thank you for all your answers to the questions. at the end of the hearing go- moku it is open for an additional 30 days or additional questions or. i am sure there will be additional questions. i think you for your time today and your work as well. crops thinking so much, mr. chairman. [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2011] >> and of max, former nbc nightly news anchor tom brokaw reflects on politics and changes in journalism. on this morning's "washington journal,"we will talk to congressman jim jordan and a director of the census bureau discusses demographic changes in

u.s. society. >> the new october unemployment report will be released today. the commissioner of the bureau of labor statistics will testify today about the latest jobs numbers before the joint economic committee. you can see live coverage at 10:00 a.m. eastern on c-span 2. gop presidential candidate mitt romney and herman cain will deliver remarks at the americans for prosperity foundation today. rudy giuliani will also be on hand. live coverage begins at 1:00 p.m. eastern also on c-span 2. >> when i started to sell my books, every person i worked with have rejection letters for me so that was cruel. they said we love your stuff but what about this. >> in his nonfiction book, his

account of mark zuckerberg and the creation of facebook was adapted for the screen as "the social network." his latest book, "sex on the moon"and now is your chance to ask questions. he is live on "in depth" live on sunday at 12 noon. >> former nbc nightly news anchor tom brokaw on american politics, journalism, and the economy. during his speech, he reflects on a career in journalism, the changes he has seen in the world from the various challenges facing the u.s. this is 55 minutes. [applause]

>> our guest speaker is on the walls of our institution. he has spoken at our luncheons and is the winner of our lifetime achievement award. i have him to thank or blame for this career in journalism. during the administration of president ford that i saw at "network stars, tom brokaw and barbara john cochran holding forth at a news conference in topeka, kansas. i became fascinated with the worker broadcast news and they were camped outside the ballroom at the ramada inn. i decided to get into the business anyway. i have you to thank for that but not sure my wife would say the same thing. for decades, americans have had

breakfast with our guest, perhaps a dinner, or even a nightcap. he hosted "the today show." he is here today to talk about his new book, "the time of our lives, and examining the past promise of america." he will give us his unique perspective and tell us what he thinks about the great divide in our political climate. many of you are familiar with his remarkable story. a native of south dakota, he married miss south dakota and they will soon celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary. his first tv news gigs or in iowa, atlanta, and nebraska. we are told he has covered 11 presidential elections. he was the white house correspondent during watergate and then he hosted "the today

show." he became the anchor and managing editor of the nightly news until 2005. having been named one of the most trusted people in america, he was asked by nbc to step back in the spotlight to host "meet the press" after the sudden death of tim russert. members of our club know he is winner of the fourth estate award in 2003. that same award was given to jim lehrer a few days ago. our guest is a natural storyteller whether on the air or between the covers of a book. in 1998, he had a popular book, "the greatest generation." he is -- he has easily emerged capturing history on the fly to one taking a longer view.

he has had other successful books. while he has been less than complimentary about baby boomers, he has remained a properly neutral on politics. several years ago, rush limbaugh refer to our guest as a self- hating liberals. he said rush should know that those of us who make a good living listening to the sound of our own voices are incapable of self-hate. [laughter] we think we are grand. it is not often we have the opportunity to have such a prestigious member of the national press club address our audience and we are pleased that he is willing to return once again. please give a warm welcome to mr. tom brokaw. [applause]

>> the other piece of that is that i include russia and that fraternity. -- i include rush in that fraternity. your father was a great friend and the godfather of a great club i belong to, anchor of the evening news. i will share a story about your grandmother who is one of the most favored people any of us could ever have the privilege of knowing. i'm sure you would agree. i always said he had betsy cronkite as a fantastic partner. we count on our wives to let the air out of us at the right time. meredith played that role in my life and her idol was betsy cronkite. for a couple of reasons.

