recently our bus travelled to wyoming. sam smith was recognized by classmates, family, and the investment of the future. then our bus travelled. and then we went to minnesota where third prize winners were honored for their video on water pollution. and every weekday this month on cspan, make sure you watch one of the top 21 winning entries before "washington journal."

good afternoon. i want to welcome you to the denver athletic club. i also want to welcome the viewers of cspan. cspan is as important of a contribution to american democracy as anything that comes to my mind. and the founder of cspan was a colleague of mine when we were press secretaries in the u.s. senate and he had the idea to

start cspan. somewhere later in life. but it is remarkable. and if you don't understand what is going on in america, the probability is that you are not watching cspan. now i need to explain this hat. the national football league season ended two weeks ago. i was no longer a fan of the san diego chargers, but a fan of the denver broncos and the governor of colorado sent me a text saying it was about time.

and the interesting thing that will shap it will be denver against kansas city for the championship of the american conference and that will be denver in the super bowl. he said the next event of the denver forum is very important. it is wednesday evening, february 24th. it will be in conjunction with the tattered cover. our speaker will be jim wallace, a very close and believed friend who has been a guess of ours many times. and they can do this event with

the tattered cover at the colfax avenue store. jim comes to talk about america's original sin. racism, white privilege, and the bridge to a new america. i believe he is the greatest prothetic voice that we have in our country. it is about what he has done for our country and what he continues to do. so it is a free event and we don't to many free events. put it in your calendar, and i will look forward to seeing you the night of the 24th. it is a wednesday night. our guest speaker today is the editor and chief of the baffler

magazine. there are several thing that's are about me. they represent the great under ground of american -- some of the publications that circumstance rations in 2,000 and 3,000. but their important is not related to the circulation. their importance is related to two things. who reeds them and takes them seriously, and who writes for them. and the fact is that in american literary history, some of our greatest writers were in literary quarterlies.

so you will have your own copy to take with you, read it, enjoy it, and help make it succeed. and i'm haud to introduce a new friend. she just a terrific guy. ph.d in american history from the university of rochester. the one and only dr. john summers. >> thank you, george. how do i sound? did. >> craig: you hear me okay? let me put this down bhap a

pleasure to be introdutied ced george. i will get to some personal and institutional background that got us to this point, and then i hope can have a conversation. this is a topic of a very focused rich substantive discussion that it is possible to have and it would be a shame if i did all of the talking. let me start with a catechism. our editorial program issued four times a year in print, and every day online. offers a mix of social analysis, political criticism, poems and stories and satire. also lots of art.

as you see from this issue that is out in the foyer there. and it is misplaced by us but comes and a great time to discuss foreign policy. all throughout we keep our focus on the money power. . the way that money talks to itself. what is generates in our culture. the pathologies in our politics. we identify concentrations of power, we challenge consensus thinking, and remedies. we believe public license is

diminished and our intelligence atrophied and the failure of our big institutions. . we strive for the third side of the two-sided debate. and we want to create count cou- contradictions. prejudices, assumptions, we believe that they are offering commentary on current affairs that need not be motivating or frightening. born in 1988 at the end of the cold war, and reborn at the dawn

of the information age economy in 2011. it was the aftermath of a global recession. all of the poem that have edited and written. it is a playfully ironic title, every time you read one of our essays, we are saaiming to persuade you of something. it is usually the opposite. some of you are probably wondering how it gets funded in

the first place. i know that more of you will be curious once we tell you how stubborn we are. we pay all of our contributors and that distinguishes us from about 95% of the kind of media we're involved with. we refuse the use of interns and volunteers. no one gets to work for free around here. third, if you use government money, don't bother asking for grants. we are independent, which means you don't have to ask for permission. we don't take adds, and we do

give prizes, we need one for george. to explain a little of the framework, we're a nonprofit, 501 c 3. charitable, and we depend on a group of people to depend on our work. video game designers, play writes, and a smattering of professors, lawyers, entrepreneurs, everyone i assure you with exceedingly good taste. . we have a relatively new initiative called the publishers circle, and it brings the value of our unbought opinion. and we now the value of

