments, explaining to the chinese why american values are correct. this is very threatening to regimes that are very powerful. and that's why they don't want it. >> what we supply in china right now is news about the blind lawyer that they're not getting very many other places. should we be supplying that? or should we take the view that singapore is right, we shouldn't bother them? we have clearly decided that that is information that we should have and anyone should have. and has a right to. >> let's take some questions from our audience. you've all been -- first

victor's hand shot up before anyone. let's get the microphone to the gentleman in front. >> sitting here thinking what a marvelous panel and i'm agreeing with everybody on it about the importance of public funding, first amendment, no censorship, et cetera, and globalizing the conversation. but i'm worried about technology. and we did a survey at cjr where we found that -- where we looked at the relationship of magazines to their websites. we found that even a magazine like "the new yorker," probably the best of them, doesn't fact-check for its online stuff with the rigor that the does for its print magazine, arguing that you need speed because you need traffic. even the best of the magazines don't copy edit with the rigor online that they do for their print publications. the online convention is, everyone has a handle, whereas in the traditional media, the

convention is that you don't use anonymous sources except where it's absolutely necessary. the traditional media have a separation of advertising and editorial whereas the online world, it's all mixed up together. so the question i have for all the panelists is, how do you maintain or achieve and uphold appropriate standards to the new technology media in this complicated world that you're all talking about? >> who wants to take that one? >> you know, i'll say one thing. i'll give an example. you know, this doesn't show us in the most wonderful light but i think it does, in a way. we cover russia pretty closely and our internet presence is strong there. and we were played by someone empercent nating alexi novani,

the blogger. or at least so mr. novani says. to this day we're not able to know for sure. someone impersonating him said some things to us which we put up as according to mr. novani and he said, no, that wasn't me. and i'm sure it wasn't. but there you are. what is a responsible news organization supposed to do in that circumstance? you quickly go back and check your source. you go back to where it came from. and we had a way to get to mr. novani. he says it's not him? you quickly, and we immediately, said, mr. novani says this isn't him, how interesting. how interesting. and we of course don't know which agency or entity was impersonating him. but this is the kind of thing that happens on the internet, as you said. and we do have to move quickly. mr. novani's news so if he makes comments that are interesting, people are going to want to quote them.

but we've set more strict standards about how to check that you really got him. >> but is it a fair observation that on the internet, i'll ask you, that the notion of saying, we don't quite have this yet, let's hold off until we really nail this down, that that's a real old media thing to say? if i can say, it's out there, it's been alleged, it's been charged, it will make it on the web? >> i have worked on fleet street as well as in new york. so i will tell you something that i heard in the news room once was, that's too good to check. that's something that fleet streetitors realized wasn't a good attitude for young reporters. it's about cultures and working at reuters was a revolution for me in that they're a 24/7 culture from the get-go. we tend to think of 24/7 as a new thing but there are news

cultures that have been 24/7 forever. and still cared very much about facts. and been very sort of punk till yus about checking. so i do think it's a lot about culture. i also think victor is right, that there is more kind of a loosey-goosey cultural acceptance on internet. yesterday on twitter i followee a debate about politico where the question was, does politico think it's okay to publish that there is a rumor? before they've confirmed is it true or not? then you keep on reporting the rumor and reporting whether it's true or false. that's kind of a cultural choice. not just because the internet exists. i think the pressure of everybody being there and the pressure of -- now i think journalists feel they are competing not just with other journalists but with everybody who has an iphone.

adds to that sense of urgency. the only other thing i would say is there's a flip side too. and especially i work a lot now, especially on sort of the build of our new site, with this younger generation of digital natives. and from their point of view, they feel like old media is insufficiently fact checked. one of the things that drives them crazy is anything that doesn't have a link to the source. so actually being inaccurate with your sourcing is much harder online than it is in print. because you can just go check that link right away. and i think that internet community keeps you a lot -- can keep you a lot more honest. back to those -- the olden days of foreign correspondents, they would write about people who never in a million years were going to see what they wrote. >> in our global voices community all the time, people will say, "new york times" just did such and such a story, half

of it came from so-and-so's blog, this other story that i saw somewhere misquoted so-and-so, completely misconstrued what happened. because i was there and i saw it. you know. that certainly adds value. then you've got the other problem where, you know, who reported first on the helicopters in pakistan getting osama bin laden? a blogger who said, oh, there's a helicopter crashed a few blocks away. and so i think, you know, of course people then have to start reporting. you can't wait. i think i'd rather that the journalists sort of get in there than let this go on twitter, rumors spreading for a long time, before any journalist actually weighs in. but i guess the other point too, and this just to broaden this conversation out globally and

coming back to singapore and to kind of transpose this conversation into some other cultures. you sometimes hear, oh, you know, sometimes hear non-professionals shouldn't be allowed to report first because they don't have their facts right as an excuse for censorship and as an excuse to say, you know, these are the people who are allowed to report the news and if you're not given a badge or a card you can't report the news and it's illegal and you're -- you know, and you can be arrested. and so we have to make sure as we're having this conversation because as lee rightly points out this is really a global context for media that we're not saying, okay, there's only certain types of people who are allowed to be journalists, who are allowed to commit journalism and any other way of conducting journalism somehow is irresponsible, bad for the public, and should be shunned. we have to be careful about how we frame that. >> one thing and then we'll get

another question from this side of the room. >> i think this is an argument for what victor raised, for multiple kinds of media, including some publicly funded media. you just get a different type of voice that comes out of a publicly funded -- they have bbc and npr, voice of america. and commercial pressures coupled with the nature of the new technology are pushing inexorably toward this kind of highly current sorts of news. you really benefit from having multiple systems, multiple voices. and in fact, that's what we've had in the united states for the last half century. we had broadcasting, which was regulated. and we had the print media, which was free. and public broadcasting. >> take a question.