when the cronkites move from a town house into a high-rise in new york, she said to a friend," i miss the old place. the friend said," of course, you raise your family there and you had so many good years." she said she could bury all those damn platts. [laughter] we were at the kentucky derby one year and it is a death march when you have the kind of visibility you do we were there for are affiliated stations. it begins with drinking on thursday morning and by saturday night we were at a black-tie dinner and walter cronkite as we get out of here. i said i have two fronts -- to friends who want to take us up in my hot air balloon and we can only do that now at dawn. at dawn the next morning, we

were on the outskirts of louisville. we were getting ready to lift off and have the town showed up still in tuxedos and still with champagne glasses. [laughter] walter got in his basket and i got in mind and we lifted off and had a two-way radios. i first heard betsy cronkite after we got up to 1,000 feet saying," we are on the ground dividing up your things, walter. do you still want the burial a sea? " after walter had retired for a couple of years and was narrating a documentary and he was probably buying something. he went to the gift shop like an ordinary citizen and a woman was standing behind him and behind that woman was betsy cronkite. the woman kept looking at him. she tapped him on the shoulder and he turned around and she

said, "has anyone told you you look like walter cronkite did it before he died?" [laughter] walter turned around and cleared his throat. the woman is a mild panic and she turned to the woman behind her not knowing it is that he cronkite and says, "walter cronkite is dead is and he?" and's a lot of for a moment she had a wonderful crooked smile. she smiled and looked the woman and said you know if he is in by now, the old sob probably ought to be. [laughter] that is part and parcel of what met -- what may well for a great man. he had someone to help steer him on a steady course. i want to talk about how wrote this book and about the craft that so many of us here at the

national press club and joy. i have been at this for half a century this next year. my marriage coincide with my beginning as a journalist in a modest way in omaha, nebraska. i have won the lottery professionally and personally. i have a wonderful family. we have had an extraordinary life and now four granddaughters. i have had the privilege as a journalist to cover stories at the police precincts of all mall, atlanta, all the way to summit meetings in the kremlin and china. in the course of that time, i have never lost my sense of wonder at the change that we have all experienced. that change was, for me, distilled in june of 2009 when i

was interviewing president obama in dresden, germany as he was preparing to go to normandy for the 65th anniversary. i spent a fair amount of time they're given that i wrote about "the greatest generation." i was waiting to interview her first african-american president, thinking about all the change i had witnessed. i was born in 1940. i was standing in dresden which had been firebombed to the point where it was almost completely leveled the at the end of world war two and spent the next 40 years behind communist lines and now the city was writing out of the rubble of that time. i had just come from berlin. the wall had come down. berlin was the most exciting city in central europe, a very cosmopolitan, vibrant once again. in the course of my lifetime, it

had been the capital of the most mondays his regime that anyone could possibly imagine. it was the headquarters of hitler's not to germany. -- nazi germany. obama and i began our exchange. i mentioned i had been in berlin the night the wall came down, the only correspondent with a live transmission abilities. the president's said he knew. he said he was in law school at the time. [laughter] i walked away from that interview trying to take the measure of all the change that i had witnessed and we have all been through. it began to resonate as i lifted my grandchildren. i wondered 50 years from now what they would be saying about their time at what they would be saying about what we left them, what we created for them. as many of you know, when you

begin to write a book, you think you have a firm idea of where you are going to go but you find that the journey becomes an adventure because with every page, as you finish it, you have new thoughts about the direction you want to go. this book, for me, came down to two questions -- what happened to the america i thought i know? and the second question to confront people i encountered as i went across the country who would say to me -- mr. brokaw, do you think my children will have a better life than i had? i worry that they will not. that question is at the heart of the american dream for so many families. they come here hoping that succeeding generations will have better lives than they have had. that was the case in my family. my mother and father came out of the deaths of the great depression. my dad dropped out of school when he was 10-years old to go

