but yeah, i mean, we have for political candidates, the presidency but people who aspire to be president, who are appealing to their own media outlets, media outlets there -- that very much favor them. donald trump, obviously breitbart.com. bernie sanders, young turks. they say, the media is giving your reality. the conservatives will say they are promoting a liberal agenda in many instances. the people on the far left will say they are putting a corporate agenda. we are actually getting the real reality from these outlets, and the media is actually part of the conspiracy. >> if you look at a media outlets like fox news, right, whose slogan is fair and balanced. if you talk to the average viewer, they are saying no, we

don't think it is the coverage that is balanced, we think fox news is the balance to a progressive media culture out there. so, they recognize that they are going here because it provides a different and more conservative perspective, and that is what attracts those viewers. i think it amplifies 100 times in the digital space. people are going to the corners, reinforcing their perspective. and our phones, the digital age is designed to perpetuate that. right? i read three stories on my phone from various media outlets. every single one of those algorithms will then show stories that are just like it, with that perspective in front of me. why? because that is how it knows i will click. and we are living in an age where the click is king. it is easy to understand how people's perspective of the same event suddenly become warped and segmented into different perspectives.

the wall street journal just did a tremendous graphic the last couple of weeks with a look at two facebook feeds side-by-side, a progressive and conservative you are, the same exact events but how they are consuming the event is remarkable. you look at the same exact event, a progressive and conservative reading about them, and the headline you think they're living on two different planets. that is what worries me a bit about the digital age, is that journalism is becoming more commentary. not even how it is presented, but at least and how it is being consumed. kathleen: if you look back in history, the age that marty and i lived in, newspapers being middle-of-the-road and nonpartisan is an unusual period in newspapers.

there were lots of them because they appeal to different groups, they had specific audiences. so, you know, the fact that people like to be associating with people who think like them is not new in the country. what is new in the country is that, you know, the president in the 19th century did not have their own outlet to give directly to the voters. i keep harping on the same thing. but again, it is whether media is segmented or not, the problem that we're trying to deal with -- elected officials closing themselves off with the people they were elected to serve. and using the mechanisms of their administration, not just in the white house but

throughout the government they run, to close off access to people. marty: kathleen, they are closing themselves off, but they are not necessarily closing themselves off from the people who support them. and what about that? what are the implications of that? kathleen: absolutely, the obvious question to ask about that is, are they serving them, only the people who support them, or do they serve the wider responsibility that i think mostly they have, to serve the entire country? >> yeah, as the president needs to serve everybody who voted, everybody who participated in the process, he represents all people. he tried to do that. the key though, he has to put out good, to the extent you control your own channel, and have to be good. or it will not get shared. and here at the bush center, a couple of years ago bush hired bill mckenzie, a pulitzer prize winner to be the editorial director because he was credible. we had a catalyst in january, a journal of ideas, a quarterly publication.

you can sign up at bushcenter.org. [laughter] >> in the first issue, we had joe lieberman, mark cuban, affected the way we share. and today in politico there was a reference to the cuban story that was in that issue of the catalyst six months ago. because it was good, compelling, a little bit of a surprise. ryan was in that issue. surprise people with the content. make it good, make a compelling. you know, a good white house example -- people forget that george w. bush had the first all-digital presidency. every photograph was digital. the first live stream, starting in 2001. they were live streamed. all digital. he did a blog on his trip to the middle east with air force one. the first interview for yahoo!. mike young did the interview. after 9/11, tourists had been cut off. the public cannot come in. so the way to show the public, the declaration to tell the

story of the holiday season, was through the lens of marty, the scottish terrier. came up with this idea working with jeannie and others, and zipped through the white house showing the decoration. it was a massive hit. mrs. bush did it at the children's hospital every year. prime minister tony blair and dolly parton appeared in those over the years. but it was good content. it was interesting. it was little bit offbeat. in terms of serving your audience, you have to have the good stuff. and you've got to have a credible voice. >> quick point, barney is more important than every other breaks you listed in the digital bush demonstration.

