alaskadispatch.com. i'm quite sure none of you in the room has heard of it. i urge you to look at it. but it is an online-only news site that is conceded by others besides our own family to be the most comprehensive source of independently read and acclaimed news and information in alaska. however, we have no physical world presence. and so i am sitting here listening to this conversation and thinking back to my prior years when, for example, the "washington post" went through the janet cook incident and realizing that print as a medium or broadcast or cable television as a medium has not necessarily done all that perfectly at presenting truth. and we all can concede the many examples. so what is your feeling, all of you, or any one, about how a site like mine, which is as

honest in its attempt to present straightforward, highly edited and vetted journalism, how is that to be recognized by folks like you and particularly by the readers of the world as something different than other things you would refer to as citizen journalism? >> well, who would like to venture an answer? rebecca, you want to try? >> sure. i mean, it has to do with reputation. i think news organizations or online organizations that are doing a good job develop a reputation of being credible and straightforward and fact-based. and that's how you distinguish yourself from, you know, random commentators who may not be as rigorous. but i don't see how else one goes about distinguishing oneself other than reputation,

you build a brand, you build a name for yourself. >> and you hope that your readership increases over the years on the basis of that. where's the microphone now? let's get another question from the audience. >> it was touched on a little bit earlier, but if you can go back to the issue of how technology is affecting news organizations' access to war zones, you talked a little about syria, but right now the united states and other countries are not really covering the drone strikes in pakistan because the military has just said we're not allowing access there, on the u.s. side and the pakistani side. and i think when -- and i think viewers are sometimes not -- well, the less sophisticated news junkie viewers might not be aware of the fact that the information they're reading on yahoo news or whatnot has not been firsthand reported because somebody is relying on a citizen blog, the aggregator journalist

is relying on a citizen blog and youtube feeds and citizen photos to cobble together a report and the editor's happy and cnn is happy because they feel like they're reporting it. but i think there is this disconnect coming. and it's in newsrooms. and it's -- from what i believe, i think it is becoming increasingly more difficult for news organizations to cover war zones. we saw it in the gaza strip in 2009. we're seeing it in syria now and pakistan. but because of the proliferation of technology and we are kind of still able to get information from these war zones, we kind of still feel like we're doing our job, but the trends are there that if journalists worldwide don't unite and push back and say we want access and we don't think it's okay that you're refusing to allow any journalists in these things are just going to become a culture to themselves. >> i'm not sure where the journalists would have access to the drone strike, if you mean -- >> well, they're not allowed at all in the northwest tribal zone. just they're not allowed. and they have to sneak in.

and the u.s. military is not commenting -- they're just -- well, until recently denying these -- >> the question is is voice of america covering the drone strikes? >> of course. that's a news story like any other. and of course if we can double-source and make sure we're right about a drone attack we'll report that there's been a drone attack. i would just kind of push back a little bit because i actually think that because of the iphones and devices and proliferation of cameras of one kind and another there's more pictures and information and alleged information about war zones and everything else than there ever was before. the problem is it's joined the fog of war. in a war zone there's tons of information. which part of it is accurate? that's where the journalism comes in in a way is sifting through. and we increasingly as a news organization, and i know my old employers at cnn and abc news have the same thing, are really getting into the business of

analyzing, for example, photographs. where was this picture taken? we spend time on that. we have professional help figuring out which corner in damascus was this picture takeen? because it makes a difference given what we see in. that sort of thing. i don't think there's less coverage. i think there's more. but there's more information journalists and they've pointed out a trend in freelancers who aren't tied to the support from a news organization are amongst the

largest growing source of news. and also local journalists in these places who are covering the wars. and they are more vulnerable than ever. and the number of deaths of freelancers and local journalists in war zones is growing very rapidly. >> i would just make two very quick comments. one is that all the information that i have about major news organizations and the coverage of war, current wars, establishes that we have far less of it than we've ever had in recent memory. and insofar as that's true, again, it points up the essential problem of how do we get the information we need in the modern world, this global world. the second point is that it's always interesting that we no

longer think i think seriously about what the first amendment might say about a claim by journalists to have a first amendment right of access. only 30, 40 years ago the supreme court made a narrow decision, 5-4, saying that it would have protection for whatever the press basically published, that is, "new york times" versus sullivan, pentagon papers, government documents, government secrets, and so on. but there would be no right of access under the first amendment by the press to government-held or controlled information. that was a very vital debate about the scope of the first amendment in the 1960s and '70s and into the 1980s. it should be -- again, now, i'm not saying that i think this particular supreme court would be favorable toward that. but when you think long term, you think several decades, and how principles develop, one of