to work for a swedish home setter because he was a large, strong boy and became a master operator of heavy construction equipment and could find work but it was not easy. my mother's family farm dried up and blow away and was seized by the bank in 1932. she was 16 when she graduated from high school, one of the brightest women i will ever know and college cost $100 per year and there was no way she could possibly go. you want to be a journalist, it turns out. she has lived out her life through may and so many ways and has been a guide. i thought about the change in their lives and the change in our life and my parents always saved for me to go to college in the hopes that their sons with a better life than they would. as i began to write the book, i thought maybe we should recalibrate that question. at the root of the question,

historically, has been the expectation that succeeding generations will live better economically. they will make more money, they will have better homes, more cars, more toys. obviously, there is a finite capacity for all of that. what i attempted to in this book in many ways is to get us collectively, wherever we are from, what ever we believe politically or religiously or culturally, to kind of have a national dialogue about what it is we want to leave behind. i think you begin with that question of what kind of values do we want to leave behind. what kind of economic opportunity in the workplace do we want to leave behind? how'd we expend -- how do we expend the tolerance as a result

of dr. king and the civil rights movement. how we fit into a smaller plant would summon a people? how to use this transformer to technology that is available to us all at our fingertips now? to make this planet a better place? it was in that fashion that i launched this book. if i begin with the need to do something desperately about american education. what is most encouraging is that is a subject that is now on the table and for too long, we have a two-class system -- those who could afford to move to the suburbs or send their children to private schools. rest of america and the inner city and are parts of the socio- economic class is were stuck with it one size fits all warehousing education. education is the currency of the 21st century.

at least we are talking about it and in the nation's capital attempting to do something about it as there are across the country. we have a long way to go. in china, every eighth grader is required to take math, physics, and biology. in america, only 18% of high- school students take those courses. as long ago as 1996, i was reporting from seoul, south korea during the olympics. we did it in the middle of the night to meet the time change requirement. i was there before dawn on a rooftop overlooking the courtyard of a junior high. before the sun came up, that court yard was filled with lights and flashlights and i looked down and could not figure out what was going on. i looked closer and there were students in the courtyard doing their homework by flashlight waiting for the doors to open so that they could improve

themselves. this is a country that in the 1950's was ravaged by war and had a kind of stone age agricultural economy. now it is one of the industrial powerhouses in the world. the president of korea had a per minute -- meeting with president obama one year ago and president obama said, "tell me about your challenges in education." >> the president of korea said the parents want more, not less. i began to address that in this book and the role we can all play in a variety of ways. in my generation, we should think more actively about becoming tudors and becoming more actively. actively there are heartening developments. i think charter schools are important. i believe the combination of what i call public/private partnerships in many communities where companies are getting

involved because that will be their work force and our customers and they are trying to bring new resources to teach it. we are finally beginning to have a national debate about what an effective teacher is and how you build an effective school system. and make a transition into what i call proportion in our lives. i just had a fairly active discussion on npr this morning in which a caller called in to challenge me on the housing crisis, saying it was entirely the fault of wall street. wall street played an enormous role in the housing crisis but it was not all wall street. people have to accept personal responsibility when they sign on the bottom line for a mortgage they cannot afford. here in washington, fannie mae and freddie mac drove a lot of the stampede of people thinking they could afford homes. home ownership was going to be part of the american dream but unfortunately, it ignored a lot

of the financial reality that comes with that. it continues to be a heavy burden in the economic recovery in this country. there is an extraordinary change coming up in the profession of journalism. i liken it to the second big bang, the impact of this new technology. we have created an entirely new universe out there. we are trying to determine which of these planets will survive and which will drift too close to the sun, which will merge with others to support life as we have known it as journalists and how will the finally work itself out so there is a kind of orderly universe in which we can know where we are going. at the same time, it is exceptionally excite didn't. on.