here's a mike. you want to come "daily show." >> two quick points and then a question. i'm an editor at politico. we don't publish rumors. i'd like to just point out to you're distinguished ivy league president that another ivy league president, rick levin of yale, is devoting a lot of time to changing the culture in singapore by partnering with the national university there and trying to instill our values in that culture. so my question is this. if you were sitting around yesterday and you had the choice as anyone in washington did of watching an exciting game between the red sox and the orioles or watching the new president-elect of france give his speech, which you could watch on france 24, which would you do?

>> was that directed to professor -- to president -- >> i didn't know the game was on. so i watched the president of france. >> -- i'm not sure that in this new world people really want to -- >> let me take -- this is andy glass of politico. let me take his point and also add this to it. when we have discussions like this, we like to talk about covering revolutions and crises and covering people who've been thrown into prison for expressing themselves. but much of what the media does is also new music reviews, celebrity interviews. the newspapers when they thrived had a monopoly on tv listings and stock tables and box scores. are we seeing new forms, say, whatever social media folds into, are we seeing journalism

in a digital age fold into larger -- larger things like a newspaper, which is -- which is a vehicle for all sorts of information? it's not only tough reporting. are they linked together? or have we so disaggregated journalism from the other things it used to come along with, which were rock music or the society page it used to be, that it's tougher to get people to pay attention to it because we're only going to talk to those who will pick the french inauguration speech over the red sox-orioles game. what do you think? >> they're different platforms kind of serving different segments. you've got the platforms where people go for general stuff, and maybe it's more entertainment-heavy, but you're also seeing on the internet a lot more segmentation and specialization and niche -- and sort of online media directed at niche audiences actually doing pretty well with those niches. so there is a certain -- there

is a pretty big percentage of americans who actually were interested in that speech. not the same number as would want to watch the baseball game. but there's enough that, you know, depending on how you kind of set up your platform and how you're targeting your audience, there are online publications like "foreign policy" for instance has a very lively and successful website targeted at foreign policy wonks. no, it's not the same size as the audience for the baseball audience, but it does quite well with that audience. >> i don't know. i think it's very true, and i think it's really bad, but i'm not sure there's anything we can do about it. so i lived in the soviet union when it was still the soviet union and then afterwards. and when it was still the soviet union, you could actually see people on the subway reading dostoyevsky, chekhov, tolstoy, that was sort of normal. and then the soviet union collapsed and they were reading

porn. and before that, my family's ukrainian, so i had thought it was just a higher culture and sort of culturally superior, that was the grandparents' point of view, and then you saw it wasn't. it was that's the only thing available and when other things were available people wanted other things too. but i think that this actually goes back to lee's argument. it is one reason i think maybe you want to have some forms of intervention, to create a common platform, because we're no longer forced into the common platform. >> i would say on the first point -- thank you for the observation about yale and setting up a liberal arts college in singapore. because universities are doing exactly what we're talking about here with respect -- what needs to be done with respect to the press. that is, we're in a new era. we just started being in this era. we are incredibly interdependent now economically and technologically with the rest of the world.

we have to know more than we do. we have to educate young people to be part of this new world. and how are we going to do that just sitting in morningside heights and thinking and having lots of international activities based from there? and universities are responding now in different ways. and one is the yale, nyu, qatar, abu dhabi, singapore model of a branch campus. we're doing something different. we have what we call global centers in eight different cities now around the world which are a network and will help faculty and students study and work on research around the world. but we're doing i think in the university world what needs to be done in the press world. >> a question in the front row and then to the back after that. >> would news vouchers make news better or worse? suppose within the government subsidy that you're proposing, president bollinger, some of it went to news consumers and they

could pay for the websites that charge? would that make things better or worse? >> well, i mean, i think -- i think these kinds of questions are very important. and i don't want to speak as if i have thought through every dimension of this. my own personal view at this stage is that having funding mechanisms that create and nurture institutions like npr, like our international broadcasters, like pbs, like universities is going -- that will give you these very important and distinct voices in the world of the press. if you just give a tax rebate or a voucher to individuals, you know, that won't result actually in this kind of -- free market economists will say that only proves that in fact when you're trying to do is impose something

on people who don't want it. and that's an old debate. and i happen to take the view -- the opposite view. i think we have collective public values. we have national parks. we have public lands. we have city parks. we really benefit as a society from having a mixed system in which we can make our individual choices and we don't always read shakespeare when we go home at night and we do turn on the baseball game and watch it. and we don't always participate in public debate when we should. we have that option. but we also have the option of going into a national park which doesn't have golf courses, doesn't have amusement parks and the like, and it's been preserved as a matter of public values. and i think that that's what we need in an american world service. >> a question in the back row. i am here almost by accident, and i happen to be the owner-publisher of