the things we should be thinking about in the united states is a first amendment right of access, especially to war zones. >> the last questioner began with the impact of technology, and i would just note here and ask the former television journalists for confirmation, the device with which one can take pictures of an event and then transmit those images back to some place, which used to be perhaps a crew of three or at one time four people who would drag some vast camera somewhere, the videos we're looking at could have been shot with something that looked like a single-lens reflex camera even and gave no indication. so the access to -- the ability to make video images and in any location has become phenomenally greater than it was until -- >> well, and the ability to transmit them live. i mean, in the early '90s we had to have a crew with a satellite dish who knew how to operate it.

either that or it was stick a videotape on a flight and get it somewhere. >> i was in new hampshire just before the primary. i realized what the current press corps looks like, which is a bunch of monopods with cameras stuck on them gaining a more direct live access to an event than just about any medium could have delivered until, oh, 10 or 20 years ago. so the landscape has been greatly changed. we could go on like this for quite a while. and i must say these are the kinds of issues that justify and require the existence of the columbia journalism review, to actually treat seriously with questions of the intersection between technology and free speech and new media and commerce. i wish i could share all the optimism about public funding that we've heard expressed today on the panel. it seems to me there may be some necessary alternatives to that.

but to david ensor and chrysta freeland and lee bollinger and rebecca mackinnon, thank you very much. >> thank you. [ applause ] >> excuse my back. my name is christie hefner. i'm chairman of columbia journalism review's 50th anniversary. so i just want to join in thanking all of you for being here today. for five decades cjr has believed that you can be both a watchdog of the media and an ally in searching for the models that sustain quality journalism. i think we can all agree that those worthy goals are more critical than ever before. i think today's discussion, whether it was around public spaces, funding, and values, twitter as a curation of access to academia, the role of universities, or indeed the role of the relationship between privacy and freedom is a discussion that's going to be

ongoing. we hope you'll join us for a short reception afterwards. we hope you'll pick up a 50th anniversary copy of the magazine. and i just want to say thank you to jim and to shelby for being such great partners, not just in hosting us here at the newseum but in very much developing this program with us and being passionate about these issues. i want to thank bob and my friends at google not just for sponsoring this but for providing youtube videos and again being passionate about these issues. i want to thank our friends at c-span who are broadcasting this so many more people can watch it. we really appreciate that. and again, i want to join my thanks to david and chrystia, to president bollinger, who traveled for this. and he has much to do and many demands on his schedule. and he wouldn't be here if this were not indeed something he cares about very personally. and particularly to rebecca, who changed her whole schedule and now flies with a 24-hour turnaround to oslo tonight in order to be here, which i think is above and beyond. and to robert who not just is

the consummate moderator but believe me, put in a great deal of work before this panel ever met to make it such a success. so thank you all very much. [ applause ]

coming up on c-span 3, white house cabinet secretaries ray lahood, janet napolitano, and kathleen sebelius at a town hall meeting talk about public service. then a discussion on the role of nato and its priorities. later a forum on u.s. veterans and their families. on "washington journal" tomorrow morning we'll be joined by republican representative tim huelskamp, a member of the budget committee. "new york times" columnist paul krugman will take questions about his book "end this depression now." also harper's magazine contributing editor ben austin will discuss his article on public housing. "washington journal" is live on

c-span every day at 7:00 a.m. eastern. this is c-span 3, with politics and public affairs programming throughout the week and every weekend 48 hours of people and events telling the american story on "american history tv." get our schedules and see past programs at our websites. and you can join in the conversation on social media sites. next, a discussion on the government work force and the services it provides for the public. three members of president obama's cabinet participate in this town hall meeting on public service. abc news political commentator cokie roberts helps moderate the discussion. it's just over an hour. >> good morning, everybody. my name is max stieer. i'm the president of public

