president bollinger's idea of an american world service. to some extent we are what you might call the roots of one. i think, if i could, i'll just lay out for a minute who we are. i think a lot of americans don't really know, what is voice of america? it's still there? i thought the cold war was over. that's what a lot of the people say to me. it's still there. you know what? we are a source of -- as close as you can get, objective journalism. we reach over 140 million people a week around the world. in 43 languages. we do training of journalists. we set up fms in africa. we stand for freedom of the press. we condemn violence against any journalists, including one of our own who died in january in pakistan. we try to report the truth and we try to explain america to a sometimes rather befuddled world. because we're not supposed to broadcast in this country, not

too many people know that much about us. and some have inaccurate notions of what we broadcast and our impact. but we are platforming a not stick. we're on shortwave which is where it started in 1942. we're on medium wave, fm, satellite tv and radio, about 50 websites. we use facebook, twitter, youtube, skype, actively, every day. we have a charter that's signed by president ford in '76 that orders us to serve as a consistently reliable and authoritative source of news and orders us to be accurate, objective and comprehensive, and we try. and actually, some of the best stories for us are when things don't go well in the u.s. because that helps us to burnish our credentials as objective journalists. watergate, the audience grew tremendously. abu ghraib, the same. our top five markets, i have some charts here. our top five markets are up on the screens there.

they're indonesia, nigeria, afghanistan, burma, ukraine. we have 38 million viewers every week in indonesia. i say viewers because it is mostly tv there. in nigeria, we do very solid reporting in housa on the radio, we're second-largest after the state broadcaster. afghanistan, we are the evening news on the state television. i was until just recently a viewer. here's a graph now that shows you the media trends in pakistan. and this underscores something we may all want to dwell on. you see the dotted line? that's the use of social media. it is skyrocketing right now. this is our future, clearly. the mobile device. between february and march of this year alone the growth in use of mobile sites was 6% to almost 3 million visits for the month. so we use -- how do we penetrate? one of our jobs is to penetrate closed media environments. china, iran.

how do we do it? we started the short wave but they jam it. we used satellite tv and that is today's shortwave. but the iranians jam that too. although in the process they damage other broadcasters' signals as well and they get a lot of protests and we're trying to encourage that protest process. and we do get through. we're gearing up right now for a two-hour daily satellite television program in mandarin to china. 10%, more than 10% of china have a dish or adequacy to it and we think that's going to be a big potential way to get in. also some of our programming is not blocked. for example, teaching english. here's a quick sample if i may of omg mayu which has had 9 million views in china.

>> anyway. and one more quick teaser. in iran, we use satellite tv and the internet to get through with television programming. and people sell it on the black market, copies of it, because some of it is jammed but people get it one way or another. so the private sector helps us a lot there. here's a sample of parazeet, which is our comedy satire show about the ayatollahs, like "the daily show."

>> action. what's your opinion? >> well, i know sanions are sometimes controversial. >> i think that's the end.

those are just examples that are kind of edgy, they're not typical of "voice of america." most of what we do is straightforward news. you'd recognize it more clearly as a news broadcast. but we're trying different formats and we're trying different platforms to reach more people. we are facing budget cuts. the bbc recently cut 18% of the world's service. we are facing cuts in fiscal '13 as are others. but media change is media opportunity. tv is getting cheaper to do. social media offer huge changes and opportunities. we could use more resources but we do interesting stuff with what we do have. >> i'd like to hear from -- well, first from krista. since you've all remarked on social media as the coming, real media. what does that say in terms of the way in which information is presented?

that is, are we talking about a medium that will take brevity to its absolute, ultimate conclusion? the tweet? is there room for your investigative team's project from reuters in social media? >> what's interesting to me about twitter is i think of twitter as social media for old people. like myself. because although it's very short, i use it mostly and i think it's used very often as a way of linking to longer things. and it's quite interesting. i mentioned mike as an avid tweeter. another person i urge everybody to follow is karl bilt, foreign minister of sweden. he said to me he thinks his own twitter activity is probably the single-most effective of promotion that the sweden foreign minister has ever done. he has like 135,000 twitter followers. it's not -- karl isn't tweeting

you like cool, fun, hip stuff. karl is like tweeting you interesting papers, interesting conferences and stuff like that. >> he's indexed to things? >> it's a shadow. we are rebuilding our website right now, all our electronic platforms. debuting in the fall. and our sort of core idea is to adapt to the stream experience that all of us are getting used to on twitter. >> if i could just add to, that i think chris is absolutely right. twitter is sort of the gateway to see what your friends are reading and looking at, not just friends, people you follow. so it's taking you to videos, it's taking you to long, investigative pieces that people are sharing around that you wouldn't know where to go to find otherwise. i'm definitely seeing a large percentage of things in the my twitter feed are linking to long pieces.