information in a democracy. in a market culture, financial transactions, are caught up in a grasping language of investment. but tobacco is not selling steaks. ours is the language of the gift economy. it is quality not equity. it is appreciation, recognition, and trust, rather than a return on investment. it attracts leaders to our community. this is how we are able to speak from outside systems. a challenge of cliches and euphemis

euphemisms. there are fewer commercial outlets for a writer who was bold enough to speak on it, but also attempting to rise. to get at something larger. taking the time to consider, reconsider, and rework. to rework and revise. to think, and writing. our magazine, our kind of magazine exists to publish carefully edited fact check work. how do you measure impact on something like this? it is a different question. one of the richest ironies living and breathing dividends figured out a long time ago how to work outside of the market economy to advance their monetary interests.

much is made of donald trump's wizardry producing new political realities. but trump is only an especially gaseous product of power and intellectual capital that has presided since before ronald reagan. a war of ideas, he told us, while building up an arsenal, video and television films. think tanks, and trucing an all-star team featuring brand name editors. their ultimate aims that been to rewrite the rules by which popular thought is judged. to produce a world where the alternatives to the money pour don't seem possible. and it seems perfectly natural

and perennially necessary. cutting taxes, cutting social spending. cultural funding, downsizing workers. deregulating networks. the default for america's future that cannot be understood outside of the context of philanthropy. it's not a secret. for nearly half of a century, they have showered sums on nonprofit institutions. miss measuring american progress. this revolution in reverse never could have won an open competition of ideas.

sheldon adleson. viciously attacking. trump just took the next step and captured the public media all for himself. what about those that believe in democracy. people like us created and furthered and were swept away by our own culture. parted by students for a democratic society. women's studies, black studies, launched the careers of social critics. and this movement culture

defended things like medicare. that movement and culture with the thinkers and whys that sustained it is surprisingly coming back. and kwekting our writers and thinkers to the young and disillusioned. but we are part of the tradition at the baffler. a long with a handful of other publications and periodicals, and renewal. compared to the conservatives they are pretty cheap. some parties pace in the 1,000 dollar level. and we have a few angels that make up the difference.

one of our principal goals is to grow our circle. if the only thing that happens to you as a result of today's talk is that you subscribe, we will consider it a victory. there is another part of the baffler imagination that i want to talk about. the heavy use of irony in our essays can produce a tone that sounds sometimes scar cast ti-- sarcastic. it is a nod to what we think of as the as if attitude it is very simple.

act as if today's smerk a time and place where an independent magazine could influence minds. the as if attitude is dangerous. if it is a culture of magical thinking, it is a main target and application, but it is more satisfying. and it is working. 2015 marked the year that we had a publishing officer to work in concert with our editorial office. to have a staff that has doubled. we took down our payroll on our website and fine tuned the frequency in our fast universe.

we published essays last year that included a popular one about the cross breeding of l labradors and poodles. we are not immune to publishing stories about animals on the internet. as the year went on and trumpism riled up everyone's attention, boston, new york, houston, dallas, san francisco, and denver. meanwhile we produced the three largest issues in the baffler's history. one each on the rule of fashion.

the dance of violence and empathy. we call that battle hymns. and one on the family unit as a folcrum and we call that the family that preys together. happy to talk about the issue on violence in a minute. but consider that is 624 handsomely appointed and printed pages at a time when it is not supposed to be comfortable, but it is. we're upping the ante this year. for a quarterly publication schedule. but for the first time, in the baffler's history and adding a

new slate of web columnist. so i will talk and then we can have a conversation about the personal aspect of this. and the virtues of waiting and hanging in there. back in 2010, some time after it became clear that my failure as a college professor was likely to be firm innocent, i got a quality to my office at boston college. i was looking for a new way to organize my discontent. the baffler's founder was on the line. he put that his formally punk magazine might be better than

the adjunct teaching i was part of. at the moment i was visiting an assistant professor of history, teaching a low level survey course, making a third of what i made at harvard and i lost my benefits. i knew where the story was headed. he was writing a column for the wall street journal where he was the token liberal. i never nknew it but we had friends in common. so figuring that i had little to lose, i said dtom, of course, immediately. i walked down the hall to my supervisor and department chair and i said i would quit, i would finish out the fall semester

teaching the survey course and then i left. occupation occupationally speaking, my was an object lesson. speaking to high school students going into college or perhaps not. it's important to make your choices and that have plan. i finished my ph.d in rochester in 2006. we published it, you know, sold a couple dozen copies. but i did finish and i did well enough as a teacher, i even put in a little time as a innovator.