service. we are a non-partisan public organization dedicated to make government more effective by focusing on people. and it's truly great to welcome you all here on behalf of the public employee roundtable and the partnership at public service recognition week. one week in the year when you have federal employees who hopefully are the subject of respect and accolades, people who otherwise all the rest of the 52 weeks, or 51 weeks are very much focused on trying to serve the american public. we want to take this week to make sure the minor public learns a little more about what their public servants are doing for them. we have an exceptional, truly exceptional panel here. i'm very excited myself to hear from. beginning with secretaries -- i'm going to get this right because i know there's supposed to be a special order here. but secretaries lahood, sebelius -- or sebelius, lahood, and napolitano and acting administrator gsa dan tangherlini. before we get there, however, i also want to make sure i recognize one of our colleagues

here at the partnership who made all this possible and has done much more. so i said this is psrw. i also like to think of it as jsrw, or jim seymour recognition week. he has been with the partnership for nine years, and he's our director of events and programs. and i salute jim for all the incredible things that you've done for nine years with the partnership. so thank you very, very much. [ applause ] now, clearly, if you pay attention to the news the thing you hear about most these days or the avalanche of news stories we've heard about have really been focused when you think about government on an $800,000 conference at gsa and inappropriate activities of a few secret service agents in cartage cartagena. what's been missing entirely is the positive side of the ledger. and what i hope again today we'll be able to do is talk a little more about that positive side. one way of doing that is to look

at some of the specific achievements federal employees are doing and one of the other programs we run at the partnership is the service to america medals. we are recognizing 33 finalists tomorrow at a breakfast. i wanted to take a couple minutes to talk about three of those finalists because again, i think in the baffle things you'll get an idea pretty quickly of what's more important here. we have dr. lynn moffenson from the national institute of health. great secretary sebelius employee. and she plays a pivotal role in kur taulg the transmission of hiv of to infants from their mothers, imagining a world where children free of aids. also kelly menzenograf who directed more than 200 amerikorps members after the tornado in joplin, month mop they coordinated the efforts of 60,000 volunteers. they served meals to shaken residents, operated a donation warehouse and helped rebuild homes across the devastated

city. this has now become a model for fema about how to engage in these incidents going forward. then you have louie miglione who way team from the d.e.a. led a high-stakes operation on three continents to capture the world's most notorious arms trafficker. so again, to go through all 33 of these, but you get the point. we will frankly not get what we want out of government if all we do is tear it down and fail to recognize the good things that it does. and this is particularly important today where we have so many different challenges. obviously the budget difficulties, globalization, shrinking, you know, economic difficulties and of course i've got to mention increased partisanship. government is going to need to change. there's no doubt about that. it's going to have to adapt to the new demands and constraints we face. but we will not succeed in getting the government that we want if we treat our federal employees as an unnecessary cost instead of the national asset. in this new century we need focus on building a federal workforce with the advanced

skills of the day on a knowledge-based economy including ones with a more global and multisector approach. we have to give them, though, the tools that they need to succeed. to succeed more generally in this venture it's going tyke great leadership and i'm really pleased and proud to be on a stage with great leaders here that you'll hear from in a second. it's also my great pleasure to welcome to the podium cokie roberts, a board member of the partnership for public service, author, journalist, thinker extraordinaire. thank you very much, cokie roberts. [ applause ] . >> thank you. and excuse my silly wrist. this is evidence that ladies of a certain age should be more careful. but welcome all of you. i must say it is very brave of you to come here today. secretary sebelius, you know the

secretary of health and human services, a former governor. secretary lahood. secretary of transportation. former member of congress. secretary napolitano. secretary of the department of homeland security. also a former governor. and dan tangherlini, who you probably don't know. he is the really brave person because he is the acting head of the general services administration. he was at treasury for a long time and was in charge of management there. so it's good to have him at general services administration now. but it is a rough time. it is wonderful that we are having public service recognition week because we need to be doing that in this period of time. just on the way in on npr i was hearing complaints about immigration rules -- you were being picketed yesterday, i

think, secretary napolitano. you didn't even notice, but they were. >> thank you for sharing that. >> and of course stories about the airport scanners not picking up bombs. great. you know, we're stripped naked and still they're not getting our bombs. >> no, i'm going to have to respond to that later. >> secret service and the gsa the butts of presidential jokes at the white house correspondents' dinner. of course health care is never an issue. and as i recall, secretary lahood, you have a bill in conference at the capitol today, a bill that is seemingly not proceeding apace. the highway bill. i remember when it used to be fairly easy to pass highway bills, but not these days. so it's a rough time, and it's nice that you all have come. i know you've really come to take questions from people who