people tell me what happened to the journalism i used to know. i said i will surprise you. there is a richard manuel of information out there now than there ever has been. it is available at a keystroke. you can no longer be a couch potato. you have to get up in the morning and not just retrieve the daily newspaper and watch a little bit of "the today show" and in the evening watch the evening news. you've got to develop a kind of personal filter system for the information that is coming at you all day long. with which you are being bombarded. what is reliable? what has integrity? was the political motivation of this particular website? all the newspapers now have websites of one kind or another and those are still works in transition. the same thing is true in my business, both over the air and

cable broadcast journalism. we're working our way through it. the test ultimately always is, however, how reliable is the information? what is the integrity of what we are seeing and absorbing? that will require more vigilance on the part of those of us who are on the receiving end of it. we should have no less an expectation about it. the region is so much greater. even while traveling, i can get up in the morning and collect and read the financial times from london, latest -- read the latest release from the saudi ministry, see overnight developments in the national news to say nothing of a broad range of paper is available to us in this country. i even read the dakotan to see how the old high school football

team is doing. they have a terrific website. what is most important about this exceptional change we are witness to and we are part of as catalyst and practitioners is the place of journalism will not and should not go away. it is critical to free people everywhere. that cannot be lost in the debate about journalism. three people still require a forum where they can retrieve information that is useful to them to make decisions that affect their lives and their nation and their communities. we must redouble our efforts to make sure that the culture of journalism remains intact and that its place in the public dialogue is prominent and indefensible. just this past week, obviously,

we have been witness once again to what effect is one of the fault lines of american journalism at the moment. it has become kind of an echo chamber. something like the herman cain accusations get into the system and a squeeze out almost everything else. there's a kind lemming-like journalistic pattern where everyone chases the same story. the fact of the matter is that herman cain decided to run for president some time ago. where were we and going back to find out what his history was? he had a fairly prominent role as president of the restaurant association. he was on the board of the reader's digest association. there was a time not so long ago when anyone who declares for president can fully expect to be the object of a series of reports in "the washington post"

four other newspapers or on television. no longer. it is now just everybody chasing candidates around the landscape for at debates and when something happens, playing a giant gain ofgotcha. that may be a place to begin. you will always have the horse race in american politics. you will always chase the scandals. the american public deserves more from us, from these people who are stepping forward to running as president, possibly president of united states. they require a long, in-depth examination of who they are and an examination of what their policies are across the board. republicans, democrats, and independence -- that is the least we owe the voting audience and the people who give us all the freedoms we have in the

first amendment to the constitution, freedom of the press. having said all of that, we can always expect there will be robust debate in this country that in fact some of the language we are seeing now is reasonably mild even by. contemporary by standards. everyone remembers give 'em hell, harry. he gave a speech where he compared thomas dewey to hitler and mussolini and it was recorded and printed in that fashion. he said he was like what happened in germany or the financial interests decided they had to have someone represent them and it was adolf hitler. the same thing happened in

italy. the dewey people went to a ballistic but harry truman stuck by his guns and continued the campaign in that fashion. we have a rich tradition of that. moreover, abraham lincoln was, in a way, one of the first bloggers. when he was a lawyer and active in illinois politics he wrote scathing criticisms of his political opponents under a pseudonym, scathing criticisms that have very little basis in fact. it was very opinionated and very scurrilous. because he was so well-known, one of his opponents called him out and challenged him to a duel. because he was challenged and a large gangly man, abraham decided he would choose broadswords and they met across the line because tools were not

permissible in illinois. they met in missouri at dawn and, thank god, wiser heads prevailed and got the tool called off. it was provoked a. licoln, blogger using someone else's name. [laughter] i will tell you two stories, one which involves a our grandchildren. we are big outdoors people. we could not wait for the grandchildren to be old enough so we could take into the back country of montana. when they were just seven and five, we decided they should go on their first camping trip and we took them up a trailerless area near our ranch to a rudimentary cavan on our

property. there were warning about the and sex but we got there and had a big cookout. the --y were winding but when we got there we had a big cookout. -- there werewhining. we gave them lamps and tuck them into their sleeping bags and you can see they have a lot of questions but they were not talking. we got our sleeping bags just outside the tent and we could hear an urgent conversation in whispers inside. the august of the two came out instead of the -- the youngest of the two said we need an adult in here and now. [laughter] that may be a metaphor for the country. finally, the anecdotes that