>> lee bollinger, is this what you've heard? does it define, alter, lead you to rethink your proposal for an american world service? >> well, i mean, i don't want to be the advocate for a particular -- i mean, i think it's interesting that i think almost everybody on the panel probably agrees that public funding of journalism in some forms is a good thing. you don't have to make the case that journalism about the world by traditional media is declining. you don't have to make that case in order to accept the proposition that we should have increased public funding. so i think that's cynthia's point. i share that view. i do think that we are living in a world that we're just not thinking about seriously. in how to get the information

and the ideas we need about the world and to get ideas that journalism provides to the rest of the world in the way that american journalism can do. i just think we are still -- we're not doing what we did in the -- with the development of the first amendment. we're not -- which was, you know, really a 20th century sort of focus. we're not doing what we did in the 1960s with public broadcasting. we're not thinking about the post world war ii era and "voice of america" and radio for europe. it's bizarre that "voice of america" is legally prohibited from rebroadcasting back into the united states. why? because when it was developed in the 1940s, it was thought, this is a propaganda arm of the u.s. government. and it would be inconsistent with our notions of freedom of the press in the united states to allow them to use that

propaganda that we're bringing to the rest of the world and to come back and show it to u.s. citizens. that is a bizarre notion in today's world. it's also i think quite inconsistent with the first amendment. and really ought to be changed. it's just another example of how we are living with a set of ideas about information and journalism -- >> so out of date. >> -- that is the last century. and we don't have national plans for how to be part of a global economy. we don't have national plans about how to be part of it in terms of information and ideas. >> but before we see a little bit of video from around the world, i have to bring us -- i realize you said let's try to ignore political realities at this moment. but despite the unity among the panelists of the need for more public funding of journalism, the simpson bowls recommendation for the public broadcasting was zero.

eliminated. as said, everybody's cutting and people do recognize the spending problem in washington. can we say something about another model that's out there apart from public support? >> i think push-back slightly -- i think perhaps it's broader. you've seen a trend with commercial news companies where there's more -- it's gone more and more towards news properties that are owned by large companies of which news is only one very small part of their business. and, you know, certainly that my former employer was this way, where it sort of went from a family company to being something where the stock price was paramount and ratings were paramount. so part of it i think is not necessarily only is it public-private funding but what kind of private funding? and is it a private funding that takes a long-term view? and that considers news to be a public trust? or is it the kind of public funding that only cares about

quarterly earnings? and i think that's also part of the picture. and, you know, there used to be a time when you had a lot more family-owned newspapers, where they're like, as long as you break even and a little bit of profit, we don't need to maximize returns for shareholders. you know. so there are different ways to approach the news business as a business as well. but i think the key is to look at what is public value, and how are you creating it, and who's responsible for supporting it? maybe we need to look further than just government and tax dollars. >> maybe there's a role for universities. so we fund "the columbia journalism review" with great, great pride. it's one of the real treasures of columbia. for a while, i toyed with the idea, facetiously, during the crisis, of using part of the columbia endowment to purchase the new york times. and then we would run the like a

medical hospital and we would train our journalists and others -- >> how long did you harbor this? and was there a trustees meeting at the time? >> until i said it out loud. >> can i respond quickly? i would -- to rebecca's point about the great golden age of the family-run newspaper. as it happens, we are now owned by an old newspaper family. >> thompson. >> the thompsons. so we experience a little pit of that now. but i would point out that it wasn't purely being benign, it was also lee's point. the margins on newspapers were fantastic. these were monopolies, they were making tons of money, it wasn't that hard to be benign. and i do think also, you know -- there is different kinds of private capital. but private capital, you know, there is -- the old goldman