are public servants. and rather than members of my profession. but they are here -- we are here as well. so it's all fair game. but go ahead, secretary napolitano. you answer that business about airport scanners, and then we'll go from there. >> well, i think the reports in the paper today illustrated the kinds of threats we confront, and there is nothing we do at tsa that's not gauged to be a risk-based approach and give us multiple opportunities, many layers, to prevent these plots from succeeding. so we are taking all appropriate steps at this time, in this era in the world where we have terrorist groups to make sure that -- [ audio difficulties ] they show, the software has evolved. it's like a pencil figure. a transportation security

officer to have a shot as the last layer we have really, or second to last. i think the cockpit is the last. the airplane itself. but the second to last -- >> i'm sorry. there seems to be some problem with your microphone cutting in and out. maybe if you can just position it better toward you. >> how's that? >> that sounds good. >> good? >> yeah. but it's still true that people get very fed up going through airports. i mean, i go through airports way too often, and it is irritating. >> it can be. and i suspect you're at -- one of the things that we're doing is constantly trying to say how do we provide better passenger service? we monitor the length of the lin lines. and really, although airline traffic is up over the last decade, the lines in terms of length have remained about the

same. we want to cut that length down. we're testing new technologies all the time to see if we can find one that's affordable and scalable for the size of the american traveling public. and again, we don't do this just for kicks. there's a real threat -- >> and the up side is that yesterday a bomb was detected. >> it was reported detected, yes. >> okay. mr. tangherlini, the gsa was probably something most americans had never heard of until there was a notorious conference with mind readers and magicians. >> no magicians. >> no magicians? >> no. that's a different agency. >> i think magicians are a good idea myself. i mean, we need as much help as

we can get these days. but to do something with nothing. but what do you do to try to get the word out about what the gsa actually is and try to get past this? >> well, people have now heard the name. >> that is a true statement. >> and so hopefully, what we can do is begin to make people understand that the gsa is really the government savings agency. and i think that's been part of the issue. when people have talked about gsa and the events around the western region conference, there's this huge irony in the fact that this is an organization that's supposed to be about saving the government money. the point is every day the 12,500 employees of gsa actually do focus on saving the government money bep save the governme government hundreds of millions of dollars in things like the telecommunications systems we provide. we save over $100 million by managing our fleet in a central and efficient way.

we save the government billions of dollars by using our scale to acquire more efficiently. so what we need to do, and what we've talked about doing now as a result is really redouble our efforts around saving. people like my colleagues here money. so that we can make sure that they're able to deliver their incredibly important mission. >> but how do you get that out? >> it's really a question for you. >> thank you. >> i'm still the new guy. i need to learn how to do that. but i think part of the point is as we -- you know, as we talk about the way we respond to these issues, we need to also talk about what we do. we also just simply need to deliver, continue to deliver innovation and outcomes and work with our partners so that they can get those solutions. >> secretary sebelius, your department is so enormous and

includes so many different kinds of things. one of the things that we do at the partnership is best places to work in the government. and it's really tough to keep that up and going. how do you try to do that? >> i think that, first of all, it's great to be here. and i want to thank max and the partnership for actually helping us celebrate employee recognition week. because it's critical. and i don't think there's any more important time than now to be involved in public service. the challenges we have are enormous. we need the best and the brightest in these jobs. so trying to recruit and retain the best possible workforce is tough, and it's particularly tough when people are working a gazillion hours a day and paid well below market value and trashed day in and day out in the news media and on the hill told that they are incompetent

and not doing a good job. so i think a real challenge for leaders is how to, you know, make people proid of whud of wh do, make them understand how important it is, reinforce that. and we spend a lot of time with senior leaders at hhs trying to do that, sharing strategies and ideas. but i think that things like the sammy awards, you know, the recognition, i'm really proud that seven of the 33 finalists come out of hhs. they are doing incredibly innovative work. they're doing incredibly life-saving work. and to have an opportunity to shine a light on those i think is part of what reinforces people's feeling that they have made a right choice. >> now, the sammys are every year. it's goose bu bu bump central.

>> to follow up on janet's point, we would love to have -- i mean, bad stories always get day after day after day after day of headlines. good stories get, you know, page 30, bottom, left-hand corner, one nanosecond and they're gone. so having a little more press balance would really -- >> man bites dog. secretary lahood, max alluded to the partnership. you were in congress when it was partisan but not quite as bad as it is now. and i made a joke about the highway bill, but really, it is very hard to get it passed. have you seen that partisanship making the work of government harder?