employed in the private sector. compared with the election, exports have gone up. compared with the election there are some encouraging signs in terms of manufacturing investment. but when you think of the enormous boom we had in terms of housing and banking and finance and government spending and also, i would argue, uncontrolled immigration as well, the drivers of growth were completely unsustainable. now those drivers are gone. it's really tough, hard, painstaking work getting our economy to grow. but it must be the right thing to try and deliver growth which is based on real hard work and effort. proper jobs. proper manufacturing. proper industry. based on the fact that government can't go on spending and borrowing beyond its means. and i think what we have to do is be very frank with people that it is tough. it is difficult. but these are the right steps to take so that we don't just pump the bubble back up and try and enjoy the sort of growth we had

which was something of a mirage in recent years but let's build something really worthwhile. and, yes, it will take time but it will be built to last rather than as the last recovery was, built on sand. it is difficult. and politics is not easy, obviously. when you are working in coalition, when you are dealing with difficult economic circumstances. but the most important thing is to do the right thing and to do the right thing by the people of this country who want government to think about the long term and not about tomorrow's headlines. >> just to underline that point, the latest forecasts are for the british government -- british economy will be a full 11% smaller by 2016 than it would have been if the crash in 2008 had not happened. a full 11% smaller. and no government can wave a magic wand and wish that away. the nature of that cardiac arrest that took place in 2008 just takes some time to recover and it means the economy is

smaller than it otherwise would have been. i'm genuinely very optimist. very optimistic for the future of this country. meanwhile, we're here in a plant that's producing these extraordinary tractors. one is coming off the production line every four minutes. we -- i think we have undersold our strength and potential as a country as a manufacturing powerhouse. manufacturing now represents about 11% of the total value of our economy. there's no reason we shouldn't in the long term, hope that that should increase to 22% if not -- if not more. and that is what we are dedicated to doing over the long term. rebalancing the british economy. making sure that growth is sustainable, not the boom and bust of the past. you can't do it overnight but we are taking the right steps along that path. >> thank you all very much for coming. and i thank our hosts again today. i know some of the production line has still been work bug i'm worried we've shut down too much of it for too long. thank you for the welcome.

thank you for your questions. thank you very much indeed. this week, live from london, the ceremony and pageantry of the state opening of parliament. until recently, parliament's official opening was usually held towards the end of the year with changes to their election rules, it's now been moved to the spring. and wednesday, queen elizabeth will formally outline the government's priorities for the upcoming year. live coverage starts at 5:30 a.m. eastern on c-span2. next, a discussion on journalism and digital media. industry professionals talk about freedom of expression,

citizen journalism and the role of social media in news gathering. this 90-minute event is hosted by columbia journalism review. >> i'm jim duff. i'm the ceo here at the museum, and it is my distinct pleasure to welcome all of you here. it's an honor for us to host such a wonderful event. the 50th anniversary celebration that you are all participating in at the columbia journalism review. and it just gives us all the more credibility in what we're doing here to host wonderful events like this. it's also my great honor to introduce to you victor navasky who you all know so well. he's had such a distinguished career, if i went through the list of his accomplishments, i'd consume all the time you have for more interesting things and a recitation of everything that he's done. but, obviously, as you know,

he's a publisher emeritus of the nation, the magazine's editor. he was a publisher and editorial director from '95 to 2005. he was an editor at "the new york times" magazine. he's been an author. he's been a lecturure and a visiting scholar, and with that brief introduction from a magnificent career, i will turn it over to victor. >> thank you. i am one of only 20 introducers, so i just want to say about x years ago, nick lemon, the dean of the columbia journalism school did me the honor of asking me if i'd chair cjr. and that is the oldest media monitor in the country and maybe in -- around the globe. i'm not sure of that. but it has this legacy of trying to uphold standards in

journalism and now it has this new challenge of figuring out what's a business model that can work and so it's a great honor and pleasure to be at the newseum and with everybody else here. and we have just at cjr completed a search for a new editor in chief, and it's a countrywide, worldwide search. we ended up with a marvelous person, cindy stivers. and cindy, i'm going to let her speak for herself. >> thank you. well, i'm not going to tell you about me because this isn't about me but thank you very much, victor. this is the latest in our road show of our 50th anniversary celebration. it's a really exciting time for cjr, partly because of what victor said and also because now more than ever, journalists need help figuring out how to survive the hamster wheel of what we do and sort of what's working, what isn't working and, you know,