[laughter] olivier: for me, it is a pivotal point. what happened to the barney cam video? every day on the morning shows, right? for me, it was the first time the more traditional news media, to the extent we can call morning shows news media, they took content produced by the white house and used it without really modifying it. and for me, that was the moment in which the white house realized, sure, we are going to get these -- you mentioned the people with the phones to be journalists and report the news, but there is a barrier to entry, at to meet with a lot more important for powerful institutions that have built-in constituencies. and the barneycam moment, when

the news orgs are taking that moment and showing it entirely, that is more important than the blogs. is that is what fed into this presidency. kathleen said it right. they love to cover themselves. and they expect on some level, and unfortunately we reward them, that if they release a particularly good video or photograph, that we are going to take their content. and that is going to displace what would have been hours. >> that is partly true. i think the bigger calculation internally, not speaking for the white house, the bigger calculation is not that you are going to take it and use it as your own, they can just go around you. right? own can jsut, through their channels, looking at how many followers barack obama has on twitter. that they can just go straight to the people. the filter is less necessary.

>> that would be true if they were not excluding us from the event. mo: and i am not disagreeing. to the exclusion of the press, i'm just saying that the press -- there are other avenues. kathleen: this museum has a very famous picture, and it were many of them of president bush's expression on his face as andy card leaned over and whispered in his year. that is a piece of history that is important. important enough to share it here. i doubt that a picture like that would be taken in this particular administration, by an independent news photographer, and probably not reported possibly by a white house photographer. but that event, it would be taken off-site, i am almost certain. what does that mean for the history of a presidency, when events like that occur on stage? olivier: i think your point is a good one.

mo: the first draft of history is being increasingly written by the ministration. i think it is true across the board. i think everybody is trying to control that a little bit more. marty: the mainstream press being pushed out of the picture, something it is to some degree, the question will be how much do you push it out of the picture? does the public care? mo: no. marty: why not? olivier: they're getting a multiple sources, and i don't know when they should trust the video feed like that. you know, i was struck when the president went to the toner journalism prize, he really lectured us. and one of the things he

lectured us about was that we should be producing quality content, we should be taking the audience. which was interesting, because that was actually the perfect distillation of his medication strategy. the president sits down with a woman who is chiefly down because she ate froot loops and a milk-filled bathtub, he is not looking for the question about the islamic state. i guarantee you. he is looking for that audience to and vacates the audience. marty: not a good messenger. olivier: super effective. when the president sat down between two ferns, with the white house called an interview -- [laughter] olivier: that is like saying dana carvey gave an interview. the stuff works. it became a primary driver for obamacare. people consuming. and they are not necessarily aware -- you talk about the algorithms, i was actually at the george w. bush library doing the panel, and the q&a guy said, yahoo!, i go to yahoo! to get my news.

it is all kim kardashian. sit down. go away. you are not a real newsperson. the moderator said i did not have to answer that. i said i want to. you see a lot of kim kardashian? here's the thing. what you're seeing on that page, that is chiefly algorithm driven. if you are seeing a lot of kim kardashian news, sir, because it is all you click on. [laughter] jake: one thing about the youtube interviews, so after the state of the union last year, 2015, president obama did three youtube interviews. two others that have a big following on youtube. he did them one after another. i think it has been viewed almost 4 million times, if i'm not mistaken.

one of the questions was, if you're a superhero, what would your power be? you are right. they were not being drilled. there were a few legitimate questions in there. by volunteered them. they should not exclude the media.

but they should do both. it reminded me of the state of the union experience we had with president bush in 2007, i guess it was, fanning out across the country to do events interviews about the policy that were in the state of the union, we went to kansas city this particular year to talk about health care. and we did an interview, a few things, get back on air force one, the president comes in the conference room and says, how is it playing out there? cable news on the tv in the

conference room, i said, sir, what is playing out there today is that the dna on anna nicole's baby carriage. he said, you mean we can stay home? [laughter] >> pretty sure he knew who anna nicole was. [laughter] jake: for the were a couple of points there. the people in kansas city and wichita, the regional matters, getting outside the beltway, the value of going there, you can never control is happening in the news, but in that particular instance, because if we had the national security and security apparatus would not let us upload to youtube from the white house. we do not have a channel available to us.