follows that is that i always learn something from the wild, from nature, when i am in montana. every year, there is an enduring lesson i learned from the animal life or from the storms that blow through or the floods we have or the severe winters. the most memorable one for making about four years ago when our river was very high, almost flood stage, because of snow run off. i went to a high point overlooking the river that was bordered by a growth and on the other side, to get to the grassy pastures and range of our ranch, there were thick rows of hawthorne bushes. out of a, for growth -- a conover grove came a group of alex. they decided i was no threat. the mother cows let these newborn calves into this very high and strong ratings. river

they swam across and the calves were having a hard time getting through the hawthorne bushes. they all made it except one and he was swept downstream. i was wondering what to do. on his son, he found an eddy and got up onto a sand bar and walked up further and was on the far bank. the rest of the herd was across the river and they were waiting patiently and he tried again until the second time. then he got back on the sand bar and tried a third time and failed again. now i can barely breathe watching all. this as god as my witness, after the third time, he stood on that send back trembling. across the way, his mother separated from the herd and walked to the edge of the river, looked at him and nodded her majestic had come waded into the

river and nuzzled him and let him upstream to a safer place where they both got across while the rest of the herd waited for them and then they moved on to greener pastures. our country is at flood stage. we need to find a way we can navigate these rivers together and find our way to higher ground. thank you all very much. [applause] >> thank you very much, tom, and it is a pleasure to have you here today. using 'a term the greatest generation' how would you categorize the present generation? >> the young people coming of age? >> or maybe us. >> i'm not a baby boomer. i was born in 1940 and there was

not a lot of birth going on during the war. i have been fascinated by the baby boomers because i was close enough to them that we shared a lot of interests and i covered them as a reporter. i call them the unresolved generation. i don't know how they want to be remembered. the current generation now are called m theilennials and they are beginning to get a subset because they have been chastened by what has happened economically. many of them have moved back, but they cannot find a job or for housing. we're beginning to be called neo-frugalists by spending their money it wiser than their parents did and they're spending their time on line talking to everybody else and they are skeptical about a lot of the institutions we have all taken for granted including corporations and what kind of

job security they have. that is how i would characterize them. >> we have dealt with similar themes in recent luncheons' including when ken burns was here to talk about his new three-part series," prohibition." he is that as a fulcrum to talk about the divisiveness in u.s. history. how would you place of this period in history we are experiencing right now relative to our other history? >> i don't think we know yet. indeed more perspective and more distance from what we are going to. it seems that the moment that this is a very difficult time in part because the old rules don't seem to apply. i was with a group of very sophisticated economists c andeo's in late 2009. they said the recovery would be well under way by the fourth quarter of 2010 because of the amount of stimulus the government would on lease.

everybody underestimated the depth of the housing crisis and the systemic quality of unemployment in this country. it was about companies learned to do their job and make money with fewer workers. everybody also underestimated the kind of rootlessness and what turned out to be the inefficiency of wall street with its instruments in which they were just trading money. 40% of our economy, i think, is made up of financial services. it doesn't make anything. it just trades instruments. everyone underestimated the connectivity in the global economy. whoever thought that when greece got a cold, we could get the flow. that is really what has happened everything is so tied together that races around the world. >> on the political climate, we

started to see some interesting things happen with the tea party movement and it seems it has garnered a response from the occupied wall street people. in terms of the political environment we are in -- you came of age in terms of your career during watergate which was a rough time as well -- how does this feel to you now and going back to the time of abraham lincoln? >> 1968 was very difficult this country was deeply divided by the war primarily and the counterculture and what was going on in the streets of chicago and other places and the war was a cancer on american life. we lost 16,000 people in vietnam in one year. lyndon johnson was forced to step down and dr. king and bobby kennedy were both assassinated. and yet we had an economic underpinning in which things were pretty good economics. even the people in the streets had a home to go back to or

