respected news agency, originally british. they were added 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 state of journalism today which i'll ask him to do in just a moment. then we'll hear some remarks well from rebecca mckin who was for most of the 1990s,

well, for nearly all in beijing for cnn. the bureau chief. almost raised to that task taken been taking by academic parents to beijing as child and put into public schools an went on to report at bureau chief in tokyo and now is a senior fellow at the new america foundation. her book "consent of the network" examines the very challenges that we'll be addressing here. holding a copy there. 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 about the question of 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 "washington post" companies. i've watched the evolution of the press from about one where there was a monopoly or at best an oligopoly. and i think to the credit of journalists and press institutions, those very favorable and privileged positions in the country were utilized 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 expertise 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. and, my thought is, somehow we need to create an american world service, funded, present 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, i mean, 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 journalist, a lot of people i soup 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 freeland 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 broadcasting. 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 newspaper 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? >> well, 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 newsrooms of the "washington post," the "l.a.

times" and 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. watch the cbc. 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 actually very interested in the global story, because farmers now 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 obviously reuters, because i run the website. bloomberg. "new york times." ft. "wall street journal." and he can do that from his

tractor in this field where he is this afternoon. so to sort of feel lying 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, sort of a supercilious english-type person who after this became my ex-boyfriend. he was my boyfriend who said, he used to receipt 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. follow a great, great -- you do have to read russian. right? 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. so 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? you know. and actually i wrote a piece 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 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 emerging markets huge news organizations are being built. al jazeera, the chinese are out there. 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 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 about the rest of the world, it's brott

broadcasting to rest of the world. is this a contributing to the freedom of expression an the globalized and digitalage? >> 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 obviously very intrigued by 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 platform agnostic. 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 hausa 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 access 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. just a quick seg wie segue. [ speaking in foreign language ] >> all of the gunk that comes out of your face. yeah. sure. sleepies. or eye gunk. i always have sleepies.

>> 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." [ speaking in foreign language ] ♪ >> -- have you on the show.

♪ >> these actions. what's your opinion? >> well, i know that sanctions are sometimes controversial. >> i think that's the end. right? 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.

unfortunately, it's all over. but media change is media opportunity. and so 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 now. >> 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 do we get from 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. you know, i mentioned mike as an avid tweeter. another person i urge everybody to follow is carl bildt, 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 -- carl isn't tweeting you like cool, fun, hip stuff. carl is like tweeting you interesting papers, interesting conferences and stuff like that. >> he's an index 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. >> rebecca? >> 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. and, you know, 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. i mean, 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.