but we would've done the same thing i think, had we had that mechanism, in addition to that i mean, gone are the days when the nightly news was a national convening. it will not sit around anymore. the sunday shows, the relevance they used to have for driving the debate in the coming week, all but disappeared. and so, i think people are just experimenting still. when some daylight between two ferns, one of the single greatest communications moments of the white house. a president communicating with an audience he desperately needed to communicate with. it was important. it had national significance. i agree with you. it should not be done at these exclusion of the hard interview. marty: olivier mentioned the speech obama made at the toner prize, which is a price for politics journalism, let me read you what he said. "the job has gotten tougher, even as the appetite for information and data flowing into the internet is voracious, the news cycle has shrunk. too often there is enormous pressure to fill the void and feed the beast with instant commentary and celebrity gossip and softer stories. and we fail to understand our world, and one another, as well as we should. that has consequences for our lives in the life of the country."

he added that "we as a country have the obligation to maintain certain standards." i want to get your reaction to all that. because i want to know whether you think we are in an environment where news organizations are dumbing down the news? and whether all we are doing is just chasing? >> no. kathleen: it assumes that the news organizations that are here are the same producing cat videos. i think there is a lot of room between cat videos and serious, boring stories. there is a lot of room in the middle, that people should read and consume. that is a lot of what news or religions are trying to do, make information interesting so that people will read it. because we are competing with cat videos. >> peter baker of the new york times last summer had interesting comment on this. people were asking about media bias, being biased against him, more sensationalistic or whatever, he said yeah, but we are also biased against the simplistic. because we know, the last number i saw, 39 of the top news sites

got it from mobile traffic. so people are skimming. if you do not get them in the first couple of sentences, they're not going to read the whole story. i don't think the media dumbs it down. i think they have tried to to make it more successful, recognizing we are an organization that is consuming more news than ever, but we are skimming. kathleen: skimming is ok. information that is broken up to be accessible is a lot more effective then seeing some big long piece of type, thank you, we are trying to get to them. olivier: it is a 24/7 cycle that has this effect, but i disagree that it is speed that is the problem. if that was a problem, than the newswires would be dead, dumb, what have you. they are not. they are thriving. i've obviously biased, i am still a wire hack, but i don't think is that. it is the volume that bothers me. got to fill the air. how will we do it? you know what, we will speculate

about where the airplane is for days on end. not to knock a particular outlet, but it is the volume, not the speed. when i got on board the ap, 20 years ago, my god, writing about the united states for the rest of the world. that is changed in the digital world because they have yahoo! now. but when i started out you were not allowed to say in the lede house speaker newt gingrich. you had to say president bill clinton's top opponent in the united states congress. you had to address your audience, knowing it was not conversant.

individuals, things like that. i would argue that was not dumbing it down. it was just knowing the audience. i think right now, when i write for yahoo!, some of the stuff that does the best is still on drones, syria policy. some of that is partisanship. people want to hammer this president for what has happened in the middle east. some of it is that it is a headline grabbing story with tremendous visuals and drama. but we do not really done that

down. and to your point about skimming and mobile devices, it is true. but what we discovered is that one of the best times to put up a feature story is friday morning. because on friday, some of you know this, they go to their work, there in front of their computer, and they are not working. [laughter] >> one of my most successful, in terms of clicks online, what happens when the president stays in a hotel? all of the dynamics of how it is arranged,, how does he handle room service all of these other issues? with about four days we had about 5.5 million readers. it was a long story. so, what i said at the outset about how we have not figured out the magic formula, it is really true. you can see stories that you think would do great but does do not catch on fire. and you know, we get our traffic from two places. search, summit happened in syria? social media, a lot of people to come back to yahoo! who have a bookmark is a homepage. jake: that story got 5 million views because they haven't seen that before. i heard a scientist once that said brains cannot resist something that is new. so, the skimming, you sucked us all in with the school story we had not seen before. olivier: i think there is a lot of remarkable, tremendous journalism out there.

