>> tonight, a discussion with the president and c.e.o. of national public radio, vivian shuler, on the future of public radio. also analyst jane goodall's interview marking her 50 years of the association with "national geographic." . .

>> good evening, ladies and gentlemen. welcome to the loss angeles world affairs council. it is my duty tonight, and i am happy to introduce our guest for this evening. when national public radio went

to look for a new chief executive officer, it led rapidly to control of the evolving digital world. the selected a career media executive with plenty of experience in both old school journalism and new age technology. in its effort to meld traditional information distribution and cutting edge technology, in pr selected a savvy executive with an understanding of both old school and digital camps. vivian schiller was a top official at the most traditional of all right wing media, "the new york times." she managed that new media entity, the largest newspaper website on the internet.

that is a major accomplishment. earlier, mrs. schiller spent four years as senior vice president and general manager of discovery times channel. under her leadership, discovery times tripled its distribution while achieving critical acclaim for its award winning programs. mrs. schiller also served as senior vice president of cnn productions were documentary's and series produced under her leadership earned three peabody awards, the dupont columbia university award, and dozens of emmys. mrs. shuler will be -- mrs. schiller will be interviewed by dr. ernest james william -- wilson iii. he is dean of the annenberg school for communications at the university of southern california. he is also a professor of political science, a university

fellow at the center on public diplomacy and an adjunct fellow of the pacific council on international policy. he was elected the first african-american chairman of a corporation for public broadcasting in 2009. ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage mrs. vivian schiller and dr. james wilson. [applause] >> good evening, everyone. is anyone out there? that is better. it is after dinner, we need to be lively here. i have come with the accouterments of every modern person, whether i know how to

use it or not, which is the ipad, a sign of the importance of communication and new ways of transmitting affirmation. this is going to be a conversation, and began i have talked about this -- vivian and i have talked about this with the leadership of this great organization. it will be a genuine conversation. we will talk for about 20 minutes back-and-forth, sharing ideas, and then we will open it up to questions and answers from you. i would like to start off, since it has been told i have been a professor, i try to limit these remarks to 90 minutes, which is the usual time that professors taught for. i will try to keep its slightly under 90 minutes. i want to start off maybe with the puzzle. the puzzle has to do with international affairs and

essential information. it has two components. number one is that the current secretary of state, oregon, has talked about the distinction between -- hillary clinton has talked about military power on one hand, and soft power, diplomatic, cultural power, and she has called for something called smart power. the idea for smart power actually grew from a study that was done at the center for strategic and international studies in washington d.c., which is a security think tank. there is this idea of smart power, which is the ability to think about mitary instruments as well as diplomatic ones. and yet the curious thing is, the moment we are talking about smart power, we need more affirmation if we are born to be smart. at a time when the american economy is more and more reliant

on international trade and international investment, what is happening to our media? most platforms, most publications, most broadcasts are not just cutting back but he eviscerating their international coverage. what does that make sense, we are becoming more reliant on the world, and yet most news organizations are cutting back dramatically on the stories that we hear. is that sustainable? that is not a very good way to move forward, it seems to me. there is one institution, however, that has been expanding its international coverage, and that is npr. so i am going to ask vivien schiller -- by the way, i should say that vivian and i have

worked closely together. i was chairman of the pub -- corporation for public broadcasting and worked very closely with vivian, who is one of the most dynamic and innovative thinkers in public broadcasting. she really deserves a great vote of thanks and confidence fort taking that leadership position. vivian, what is going on with the country? we are coming -- becoming more international in trade and fighting two wars, but most of the major outlets are cutting way back. can you say something about why that dynamic is happening? >> money. [laughter] it is actually fairly straightforward. it is not a good story, but it is not really that complicated a story. as many of you know, we could spend the entire time talking about the tremendous losses that have happened in traditional

media in this country. a recent peer report calculated that in the last 10 years, $1.6 billion in reporting and editing capacity has been lost in this country. that is sort of a euphemism for jobs for reporters and editors. when news organizations whose business model is basically just in the state of revolution have to cut, they are going to look naturally at two things, what part of my business is the most expensive, and what part of it is the least compatible with generating revenue? foreign coverage falls neatly into both of those categories. foreign coverage is tremendously expensive. people are living abroad. you have security issues.