could go get a job of they chose to because there is a demand in the workplace. what has changed is that there is so much economic on certain to. that causes exceptional anxiety. if you take the people who have a home in foreclosure or in danger of it or the value of that has gone way down compared to their mortgage, that represents the most instances and the great bulk of their net worth. they cannot see how they will ever get out from under that. then you have an older workers who have lost their jobs or have been furloughed and they don't have a retirement program anymore and what will happen to them. we had a lively debate on npr because i had been critical a of theaarp and a new advertisement. morenk it would've been useful or that the for them to save many of our members need

these benefits. we, however, would like to have a dialogue. we know about entitlement programs and we want to be a part of this discussion. if everyone just retreat to their corners and issues threats, i don't know how we get down stream. medicare needs to be reformed structurally and otherwise. social security cannot be sustained at its current levels unless we make some significant changes in it. we made changes during the reagan years and this time for other changes. i think organizations in t includinghe aarp should be saying this. >> are many americans guilty of the same issue of failing to be willing to make a significant sacrifice like the greatest generation? >> i think more and more they are.

the national debt is a critical issue. it will be left behind for our children and grandchildren to pay off the debt and it will make life that much more expensive at every level in this country. for most americans, they cannot touch it or feel it or smell it so it is kind of just out there and if things are going ok, they will not worry about it. if the national debt can with a hot, dry wind that blew in your face when i got up in the morning to remind you that it exists or when you stepped out the door there was an enormous amount reminding you of how much of that national debt you have , ipay off at some point think we would have a greater sense of urgency among the masses. >> what is your sense of optimism or pessimism as to whether these much needed solutions can come down the pike? >> i-map product of america's of the glass is always have fault

-- i am a product of america in so the glass is always half full. heroin comes to this nation to fulfill the american dream and -- everyone comes to this nation to fulfill the american dream. we had enormous outpouring of tributes to steal. josteve jobs. steve jobs and all the others invented this technology in america. they changed the world. if you go to silicon valley, you find these bright, young americans that a long time -- that a long time ago we would as computer geeks.ere if you give them running room, they can get the job done i think there are some fundamental structural problems with the country at the moment that we

have to address. we are competing against countries that now have an open playing field in which they are preparing for their future by inventing their own institutions and changing their laws to adapt to the reality. we are living in an analog way in a digital world. >> this is a question from the audience -- you sound down on public education. you cannot mean that every public school is failing its students. >> i am not down public education. in the book i pay tribute to a variety of public education has to look at how it can renew itself. i pay tribute to a woman in fayetteville, north carolina, a superintendent who got concerned about the gap between hispanic and african-american students and white students. it was mostly because of absenteeism.

so many of the lower class is had no parent at home when they left for school in the moment when they got home so they skipped. she put on a campaign to get kids back into the classroom and persuaded her teachers and a local money to have a six the day of class on saturday and gave out her telephone number and they turned the school around. i worked with a school in the south bronx in new york, an elementary school, with a principle that called me up to invite me to see the school. it was built in 1955. i saw an anteroom that should be library. i helped her raise the money and she was resourceful. that rule now is filled with computers and electronic books and other kinds of books. she keeps it open until 7:00 at night as a community center for single parents who come home from work and go there with their children and learn

together. a lot of teachers are volunteering to stay afterwards. it is the kind of enterprise that will be the saving grace of public education in the country. i have many other examples in the book. i encourage you to buy it and read them. [laughter] >> we have a question from the head table -- what you think about the impact of the citizens united decision? >> i have been a big critic of a long time of big money in politics and that took it to a whole different level. having said that, i'm not enough of a legal expert to say that the supreme court was wrong because i think that institutions and corporations have a right to play their part in the american political system. before we had citizens united, there was other money pouring into the system.