we're trying to, as of this past week, we have a new homepage that makes it easier to come in if you only have three seconds to see what's now, what's everybody talking about in our world. and also as of the past week, we are now available on the apple news stand and we'll shortly be on the nook. is that right, dennis? anyway, so all platforms, wherever you want us you can get us. part of the reason this is possible is due to amazing partners. and people who help us fund our work like, thank you, newseum, again. beautiful place. and google. i'm about to introduce the latest in the one, two, three punch is director of public policy, bob borstin. >> thank you very much, cyndi. and thanks to christy and victor for getting us involved in this. the only place worse to be in washington is between people and alcohol than between people and

the people they came to see. so i'm going to be very brief here. i will do a very brief plug for this topic of internet freedom. i spend my days doing this for google. we work on it around the world. and if anybody here is interested more on the topic, we're going to be having our own two-day conference about this in a couple of weeks, so please come and talk to me afterwards. my job here is to get off the stage and introduce robert siegel, our moderator for today. he is the recipient of the john chancellor award from columbia journalism school and with that the most distinguished dropout the school has ever had. he is, however, recipient of an undergrad degree from columbia in 19 -- '68. >> sorry to date you. i apologize. and i will let robert take it away with the panel. >> bob, thank you. thank you very much for getting

my academic credentials out there front and center. to say that we live in a time of great change in the news media should be self-evident because the more i think about it, we always live in a time of significant change. some of our panelists have worked -- one for quite awhile for cnn. cable news was a revolution that permitted the single channel that could be devoted to rock videos or news as it happened. i've been working for an fm radio network primarily for the past 25, 35 years. when i came there, fm radio was not in a majority of american automobiles. we benefited enormously from a great change in the media landscape. we have someone here who used to edit a newspaper that jumps the ocean and is published simultaneously on both sides of the atlantic. that would have been an editor's pipe dream not too long ago. times change and now we face

changes that raise questions unlike any i can recall. questions such as, who gets in control whose articles pop up in the search engine when you plug a word in? who gets to monitor whose digital communications. who figures out how to continue to make money from the enterprise of journalism in a culture of getting things for free and making perfect digital copies of whatever is out there. these are all questions which i think fit under the broad rubric of freedom of expression in a digital age in a global age. and i think we have quite an extraordinary panel that's been assembled to address these questions and others. starting from the far end, david ensor is director of voice of america. before that, he had an illustrious career as a television correspondent for abc and cnn. before that, i should remind him he was a reporter for npr for a while as well. and a very good one. he took time out to run

communications for the u.s. embassy in kabul. and now he is running the voice, a job that was held by john chancellor whose name has been mentioned as well as edward r. murrow. >> christy freeland is now the global editor at large for reuters which is a highly -- the highly respected news agency. originally british. they were at it when the new technology of the day was carrier pigeons. an extraordinary thing. she was a former deputy editor of the financial times in london and editor of the u.s. financial times which is the paper that i alluded to. and began as a stringer in ukraine working for everyone from what i can gather covering -- >> a lot of people there. >> a lot of people to cover. and eventually writing a terrific book called "sale of a century, the inside story of the second russian revolution."

lee bollinger is the president of columbia university. he's made a study of the first amendment and a little over a year ago in the columbia journalism review made a dramatic proposal for how he might address issues of the internet and the might address issues of the internet and the state of journalism today which i'll ask him to do in just a moment. we'll hear remarks from rebecca mckinnon, who was for most of the 1990s, for nearly all, in beijing for cnn. she was the bureau chief. she was almost raised to that task, having been taken by academic parents and put in chinese public schools. she went on to report as well as bureau chief from tokyo and now is a senior fellow at the new america foundation. her book "consent of the network" examines the very challenges that will e'll be addressing here. lee ballenger, you've made the most explicit proposal for how

we should address journalism in the digital age. give us briefly your diagnosis of the problem and what the solution should be. >> sure. i mean, my expertise is really the development of the first amendment in the united states and public policy relating to the press. so that's where -- that's sort of my lode stone as i think about this. i've also been connected to the press in a variety of ways, including my father owning, running a small newspaper. and i sit on the board of the washingt washingtonpost companies. i've watched the evolution of the press from about one where there was a monopoly or at best an oligolopoly. and i think to the credit of journalists and press institutions, those very

favorable and privileged positions in the country were ulgts it'sed to deepen the quality of journalism. so many of the great journalistic institutions we have in the united states -- "washington post," "new york times," so on -- really developed their expert deals in areas of law and science and medicine and economics in the 1970s and '80s as monopoly profits, as it were, made it possible to do that. of course, the internet has undermined that profitability. and one of the consequences of this, a very sad consequence, is the decline in foreign coverage, foreign news. the closing of bureaus. the closing of operations that make it possible to cover the world. that is happening at the very moment where we now live increasingly in a globally interdependent world.