you have travel. it is very expensive. further, it is not very attractive to advertisers. i guess it is not a very hard calculation to look at reducing the ranks of foreign coverage. i say this with a lot of sadness, but npr has more foreign bureaus than any broadcast news operation, including abc news, nbc news, and cbs ne. it is a very disconcerting state of affairs, frankly. >> isn't that bad for america's democracy, if our citizens -- it may be good for the advertisers, but the students that i teach or high school students, if they don't have to find things on a map, if they don't know how international commerce works, it

isn't that bad for american democracy? >> it is terrible. it is frightening. one reason i went in to public broadcasting, i wanted to play a part in preserving and expanding our foreign coverage. it is not just a matter of -- certainly we do a lot of coverage around the hot spots around the world, particularly in iraq where we are one of the few news organizations with a permanent presence there, and in afghanistan. also in areas like africa, latin america, china, southeast asia. you said it exactly right. to quote the column this from a former employer, the world is flat, and yet we have less and less reliable, independent reporting from the rest of the world that has great impacts on

our lives. >> how is npr managing to do this, if everyone else is cutting back and is all about money. hell are you managing to create -- increase your coverage of international affairs -- how are you managing? >> when i started two years ago, that was right in the beginning or the worst part of the recession at least for public broadcasting. since that time we have focused on trying to increase our revenue. we had to make a lot of cuts, actually. two shows were canceled right before i came to npr. since that time, we have been looking at trying to focus on building up our revenues so that we can reestablish our growth and reporting. even throughout that time, you have to say these are the things that are important. these are the things that nobody else is doing. the matter what we cut, we are not going to touch this, and

foreign coverage was one of those. we had to make painful cuts by cutting two shows, but the choice was, do we cut these two shows his audiences were not huge, or do we nickel-and-dimed our coverage from all over the world? for me, the choice was clear. >> you are a government owned corporation, right? >> we or a private corporation. >> let me rephrase that. you take some government money. could indeed be accused, potentially, of being biased in one direction or another because you take money from the government's? some people would say that that is a bad thing. why should we waste federal money on giving it to private suppliers who might be too liberal? >> this is sounding really familiar, actually. yes, one could, and i have certainly heard a lot, especially in recent days, about

the question of federal funding. let me just let out a couple of facts and then i can tell you why believe that federal funding is so critical. there has been a lot of confusion about how the whole thing works. npr is a membership organization. our primary purpose is to produce the national programming that we distribute to the stations. morning in edition, all things considered, and other things that you enjoy like car talk. we have 268 members representing more than 800 stations in this country. those members are all completely separate institutions that are locally owned and operated. npr has no authority or jurisdiction over them whatsoever. what we do is make those programs available to stations and they license those programs

from us. in turn, they raise money from local underwriters and also from listeners like you, an expression you have probably heard before. so where does the government funding come in? first i wanted to just establish npr as distinct from stations. it is a symbiotic relationship. we really cannot have one without the other. npr proper gets no direct federal support and has not since 1983. we do apply for competitive grants from the corporation for public broadcasting, which dr. wilson knows a little bit about -- a lot about. their role is to distribute federal dollars to public broadcasting, and depending on the gear and what competitive grants we win, it represents 2% or 3% of our revenue. moving over to the station side,

station's overall an aggregate, about 10% of station funding comes from the corporation for public broadcasting. to be sure, those public radio stations, 10% of their revenue, and with that they pay for the electric bill, the towers, their personnel, programming from npr and pri's, and to produce their own programs. 10% of that money in the coming back to npr. it is almost impossible to figure out a statistic. that is the role that federal dollars play at a very high level. i am not drawing down too deeply. >> you are saying is only about 13%.

>> 2% to 3% of the npr budget. >> let me interrupt you for a second. i would love to talk about -- this is what i do. i want to get back to the more controversial parts. let's say for the tech -- for the sake of argument, it is 25%. while that's still to in one direction or another if the democrats are in power -- won't that tilt you in one direction or another? isn't there the rest of it tilting this, and how do you prevent that from happening? >> the answer is no. because of the way we are structured and because of the far wall. there is a fire wall at cpb.

the board does not make decisions about the funding, and when she did the npr, the news division is completely separate from anybody involved -- once you get to npr. we have layers and layers of safeguards. the newsroom is separated from any of the funding sources. you have reporters being edited by editors and editors being reported. we have an ombudsman who would pay to be completely independent and to report on npr and give independent assessments, with a guaranteed employment, no matter what she writes. so we have check after check after check to prevent exactly the kind of thing that you are talking about. as someone who has been in the news media for almost 25 years, it is really no different than

the kind of -- the kind of fire walls that we had at "the new york times" or cnn. the fact that toyota buys advertising on cnn does not mean that those news organizations are not going to cover toyota. this is the legacy of journalism, and is no different here. >> let me put in a quick plug for public broadcasting. some years ago we had controversy about whether public broadcasting was fair and balanced. some of you may remember the controversy. cpb, which funds television and radio, commissioned a study. it was like mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the fairest of them all? we paid a couple of survey firms