. i was a research associate. . i helped pruts, a -- produce a cd-rom at the exact moment they became obsolete. it remains a beautiful creature for absorbing people like me. people who are searching for some public home for their values for someone that doesn't talk down to them, doesn't challenge them and keeps an honest conversation going. working on the magazine now along with contributors. and many of whom are in this

zone between academia. so with another former rochester history student whob is my friend and senior editor, we decided to take it over. we had no experience or money, and all of the nation's entrepreneurs told us that the printed magazines were over and done with. we had been writing and teaching as a form of cultural criticism. when i was in the academic environment, now i started writing as a form of cultural

criticism. the personal pivot away i often thought that the conventional notion of the career, strong compromises and skills and oddly pointed incentives once stood for a stable job when there was institutions that offered them. it should be just replaced. we should just get careers out of our mind. we should go back to terms like "the calling," vocation, craftsmanship. love for the work that we do. that should be our guiding point. we spoke at dinner about the call of the sprep injury.

there is no reason that the tech industry has to own the world entrepreneur. we could be entrepreneur's, too. those of us looking to get on with our projects and have a sense of our history, direction, and values really need to think again about the word sbrep neuron and what it may mean it was my own personal answer to forces that disrupted the world of journalism and higher education. it all goes to show the writers and artists and people like

yourself to come out. and that is all i have in this part of the program. so hopefully you can, we can have a conversation about this sketch, and you can try to challenge me or criticize me, baffle me. >> thank you, we have about ten minutes. if you stand up, cspan will be able to pick up your question and john will be happy to respond. yes, right here. >> i'm charlie and i go to east. i'm curious which do you think that people should be paying attention to today, and what degree should people be considering media. >> you mean people that go to

high school like yourself? >> just general populous? >> that is a tough question to answer. one of the decisions we made is that we wanted to stay in print. i think in the end it made things a lot more difficult for us as a organization than a lot of our digital start up shops which are only online. because it is expensive to produce, and there is a generation of people who are not in the habit of subscribing to the journals. it means to us that we're able to host long form essays which is our specialty. 5,000, 4,000, sometimes longer our essays run in the magazine, and there is just no substitute for reading that in journal and print, especially with so many

of them orchestrated under the covered. the digital die cot my is something that we think about and talk about a lot just like virtually every other outfit like ours. and if you're in, the other areas we want to push into is books. strching t stretching the essays out to short books, there are ways to do that. so the web, journal, books, public events. i'm not answering your specific question because i don't know enough about your criteria. >> i was thinking along the lines of if i want really honest

information in the media, do i listen to npr, where are s moneyed interest? where is charge corporate interest not influencing what i'm taking in. >> almost nowhere but the baffler. there was a call for journalism. anywhere you can find, i won't say unfiltered because editing is a fill ver btfilter, but som

can find -- newspaper journalism has been an after thought. it is true. and now more than ever online. >> let me ask a question. if you take, isn't it all about finding whatever your niche is? msnbc the "morning joe" show, i know the cohosts, at their best they're getting 90,000 viewer as day. chris matthews, and rachel maddow 550,000. bill o'reilly gets 2 million.

but something has figured out it is not about the numbers, it is about who your audience is, do you agree with that? i do, i think the main difference is something called an independent public and a media market. we're trying to create an independent public. it is also true that we don't need huge amounts of people all of the time eyeballing your content to have an influence. but i do want to talk about the niche. one of the things that is aflied, if you see it, you're a reader, you might like to read an essay and look at an interesting illustration, maybe you want to read a short story. it is the kind of read near is -- it is literary, it's

people that enjoy reading. it is possible to access it online peace by peace, but the magazine is sort of the opposite -- it is a niche now, but it is not as small as i think -- that ideal reader, that intelligent personal willing to read our encounter something that is slightly above their head. we think of it as potentially a huge population. maybe not for everybody. >> a follow up question is the -- some magazines, news week in particular have zone digital, the washington post, "new york times," they have digital editions, but i want to refer to the fact that a lot of people predicted that books were