i can make that case, everybody can make the case. we now have a global communications technology. we've never had anything like that before. we develop principles in the united states of freedom of speech and press that are the most protected of any country in the world or any country in human history. so now we're at a point where we have great global issues. we have a global communications technology. and we need to know more and more about the world. and we need to be able to deal with issues of censorship around the world. at the very time when our capacity to do that is declining. so my thought is we really have to face up to this in a variety of ways and one way is that, have more public funding. and of course, the journalists generally, that's anathema. so i know it's very controversial. and i think we have to be prepared to talk about it.

but i believe there should be more public funding. of course, two people on the panel already are the beneficiaries of public funding. and my thought is somehow we need to create an american world servi service, fund it, protect it, make it bigger than what we have now, and help us try to deal with the problem of actually living in a very globalized -- >> an american road service in a particular medium or in various media? >> well, im, my thought -- i mean, this is something where one can take a variety of views. i mean, the journalism school at columbia a year ago, two years ago, published a report, very famous, to some people infamous, of advocating public support for press generally. my thought would be that this really ought to be in the area of what we have now. npr, pbs.

and the voice of america, radio for europe, so on. somehow we need to take what we have, build it into an independent journalistic enterprise, and give it much more funding. of course, the funding level is now $500 million, $1 billion, it's in that magnitude. which is tiny in terms of public expenditures. so for just doubling that, you could build something of really great worldwide significance. which would both help the world, help us overcome censorship, and help the united states. so i'm not -- the form of it is less important to me at the moment than getting the concept. >> first i want to hear from rebecca mckinnon. either about lee's proposal specifically but also about this new world of digital media and to what degree is it liberating, to what degree is it bleeding us and providing no resources for

foreign coverage, pluses, minuses, what do you see? >> it sort of comes back to why i left in the first place in 2004. i was being told by my bosses my expertise was getting in the way and could i please cover my region more like a tourist. at the same time in 2004 -- >> is your region growing dramatically this time? >> east asia, kind of important. but no guys with ak-47s running around blowing things up. anyway. but at the same time, in 2004, i happened to go on leave to something called the shornstein center at the harvard kennedy school and playing around with blogs and following citizen media. it was 2004 where you started to see blogs coming out and challenging both authorities as well as the authority of mainstream media. not only in the united states, however, but around the world. it was at that time you started seeing some really fascinating blogs coming out of the middle east, africa, asia, the former

soviet states and so on. and so i ended up not going back to cnn. i was very excited about this idea that, you know, we the foreign correspondents don't have to be gate keepers any more. if my bosses won't let me cover my region the way i think the people of that region deserve to be covered it doesn't matter so much any more because the people of that region can cover themselves or have the opportunity to do matters into their own hands as they feel that the international media is failing to represent them properly. so i got together with a colleague at something called the berkman center for internet society -- i've been a perpetual fellow. i'm sort of -- >> one of the fellows. >> you're supported by public funding, i'm supported by foundations and random rich people. but, you know -- but we created something called global voices online where we basically invited bloggers from around the world to cure rate the

conversations coming out of citizen media around the world. and, you know, i do believe that we need professional journalism for all kinds of reasons that we can talk about more. i'm not saying that bloggers should replace journalists. but the fact that people can report on themselves as we've seen in the past 12 to 18 months is tremendously important and powerful. and the second point which kind of comes to the subject of my book, my experience working with bloggers around the world through global voices and research i've done about censorship and surveillance around the world has also emphasized -- really brought home to me that we take the internet too much for granted. it hasn't been around very long but i think a lot of journalists, people assume it is the way it is and what you can do with it, the extent to which it's decentralized, so on, is kind of the way it is. but the fact that you can do what you can do today with the internet is the result of a

whole series of engineering choices, programming decisions, business decisions, and regulatory frameworks over the past several decades and those are constantly changing. and it's very possible that the internet could get legislated and engineered in a direction that will make dissent impossible because surveillance will be so strong. and that will make censorship easier and easier, both at the corporate and at the government level. and working with bloggers around the world and activists, i've seen firsthand these communities being tremendously empowered by the technology. the number of people who face life-threatening situations as a result of surveillance and as a result of some of these threats that a number of actors are posing to the internet are nontrivial and you can't assume the internet's going to automatically democratize and liberalize everything. >> krista free land has been

nodding extremely enthusiastically as you've been speaking. i should add when we refer to public funding, i should clarify npr public radio is about 10% funded by the corporation of public broad cassing. those foundation grants and enhanced underwriting and the eccentric rich people you mentioned are also our donors too. you were getting very enthusiastic. first of all, you work for newspaper -- you did work for many years for number supported by advertising. do you gag at the thought of government support and do you think that perhaps we're wrongly trying to support old media when the new world that rebecca's just described is out there? >> i am canadian. so publicly-funded media for me is actually probably the most natural thing in the world. and i lived in britain for a long time so it's pretty natural too. maybe i'll respond a little bit to what rebecca and lee had to