to look into this. do you know what we found? fox, abc, cbs, nbc, ms nbc -- compare them against public broadcasting. guess who was judged to be the fairest and least biased of all of these entities? it was public broadcasting. if you ask people, let's rank the u.s. supreme court, the presidency, the congress, and public broadcasting, who do you think gives you the better value? i am delighted to say that in fact, it was public broadcasting once again. the only institution at the time when the poll was done that

received a higher ranking was the organization represented by some of our guests over here, which is the u.s. military. it was the u.s. military, the public broadcasting, then the presidency, the judiciary, etc. i think this does speak to the very valuable role that public broadcasting is playing in the united states. this is the world affairs council. we will go back to the international domain for a moment. there are these wonderful institutions called voice of america, radio free europe, radio liberty, radio free asia, which are government owned corporations which are involved in the news industry and the media industry, but mostly international. does npr have any relationship with these bodies, or maybe the unsalable bit about how they are different. >> no, we have no relationship whatsoever with any of those entities.

i am not really an expert on their governance, but i know that the person that runs all of those is a political appointee. you have to be approved by congress. it is a very different situation. npr is a completely private, independent organization. moving away from the government for a moment, those entities are really about providing news in english or other languages to the world. all in pr and public radio -- we do have an audience overseas, but we are not looking b g is not part of our business plan at the moment to try to provide or really focus on npr content to audiences overseas. we are very much focused on audiences in the united states,

and making sure that those audiences get the kind of coverage from around world that will help them be more informed citizens, so they can fully participate in democracy. that is probably a big difference right there. >> you say that the local stations, 268, a bunch of them are in this neighborhood that you are all familiar with. do you see any difference in the kind of products that different stations around the country by, especially international? i would like to think that in a sophisticated city like los angeles, that the stations by a lot of stuff that deals with international affairs, whereas another city that is less global might not by as much. do you see any pattern?

>> because the stations are all locally owned and operated, and the people that work at them live in the community, the flavor of each station is unique to the community. in the case of los angeles where we have two spectacular stations, they are both very popular. they both have a different flavor to them. so every station chooses based on its own guiding principles and what was to provide to the audience. but for a cover is very popular, whether in your programs or programs from the other distributors. "the world" is a very popular program. there are quite a few

internationally themed programs throughout public radio, and every station makes its own programming decisions based on how wants to best serve the audience. >> this is a big question in the room. in the spirit of journalism, you'll understand, you have been the center of a lot of controversy. npr has been the center of a lot of controversy over the past 10 days or so. i wonder if you want to say a bit about that, whether that has been expected, was an unexpected, did it happen because of the change in congress? was it something you said? was it something the station did? how would you characterize this? it.let's just name a back on october 20, we terminated the contract of one of our contractor, part-time

news analysts named juan williams. i suspect everyone in the room has heard about this particular incident. we terminated his contract, perfectly under the terms of the agreement. the circumstances around that were unique. there is a lot of chatter about the reasons that we did it. you did not hear those for me. there are a lot of assumptions made about what we did it and what happened. the fact is, all i will say, because it is not my practice or in pr but the practice, nor is it appropriate to go into the decision to ground personnel, but i will say that the circumstances were unique. there was a series of events over time, and so we terminated his contract. that is all i want to say about the matter. what followed was really a tsunami of media attention and

opinion and a lot of commentary, all of the map. did we expected to be quite that large? i think it is fair to say we did not. npr as an organization made mistakes in the way that we executed it. as ceo, i take full responsibility for that. our staff did not meet with one moment in person. that was a mistake. our stations and some of our -- our staff did not meet with juan williams in person. those things were certainly a mistake. what is happening now, and i think there is general consensus that this likely would have happened anyway, although certainly the controversy did not help things. with the change in congress, certainly among in the deficit

reductions included in net should be ordered $50 million of federal support for public broadcasting. we feel strongly and hope to make the case and hope that indicates the public radio, or 34 million loyal listeners to listen six hours a week will support the case that this funding is critical, particularly in underserved areas, indian reservations, places that have no other media. that money pays for critical infrastructure. this is a very important element of a democracy. i feel strongly that it should be preserved. >> one of the interesting things