sachs, goldman sachs and gus levy used to talk about, we believe in long-term greed rather than short-term greed. that can be true i think of the new -- bloomberg would probably characterize himself that way too. to the university point, i think that's an excellent point and actually one of the things we were talking about twitter, i was going to say one of the things i love about twitter is for me, it opens up academia. i don't read economics research papers, i don't read the journals as part of my normal life. but twitter for me points out interesting papers a lot. and i now probably read two or three papers a week because someone points them out. and this isn't what you would think of as classic journalism. but i do think that the internet has moved the academy much more into the business of what journalism used to do in a way that's fantastic. >> i think that's an interesting -- >> to which i would just add that in most of the country geographically, one would expect to find a public radio station system that i'm part of licensed

to a local university. typically a state university. >> right. >> that world is very important there. here's some really inexpensive journalism, or at least video. this is from citizens tube. and this is a new way, a completely new way in which many of us saw what was happening during the arab spring. we're going to see a little bit of video. first from egypt, then from syria. let's roll egypt first. i think we're all used to this experience. there's no narration. we can see a tremendous number of people. we're not being given a crowd estimate by anyone. but this is a citizen journalist video of a story that was simultaneously being covered by mass media. sometimes with some interference from the authorities.

there's that sort of international global rhythm of the protest chant that's been adapted for tahrir square. the interesting contrast i find is with our next video which is from syria where news organizations have been able to get the occasional visa for their reporter who hangs out in beirut, knocking on the door. anthony shadid as we know entered through another border and gave his life entering this country. syria is a story that we largely see through videos of this kind. this was a peaceful gathering. you video people can make your judgments about how well it's been shot. >> poorly. >> poorly is what i hear from someone.

it's a large crowd. >> but there's no professional there to document this protest otherwise. >> otherwise, nobody would see this. you know, part of what i see when i see these videos coming from -- originally out of local radio, truly cheap media, is they're supplying footage to people on television who are going to be able to look like they actually covered something. in and of itself, a wonderful contribution. but are they giving the completely -- the television network that has no interest in covering any news at all, the pictures to show that, hey, we can read wire copy over these images as well as anyone? >> i don't think that's the value. you know. i think to look at it in that way would not be right. i mean, the issue that people point out is that if you're relying only on stuff off of youtube, you have issues of verification, you have all kinds of issues. there's a reason why you want to

have professionals on the ground when you can. but in the case of syria, particularly, there's been a lot going on in syria that professionals simply have been unable to document. and when you have people self-documenting what's happening, that has changed, i think, a great deal of the dynamic in terms of what we understand with syria. so it's not either/or, it's that the citizen media that's coming out of a lot of countries is -- i think in the ideal world, it's a symbiotic, synergistic relationship with the professional journalism which, you know, you need people going out and fact-checking and verifying things and so on. i mean, you see with news organizations that rely entirely on agency footage, sometimes they just get things wrong because they haven't done their homework. so yes, you need a combination of different things. >> but this has changed the world. this has totally changed the world. this kind of video.

it's changed the way we cover things. there are witnesses. the world is a witness. president assad now has to live with that. he has to operate with that assumption. i don't know how long he'll last in this new world that he finds himself in. maybe quite a while. but it utterly changes the way he and others like him have to think. and it is a tool for us. of course as rebecca said, we have to be very careful. we have to make sure -- we spend money actually trying to verify that video was shot in a place it's claimed to have been shot. sometimes it hasn't been. sometimes it's a demo from three weeks earlier or it's the wrong place. >> would you run video saying, we can't really verify? >> yes. if it has a real news value to it, if it shows something that really matters, we'll say so. we'll say, this is claimed to be "x." we have every reason to believe it is but we don't know so take it for what it's worth. >> what's interesting for me,

robert, there's actually huge demand among people consuming news for this kind of stuff. and what we've discovered, you know, we are the aforementioned producers of the agency video that people read agency copy over on broadcast tv. it's a huge business for us. and actually, what we've found is one of our producers had an idea of, why not just put little clips of this stuff when the arab spring happened, why not put it on the websites? we do something called rough cuts where we put two or three-minute things no, reporter narra narrates, probably placed where there was a video camera. these are our most popular videos online. actually it turns out a lot of watchers or web users aren't that interested in the voice of god telling them what happened at the demonstration, they're happy to see two or three minutes of what in fact happened. >> i would say very quickly that -- i find it helpful to think about the role of

institutions in our world in providing information and ideas. 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