publishing would stop, people would stop buying books, and remarkably something very different has happened. so my point being you public a magazine, you think it is important to have it in print? >> that is true, yes. more questions? >> yes. jim, hold on. >> do you want to sway public opinion? >> yes. >> do you think our current situation with our media and news in the united states is state sponsored propaganda? and how do you relate that, for instance, to poland and their current situation. >> to poland? >> yes. >> i don't have an answer for that in particular, but i think

it has been a reflection of the government lobby. other aspects of the media, we have the first amendment, the premise, every word i have spoken, free speech. the market buy it's up. what happened in the last ten or 15 years has happened to our politics, it became big donor playground. if you just look at who owns the media, jeff bezos buying "the washington post." john henry the owner of "the boston global." they're one newspaper towns owned by millionaires. it is the billionaire class that is what we fear.

>> how does trump fit into this? >> we have not asked him for money yet. we're afraid he will bring it up later. i don't know in terms of the political culture, he is the antithesis of the sensibility that we want to promote. you know it's not just racist, but angry. and small. you know the language is clearly a propaganda language. not language of critical discussion, mutual sympathy, working out social problems. don't expect that in politicians generally, but sometimes they try to pretend, and the thing about trump is that he has just taken -- he has not been influenced by money from the

koch brothers, but he was influenced by his own money. a businessman hero. so -- >> time for one more? >> right here. just a second he will bring the mic over. >> is there anything in your magazine specifically geared toward young people? especially those in high school and going into college? >> yes, i have a couple articles about college that i would like to give you before we part. it might make you run the other way though. the higher education, we write a lot about higher education and less about high schools, but for the public school reform, there is strong interest in covering it. a beautiful, long piece, essay

by rick perlstein. but what is happening in colleges is also worth paying close attention to. and they are reproducing the social order. we have the idea that it cost a lot of money, and i'm sure you have already figured out, and they have strapg ways of ra-- ss of ranking themselves. and college education has been a conserve conservative aspect for our culture. and it is sort of, produces this

idea that we call ameritocracy. that it is a sham, and you should turn the other way and run. it is all of the strange ways of measuring emotional intelligence. if you march through it, maybe doing an internship somewhere, you may find yourself at the other end feeling disappointed about where it is taking you in context of the public order. sure education is, i mean neither of my parents went to and i went to college. i went all of the way. and i am glad i did. it infenced my personality, but the larger forces are worth paying attention to.

>> would you consider a section of your magazine where you would invite smart, bright, high school students like this and people from east high school to write an essay. >> we have a section we call conversation. that might be a nice format for spurring further discussions, but it gives us a better sense of the back and forth, and it shows by example the things that we're trying to argue for otherwise. >> let's express to johnson our very great appreciation. thank you. >> thank you all for coming. >> you all have a copy, if you

would like him to sign it, i'm sure he would be happy to do so. and i'm grateful and excited to meet her and we will do a replay of this. and it is all really incredibly important and i thank you all for coming. meet him and his wife and encourage them to relocate to denver, thank you. >> thank you.

cspan's washington journal with issues that impact you. coming up on saturday, lisa curtis will join us. and then the ceo and founder of the young turks network will be on to talk about his support of the bernie sanders campaign. he will also discuss what his candidacy means for the progressive movement. and patrick gavin will join us and talk about how the dinner evolved from a humble one night affair to a week long celebrate of press, power players, and parties. he also directed and produced "nerd prom: inside washington's

wildest week." join the discussion. the white house correspondents association is hosting their annual dinner this weekend. earlier this week we spoke with the comedy central host about what to expect in anticipation of saturday's dinner. >> larry willmore. you're going to meet the president on saturday night. >> yeah, i had to give them all of my identification and now i can't vote, they have everything. it's going to be a lot of fun. >> did you think ant saying no? >> absolutely not when the president calls, you have to do it. it makes me think of mid evil times, the court jester, if you don't perform well your head will be chopped off or something like that,