that this has provoked, as the dean of journalism school, it says we have these rules that we followed when there was a legacy media and newspapers and traditional broadcasting, but what happens when you get these things, and we have blogs and we have tweaks and twittering. what is the distinction between a professional journalist who is trained and has experience on the one hand, and someone who just gets up and goes boom, boom, 7, at and hit send and it is all over the world. we have been debating at the annenberg school, how do we train our students to draw a sharp distinction between opinion on one hand and fact on the other? that is just our journalism students. i think more of our university students are trying to talk more about -- every student

needs to be able to understand and distinguish between fact and fiction and opinion. i know we are coming to the end of our part of the discussion. in some ways that is at the heart of your termination of this gentleman, which is that you felt as the sort of move too far over that line. >> let's talk about just the conflict of opinion. we all have opinions. opinion is a critical part of journalism. if you listen to npr, you cannot listen for more than a minute or two without hearing opinions, very strong, sometimes controversial opinions, across the whole spectrum of whatever is the subject that is being talked about. here is the critical difference. those opinions are coming out of the mouths of people that we interview, not out of the mouse

of our hosts, reporters, or of our news analyst. we embrace opinions and controversy. there is an extremely important former journalism called opinion journalism. in the 18th century, many newspapers practiced opinion journalism in their editorial pages. there is nothing wrong with that. it is opinion based on fact, as tip o'neill famously said, everybody is a title to their own opinion, not everybody is entitled to their own facts. at npr, we do not practice opinion journalism on air very much, we do have some opinion

journalism but we are about to undertake a review of our news standards and ethics, and we will take a look at that and either reaffirm or make a decision about the role that should have. you are absolutely right. the world is changing so fast, and whatever the rules of work, the fact is the world is changing and social media, and exciting new tool, has really affected the dynamic of journalism. we want to take a look at all that a very reasoned way and have a dialogue with our audience about it. >> thank you very much, vivian. i would now like to open it up to the opinion and fact of our audience. if you would please signify that you like to ask a question, we will share the mike.

>> my name is barbara walker. i really love in p.r., and i would be lost without it. i wanted to know with the advent of the supreme court decision that corporations are now entitled to have free speech and unlimited amounts of money, how can we keep the airwaves with free speech for people who don't have the money of corporations? >> i assume you are talking about the political ads? is that what you mean? [unintelligible] >> that has been a boon for a lot of commercial media. we cannot take political ads. it is a violation -- we do not

take political ads. we do have an underwriting messages and there are very strict rules around them as dictated by the fcc. where we play a role in all this is to keep doing what we are doing, to keep doing original reporting, more fact based reporting, by reporters who are on the ground, bearing witness, and telling the stories of what is happening in this country. that is the most we can do in order to help provide for civil discourse for our audience. ems to be working, because our audience has grown 60% in the last 10 years. i am not attributing this to me, but even since i have been at npr, our audience has gone up every year, at the same time

that commercial media is going down double-digit. so we must be doing something right. that is 34 million people tune in to broadcast and millions more on digital media. i have to believe it is that they are looking for original reporting, which unfortunately can be found less and less at other news organizations. many of them are still doing excellent work. >> my name is david doyle. my question is based on what you just are talking about. it seems to me that in the past few years, the traditional news agencies are turning more toward entertainment coverage and less on hard news. i don't know if anyone else in the room has sensed that. seems to me that the reason may be your ratings are higher is

because you are still doing traditional news gathering where as the other media sources are covering entertainment as news, celebrity as news. d.c. that as something, a trend that your competitors are, i don't want to say selling out, but certainly not doing as the news gathering. but there is nothing wrong with entertainment and fun. we air "car talk" every week, and it is fun. science coverage has been decimated in american journalism. coverage of the arts, investigative reporting, which we are ramping up as many news organizations are stepping away from, because it is expensive,

time-consuming, legally risky. we feel that with other news organizations stepping away, to have investigating reporting holding institutions to count is vital. it is not a coincidence, as we continue to grow that coverage -- >> i have a question about two of your sometime competitors, you mentioned american public i.dio and dri -- pr i'v did those other two organizations also get public funding? >> they are different. american public meeting it is

owned by minnesota public radio. it is a terrific institution based in st. paul. they both operate stations throughout all of minnesota and they or a program producer and distributor. as stations, they do get community service grants for -- from the communication -- corporation for public broadcasting. pri also applies for public grants and gets them. pri and npr are in exactly the same boat. it is exactly the same for all three of those organizations.