i have been covering this particular part of american politics since i've. began in california, went to the secretary of state's office after an expensive senate race to look at the records about who was giving money and they could file by submitting all the names but withbetween the names and one line bond up against another so it was almost impossible to read pages and pages of documents. money is mother's milk of politics. so many people in this country who are not directly involved in the culture have come to accept a. that is hard to get the public aroused about the impact of money. they are inclined to say it has always been that way and always will probably be that way. now we're talking about numbers that are unimaginable. we will send a couple of billion dollars -- we will spend a couple of billion dollars on the presidential election and that

money could be used in some many different ways to move the country forward. >> is the impact of that pushing people away from their government? >> i went across the country in 2009 on highway 50 and half the country was ticked off in the half cocked position than they did not believe anything they were hearing anymore and i believe that was the root of the tea party movement. the other half of the country was really just worrying about holding their families and communities and businesses together and they had given up on washington. many of them had voted for the president as independents or moderate republicans and they felt a kind of sense of the trial that he was not as aware of what they're going through in the heartland most of all, people just don't feel connected to their congressmen or senators in the way they once did because they lead such

different lives than they did. you have an entire industry on k street. look at the amount of money being used to attack the new regulations on wall street. every bank and financial institution has a high-powered lawyer and we have not finished the debate on health care. that will be driven so much not from the patient population as it will be by the special interests. >> you are recognizing current times more as an author than as a broadcast journalist. talk about the craft of writing for a book as opposed to preparing for broadcast. >> broadcast journalism is short form and books are long form. that was a transition for me. i have a number of friends who are literary novelists. we talked about the craft of writing.

i said my problem is always writing long and keeping track of everything because i am used to short narratives. a book is a really long journey. they said there are no pills you can take. [laughter] you just have to find your way through it. i find it very gratifying. what i like is the permanence of awa it. lter isaacson and i had a conversation about it he said i am trying to hang onto first edition copies of books in print that i like because i think 20 years from now, i know where they will be. i'm not sure what will happen to my electronic books. i think that is a fairly astute observation. i find that my grandchildren

love the tactile experience. they read with books in their hands. they love the idea of books and go straight through. them they are not reading electronically as much as they are a book with a binding on it with a printed page >> talk about the timeworn you were the"nbc nightly news anchor." we have some young people in the audience who might not be as aware that as people like i am. >> it was only six years ago. [laughter] >> some thought the stature of the network anchor cannot be recaptured again. >> i would like to remind people that bill o'reilly gets a lot of attention because he is the most popular commentator on cable's. news

he likes to talk about that and the. as fine [laughter] as the number 1 cable news of knows -- news programs, he has half the audience of network newscasts. these evening news broadcasts on a combined basis deliver about 20 million viewers. who in this room would not like to have that kind of circulation? it is more competitive. there is a decline from year to year but we were about the demographics. the audiences tend to be older. we don't get as many young people because they can get news from many other places. we have nightly news that comes on after the news signs off on line. it is that makes that will probably prevail for a good long time.

dan and peter and i thought we were grand but we were not perfect. what changed for us was that we all grew up as correspondence, as reporters, and when we got to those chairs, satellite technology and arrive simultaneously so we could be anchors and reporters. we get on a plan to go to the philippines or to russia or czechoslovakia when everything was changing. we could be in south africa or the night the berlin wall came down and report live from those sites and it added a homer the dimension. >> do you think the nightly newscast will survive 20 years from now? >> my guess is that it will. it constantly has to adapt to what is going on. it will probably take on some new forms by then. i think it will probably have many parts to it. there will be on the airport, and on my part and they will be

complementary going on at the same time. you will probably be able to see it on your ipad. you'll be able to dial it up even on an airplane. we have gotten used to the idea of getting on jetblue and watching satellite television. why couldn't we have the nightly news available to this on apda for ipad? there is complementary information off to the side. >> you talked about how the media should have done its due diligence with herman cain six months ago. is the media missing a lot of stories because of the downsizing of those operations? anythingt think it has to do with downsizing. it only took bob woodward and carl bernstein to bring down richard nixon.

