urn presideunder president vlad putin. these men go through things and have scars that no one can understand except each other. >> the first thing that startled us was the relationship between harry truman and herbert hoover, who were two such personally and politically different men and who ended up forming this alliance that neither of them would have anticipated and ended up being enormously productive and formed the foundation of what became a very deep friendship. the letters between them later in their lives about how important they had become to one another are really extraordinary. >> it may be the most exclusive club in the world. co-authored michael duffy and nancy gibbs on the private and public relationships of the american presidents, from truman and hoover to george h.w. bush and bill clinton, sunday at 8:00 on c-span's "q&a." from the newseum in

washington, d.c., a discussion on the future of journalism and digital media. npr host robert see gal moderates a discussion with panelists from reuters, voice of america, google, and the academic world. this is an hour and a half. >> good morning, everyone. i'm jim duff here at the museum and it's my distinct pleasure to welcome you all here. it's an hon fornor for us to host such a wonderful event, the 50th anniversary celebration that you're 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, you all know him so very 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 than 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 from 1978 to 1995. 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 lecturer and visiting scholar. and with that brief introduction from a magnificent career, i will turn it over to victor. >> thank you. well, i'm one of only 20 introducers, so i just want to say about "x" years ago, nick lemmon, the dean of the columbia journalists school did me the honor of asking if i would chair cjr. that's the oldest media monitor in the country and maybe 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 this business model that can work. so it's a great pleasure to be here at the newseum and with everybody else here. we have just at cjr completed a new search for a new editor-in-chief and it's a countrywide, worldwide search and ended up with a marvelous person, cindy stivers, and cindy, i'm going to let her speak for herself. so -- >> thank you. well i'll not going to tell you about me because this isn't about me, but thank very much, victor. thank you. this is the latest in our road show of our 50th anniversary celebration. thanks to christie hefner who you will fleetingly meet later. an exciting time for cjr because of what victor said and now more than ever journalists need help

figuring out how to survive the hamster wheel of what we do. what is working, what isn't working and we're trying to, at of this past week a new home page that makes it easier to come in, if you only have three seconds, to see what's new, what's everybody talking about in our world. and also as of the past week we are now available on the apple newsstand and we'll shortly be on the nook is that right, dennis? and 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, director of public policy bob orston. >> thank you very much, cyndi, and thanks to victor and christie for getting us involved in this. the only place worse to be in washington is between people on

alcohol and between people that 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'll be having our own two-day conference abin a couple of weeks. so please come and talk to me afterwards. my job 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 nineteen sixty -- >> eight. >> eight. >> yes. >> 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 --

[ applause ] -- 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 a while for cnn. cable news was a revolution that permitted a single channel the that could be devoted to rock videos or news as it happened. i've been working or an fm radio network primarily the past 25, 35 years. when i came there, fm radio was not in the majority of american automobiles. we benefited enormously from the great change in the media landscape. we have someone here who used to edit the newspaper that jumps the ocean every day and is published simultaneously on both shores of the atlantic. that would have been an editor's pipe dream not too long ago. so times change and now we face

changes that raise questions unlike any that i can recall, questions such as who gets to 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 dimmal and globalized annal. and we have an extraordinary panel to address these questions and others, starting from the far end, david ensor ex-director of "voice of america." he had an illustrious career as a television correspondent for abc and cnn. before that, i should remind people, he was a reporter for npr 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. and chrystia freeland is now -- let me get the title correct -- global editor at large for reuters, which is a highly, the highly 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 mackinnon, who was for most of the 1990s, well, for nearly all, in beijing for cnn. she was the bureau chief. she was almost raised to that task taken been taking by academic parents to beijing as child and put into chinese public schools. she 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. chrystia is held holding a copy of.

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. so i've watched the evolution of the press from one in which where there really was a monopoly or at best an oligopoly that defined the press in this country. 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," and 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, to 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 are already the beneficiaries of public funding. and my thought is somehow we need to create an american world 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 and interdependent world. >> 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, and 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 mackinnon. 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 cnn in the first place in 2004. i was being told by my bosses that 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 at this time? >> east asia, you know, kind of important. but no guys with ak-47s running around blowing things up. so, you know, anyway. but at the same time, in 2004, i happened to go on leave to something called the shornstein center on press and public policy at the harvard condition di school and started 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 gatekeepers 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, you know, or have the opportunity to put matters into their own hands if 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, where i wept after this other fell loweship -- 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 curate 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. i mean, 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 just 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. >> chrystia freeland has been

nodding extremely enthusiastically as you've been speaking. i should by the way 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, chrystia, 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 publically 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 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 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, sort of a supercilious english-type person who shortly after this became my ex-boyfriend but at the time he was my boyfriend

said, just read the local newspaper and 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 anymore. 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 to russia is fantastic. follow his tweets and you have a great sense of what's going on. 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 foreign 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 thompson 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. the russians also. again, these have issues, but that's more stuff that's in the space. having said all that and returning to my 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 broadcasting to the rest of the world about us and the rest of the world. is this contributing to the freedom of expression in a 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 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? you mean 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.