say. and i was nodding madly when rebecca spoke because i do think that the narrative about what's happened to the media that says it's all worse than it used to be in the golden age of the '70s and '80s is very much one that comes from the news room is of "the washington post," the "l.a. times," maybe the "new york times." it's not necessarily one that comes from what people experience. and something i think about a lot, it's also i think a very coastal even sort of a corridor narrative. i grew up in a small town in northern alberta. what we could read when i was a kid was "peace river record gazette," our local paper once a week. listen to cbc. and "edmonton journal," delivered at 6:00 at night by greyhound from edmonton. that was it. today, my dad, who's a farmer and very interested in the global story because farmers are

all insane futures traders. insane. and they can now actually trade futures from their tractors because they are gps and wi-fi-enabled. so they care a lot about china. he now every morning reads reuters because i run the website. bloomberg. "new york times." ft. "wall street journal." and he can do that from his tractor and his field where he is this afternoon. to sort of feel like information has been cut off to people, it sort of depends on where you were in the information space. and i also very strongly agree with rebecca's point about the internet being tremendously empowering in terms of access to stuff around the world. i was a foreign correspondent in the former soviet union about ten years. when i first started, a guy, super sill yus english-type person who after this became my

ex-boyfrie ex-boyfriend. used to read the local newspaper and then write down what they say and that's the story the next day. and it was of course a terrible thing to say. but not entirely untrue. that doesn't happen any more. and, you know, i follow russia and ukraine quite closely. my main source of information is twitter. and you can follow some great people on twitter. mike macphail, the u.s. ambassador, is great, you have a great sense of what's going on. you do have to read russian. but still, that kind of directness, doesn't matter how many people are in the bureau of any newspaper in moscow right now, i have so much more information. i think we shouldn't forget those big positives. the second thing that i would say also kind of counter to the narrative of decline is there are some new players out there. and in particular, thompson

reuters and bloomberg. we now -- we talked about fewer phone correspondents. 3,000 journalists work for reuters. 2,600 or 2,800 work for bloomberg. that's a lot of journalists. and that is driven by economic forces which are quite different from the forces driving what's happened in advertising-based media. it's all about sort of building a news halo on top of the big, monster, capitalist professional platform. there are some issues there, right? and actually, i wrote a pose for "cjr" a couple of years ago. is news going to be private? and are you going to -- if you're a member of the plu plutocrat, are you going to have privileged access to news and information? which is essentially part of the reuters or bloomberg offering -- compared to everybody else? but you can't neglect to notice that that stuff is there. and then in the eamericaning

mark markets huge news organizations are being built. al jazeera, the chinese organizations. these have issues but more stuff in the space. having said all that and returning to my pinko canadian roots, i am actually a big believer in government-supported news. but for reasons slightly different from the one that lee articulated. to me, what has happened is not a lack of information. we have more, and i think more is good, maybe even better, more direct than ever before. what i think is missing, and i see this and i see in this a big reason why u.s. politics is quite different from, say, canadian or even british politics, is the lack of a common space. what you don't have now is an arena where everyone feels they have to go. and where they can be held accountable. and that does have a very -- i

think that that contributes to something that people in washington talk about 200 times a day, which is is polarization of politics. >> what would be an example of the common space? >> the cbc is an example of common space. steven harper, canadian prime minister, hates the cbc. like all news organizations, the cbc is kind of seen as being a little bit to the left of the country, certainly to the left of the tory party, which harper runs. he's constantly wanting to give it less money and so on, which is also by the way the issue with the tories and the bbc in the uk. nonetheless he has to go and talk to the cbc because everyone who's in position of authority has to. and that, you know -- the cbc journalists, they are neither the huffington post -- they are neither msnbc nor are they fox. they feel an obligation to try to be objective. we know it's not totally possible but at least you try. and having that arena where everyone has to go, i think it

helps you move to a space where everyone can have their own opinion but not everyone can have their own facts. and that i think is an issue today. >> let's hear from a different perspective on this, a different point. david ensor, you're not broadcasting to us and the rest of the world, it's broadcasting to the rest of the world, is this contributing to the freedom of expression and the globalized and digital age? >> heavily. and as was mentioned earlier, we're now operating in a rapidly changing space. both all the different platforms but also the new players. you mentioned cctv. the chinese budget for this kind of thing has been variously described as $7 billion to $10 billion. cctv and the others. rtv, al jazeera, all these new players. i'm obviouslry