i think it plays an incredibly important role in not just providing the facts, but the contexts. right? for the consumer, i think there's a lot of hack journalism, calling himself journalists because in our platform. i don't think the problem is speed. and i not sure the problem is volume. i think it is the combination of the two. the fact that everyone is a wire reporter now, and they live on twitter, and too often now, retweeting is replacing reporting. and people are putting it out there, and you will see reporters retweet, without checking it out, with a disclaimer. "whoa, if true." [laughter]

marty: that doesn't cover? mo: if it is, it is a doozy. [laughter] mo: that doesn't work. a story has already been told. it is hard to walk it back. now that everyone is a wire reporter, in the breaking news, god, i hate that term, the breaking news business, and we are doing it at lightning speed that everybody has access to, that concerns me. marty: the broader question here, the president talked about diminished resources available to the news media these days. and clearly, we have far fewer resources than we had before. is that leading to less reporting? is that leading to less digging? are we really doing our jobs in terms of digging beneath the surface? mo: some of you are. jake: i think some of your doing it very well. i think a lot of people are not. and it is hard.

marty: less than there used to be? jake: pardon me? kathleen: i think less than there used to be. in the early part of my career, covering a lot of institutions that really touch people's lives, there is that a lot of lamenting over the last 15 years the buildings and the agencies, the stuff that is not getting covered. but if you look back at that stuff, a lot of it was perfectly dreadful. [laughter]

>> we were. my name is on some of those stories, vertically dreadful. i think it is good to have gotten rid of that, because that turnoff audiences. and was not a good use of time and energy. but i think there are a fair number of very effective news organizations, anchoring the one based here, provided that people need to have -- harder than going to a building and writing down what the men standing in front of microphones have to say. that was too much of our coverage for a long time. i would also like to turn this conversation more towards the business of government. we can talk about politics, it is a political year. but it is much more important to talk about what an administration, mayor, governor, president is doing in terms of governing. what are the policies? in this administration, all of them get worse than before, so we have a lot to look forward to january -- marty: you have a low opinion of some of the policy, really boring and dreadful, but even at the national level, are we not covering policy the way we used to? kathleen: i do think it gets short shrift. this administration makes it harder. but if you want to find something going on, you have to go through a public information officer. you cannot go directly to the scientist, trying to get something from the health and human services administration, you get routed right back to the white house political office and press office.

mo: the white house has minders. i went to cabo, and i will turn around and interview the minder. so, was north korea not an option? you don't want to work there? [laughter] >> but it is amazing. you sit there, and they will stop the question and the answer, unless you of course maybe are slightly confrontational. maybe. and say, you have to work for. kathleen: people in government are scared to talk to reporters, or anybody who just wants to ask a question. they can get prosecuted. they are prosecuted. you know, their careers are punished. doesn't that bother anybody? marty: at least an investigation. kathleen: don't you want to know what the people whose salaries you pay, not weather -- time in myfirst

source tell me they left their cell phone in the car so we could have a conversation without worrying about being tracked. but i am not a national security reported this story happen to be about the relationship between the cia and the white house. but even by your standards, name redacted, absolute paranoia, the level of control freakish miss is off the chart. kathleen: there is a guy in our office, standing and talking to the father at a soccer game, i have to walk away. if we talk anymore, i have to report to my boss. i am not making this up. that is a scary thing. >> we can talk about another example, mentioning twitter, how the white house uses it. marty: we are going to open up for questions momentarily. but go ahead. olivier: after this i'm giving you homework.

go look up "when the white house hates your tweet." it is looking at twitter as a kind of early warning mechanism, to watch how different reporters who are influential on different topics shape the whole perception, how they replace traditional news clippings, a real-time early warning system for them. and that goes both ways.

>> that is bad. twitter is becoming a national assignment editor, in a lot of ways. olivier: it is setting the narrative, what every reporter is plugged into the figure out what the narratives are. voters not paying attention. and it is a wonderful way to get an answer to a question that you can i get answered in a briefing. what the heck is the president doing about x? i cannot believe it. you get a phone call. marty: i was going to ask you