they were two reporters who went out there and winter card files and knocked on doors and that is how you do real reporting. pro publica has won two pulitzer prizes in six years with a staff of 34. our bloomberg representative was telling me they have 200 people and the bloomberg bureau. bloomberg did not exist when i was a reporter in washington. there is a lot of firepower out there. it is just how we. use it we should not become just an echo chamber. i was on jon stewart last night promoting my book and before i got on, the first half of the best jon's staff did the job all week i have seen on the herman cain story of putting it in perspective and getting archival information and tracking the different things he has set along the way and

putting in context some of the defense of them. there is a debate going on that our blacks are better than their black and there is such a dispute. jon stewart went right after that. at one point, someone was suggesting that this was just an allegation against herman cain and it was recent and jon said it was not an allegation because it happened in the 1990's. that is the kind of reporting we should be doing on all the traditional news outlets. there wasn't anything loaded about that. he was doing a factual recitation about what had happened. >> we're almost out of time and i have a couple of last-minute housekeeping items to take care of. we will have some of coming luncheon speakers -- on december 40 ji,m cantore will be here to

talk about extreme weather. between then and now, the u.s. postmaster general will address our audience about the crisis affecting the u.s. postal service. >> ask them if he can keep the post office open in big timber, montana. [laughter] >> here is a card. because you do some traveling, you have been at the podium before, we have a new thank-you gift, as small and it is, and the as the newnpc travel mug. one more question -- you will be celebrating our 50th wedding anniversary next. what is the secret to such a long, happy marriage. ? >> when my daughter first got married, the oldest, my wife said to make sure you always have your own space.

jennifer said that was greatest advice because my mother has 5,000 acres in montana which is more than i will ever have [laughter] . i think space is important. we are devoted to each other. we complement each other in some men. a wave as i am in the vanity business. i'm a cowboy in terms of my impulsiveness. my wife is a master. she is a great horsewoman. she is an expert bridge player. she knits of this stuff for our grandchildren. i am at the other end of that spectrum. i'm out there raising house a journalist and doing the kind of things a. i like we fit together in a way. she still lives at my jokes which is important. i still count on her to have the long view and most of all, what has been so important to our

marriage, is that i amn awe how she has been a role model for our daughters by just being there for them and allowing them to develop as individual women without imposing her own self on them. it has worked out very well the . we met when we were 15 that is the equivalent of a moonshot that you can make a marriage last for 50 years when you met in your 15 years old in south dakota. i have met a lot of other people in the world and there is no one else that occurred to me i would be married to. i would like to think she feels the same way. [applause] 9 >> the name of the book is "the time of the."lives thank you very much [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2011] >> this is what is happening on c-span 2 -- the commissioner of the bureau of labor statistics

will be on capitol hill to testify about the latest jobs numbers this morning. you can't live coverage from the joint economic committee at 10:00. eastern this afternoon, a gop presidential candidates mitt romney and herman cain will deliver remarks this afternoon. former new york city mayor rudy guiliani will also be on hand. that gets started at 1:00 p.m. eastern. tonight, five of the republican presidential candidates will be in debts moines, iowa at the ronald reagan dinner. governor rick perry, newton gingrich, congresswoman michelle bachmann, along with ron paul, and former senator rick santorum will deliver remarks. live coverage gets started at 8:00 eastern on c-span. >> would you continue your statement please? >> i am prepared to wait for my

answer until hell freezes over. >> he was the un ambassador for president kennedy during the cuban missile crisis. he was a former governor of elementary and twice ran as the democratic candidate for president and lost. adlai stevenson in "is on the contenders." live tonight at 8:00 eastern. for a preview, go to our special website for a, a serious c- span.org/the contend. ers. >> coming up, your phone calls, e-mails and today's headlines live on washington journal. the house is in at 9:00 eastern to debate a coast guard and maritime transportation measure. one of the issues is on environmental regulations for coast guard ships. you can see live in 45