>> recently jon stewart of comedy central was interviewed in new york about journalism integrity. he stated, for instance, he believes the journalist who are lacking the moral courage to point out to their listeners the difference between facts and opinions. they really have a duty to do that. do you agree with that? they have a duty to point out the difference between fact and opinion, when a lot of the people on the show are mostly giving opinions. do you agree with that? >> jon stewart does something a little bit different. i think he does extraordinary work, he is one of the best news interviewers on television. we are doing something a little different, in the sense that when our reporters and hose interview people, we expect them

to challenge the guest. if something they say is false are unsubstantiated, they should question, where you get that information, or what you say that? certainly we do that all the time. reporters in covering stories, whether it is about washington or science or entertainment, that is their job to root out the facts and to find the truth about any given situation, or at least the nuances and information that surround an issue. what you are describing is really at the core of journalistic principle.

>> back to the little box on your lap there, professor. i have been fortunate to travel the world, and one of the neat things in traveling is you get to read some of the local newspapers. i can read those newspapers out anywhere in the world. "los i don't need the angeles times" to cover that for me because i can read the jerusalem post. we do not have to go to the newsstand to find foreign ideas to inform us. >> it is likely that this thing, this ipad, is going to revolutionize publishing, especially for magazines and newspapers. in fact, i to say that if you

want one of the cruelest applications for this -- one of coolest applications for this ipad was designed by npr. is really worthwhile. i do think that unless we have information in the public interest, we will not have democracy. the biggest concern, the business model is important, etc., but in country after country, no free press, no information in the public interest, no democracy. it may not be immediate, but it will happen. part of democracy is listening to multiple voices. one of the downsides of the new technology is we can all have newspapers that cater only to

owned ideological or geographic core intellectual interests. if i am interested in western europe, i don't need to know -- i can download stuff that is only from the guardian or whatever. i do not have to read about africa or the middle east. that is probably not good for democracy. so i would say that on the one negative.s my students have very little trust in any of the legacy media. that does not mean they don't listen. what they do is, they go into 10 different sources. they will go to the jerusalem post, the new york times, the bbc, and they will triangulate. as with most technology, there

is good news and bad news. the good news is that we can now download just about anything from any part of the world and here unfiltered perspectives, not through the american priorities, but the priorities of the french or the chinese. the bad news is that we can tailor it so much that we can exclude from our knowledge base places that we are not interested in, but maybe we need to be interested in. i think that is a great question. >> vivian, i think he said that 20% of your revenue comes from the government, whether it goes to your affiliate's. if this goes away, can you survive? a 20% hit to revenue is not

small in any business. >> it is 10% across public radio, but it is meaningful. it is particularly meaningful for stations in rural, underserved communities. the community service grants can be far more than that 10%. without it, i worry that those communities -- the whole point of public broadcasting is news and information in the public interest, and to revive universal access. i fear is that if that money goes away, the people that are most underserved will not have access. what that money does is paid for the critical infrastructure. it pays with the towers, the signal, the engineers. it gives the signal on the air. that is at risk.

the risk is that if that money goes away, those services will disappear. that is far and away my most critical concern. i think the core principle of all the public broadcasting, that this is about universal access and serving our audiences, is really fundamental to a democracy, so i feel strongly about it. both from a pop -- financial perspective and also as a matter principle. >> my name is alan curtis. i wonder if you would comment on the relationships, if any, between npr and pbs. you may be aware that our local pbs station is no longer going to be pbs, which i hate to think that the same might happen to npr.

>> i am happy to say that we have wonderful relations with pbs. we are two completely separate organizations. we are actually structured quite differently. the principles and our core values are exactly the same period on a personal level, i am very good friends with the ceo of pbs. we just had breakfast on monday, which we do very frequently. we are doing everything we can to share information and to work together. a lot of our stations are inside the system of joint licensees. here in los angeles, the public radio stations are radio only and kcet and the others are television.

our fates are tied, and we also are doing the same thing. information, cultural programming, education, everything in the public interest. we work together in a wonderful way in terms of new technology. gone are the days where we are radio in they are television. we are all media now, and we must work together, and we are doing this opens -- successfully. >> i teach journalism and i am here with my 9-12 raiders newspaper staff. we have a web site with news and opinion blogs. i think we can all agree that the state of media today is precarious and uncertain. since you have that experience at to the most impressive news organizations, and maybe you have some idea of when my

students come at 10 years from now, are entering into the journalist job marketplace, what the media landscape will look like, and what skills they can start working on now that will help them when they get there. >> i am thrilled to see journalism students here. for me it is such a treat. what will the media landscape looked like in 10 years? you guys at that table are going to invent it. nobody knows where this is going. i am actually not pessimistic at all. i am quite excited about where media is going. the business models are being disrupted, there is no question about it. newspapers really have to reinvent their business models entirely. television is much in the same boat. the fact is, what the internet and social media have provided and social media have provided is an