what can be done to improve things, but sounds like you don't have an answer for that. [laughter] >> why don't we open it up to questions? there are microphones. welcome any and all questions. put these guys on the spot, not me, but put them on the spot. >> i was going to ask, what could be done to improve things? but i guess we don't have an answer to that. [laughter] we will open it up to questions. we welcome any and all questions. put these guys on the spot -- not me. >> management comes from the top, usually, but how much of this is being driven by president obama over how the infrastructure of the white house is changing? with that, could you consider what they hillary clinton administration might look like in terms of relationships with the media? >> let me talk about it generationally. direction does come from the top. every time there is a new administration, there are young people who come in and most of them are full of the idea that a have just been elected to the biggest office in the world and there is a lot of hubris. a lot of the policy gets sent at a time when people are feeling -- woof, woof, you know? george stephanopoulos, when he showed off, he started closing the door and telling reporters

they cannot come in. there is an attitude thing that crosses party lines and it is absolutely common in every single white house. the line gets said that somewhere slightly better than what we do here is none of your damn business, but we will tell you what we need to know. it doesn't matter what the party is. whoever gets elected is going to be tighter about this. >> what about hillary clinton? what is your sense about that? >> i think very private. you? >> she hasn't given the washington post an interview in 18 months. on the other hand, we get donald trump on the phone all the time. [laughter] >> and he says he hates us. he is happy to speak with us. >> but she has started going to talk shows more. >> i can talk about hillary clinton in the context of the last campaign.

in 2008, the press office made a decision early on to be very controlling of the interactions. that did not work so well for her. i was her traveling press secretary after new hampshire. we started printing her a little bit -- we started prepping her a little bit more. sometimes it was on the record, sometimes it was off. sometimes it was just to connect on a human level. he was too late in the campaign cycle but it was dramatic to me how much the coverage shifted. not that she got puff pieces, but we were starting everything with less hostility between both sides. this is a problem in the social media era both at the reporter level and the staff level. we are losing that human interaction too much and those relationships that are so important. yesterday, i watched you greet each other.

these are two people who spent a lot of time together durin --during the bush administration. too often, we are losing that relationship because -- they are reporters i dealt with who i might never have met. i know who they are from twitter, but we are moving to a place where relationships -- that is the one thing i would urge my friends that are with the secretary now were moving forward. she is very good when she develops a relationship with someone. fromdon't need to hide her the press. she can actually hold her own very well. she is very likable when you get to know her. let the press get to know her a little bit better. it might not change the scrutiny, but just change the starting point of the discussion just a little bit.

>> so the answer is, more alcohol? [laughter] >> more alcohol, more socializing, but that is true in every aspect of life. >> that was not the answer i expected but it is a good one, actually. >> how do you balance competition versus manipulation when donald trump can call into a morning show and by phone say whatever he wants? at what point is a news organization say, we are not going to do that? there are analogs in all of your various segments. donald trump is the elephant in the press' room right now. what do you do about unfiltered

competition? >> that is a great question. >> one thing i wish people would do is actually know their subjects and ask follow-up questions so that when he makes claims such as, i opposed the iraq war and it turns out that is not true, that somebody can call him on that and they quote the facts. >> covering donald trump isn't handing him a microphone. we are supposed to leave, we are supposed to put things into context. to the extent that we have done a bad job of covering him. people defined coverage as we are going to show an empty podium for one hour. we had an interesting new cycle in which people covered donald trump without him. that was the stuff of the

veterans donations. they didn't need him. finally, that trump campaign approach of not answering any questions burnt them. a clearly drove him not. he handled it very capably but with that crazy press conference. it was a very interesting new cycle because for me it was, no, this is actually coverage. did he actually raise money? i don't need him to call me, he has already made these claims. i think you are seeing more of that now. there was a scene yesterday where he said he opposed the iraq war and they can say "trump says he did not oppose the iraq war (he did)." i had never seen that on a chyron before but i will commit. >> people have asked me before,

callingoint of trump shows, nobody ever calls meet the press -- is the media complicit in putting him on? should the clinton campaign dial in after he dials in. day, she dialed in to cnn. i think he is changing the rules of the game quite a bit in the media is complicit. there is an inherent tension. then inherent tension within the media between responsible journalism and good business practices. they are incompatible. sometimesre problems with him being on the phone.

we did this whole story about him pretending to be his own press spokesman. the reporter finally said, did you ever employ a spokesman by the name of john miller? and the line went dead. so we called back and said, we must have gotten disconnected. and they said, "he is not available right now." this is a problem when you are doing a telephone interview. with a candidate forced to answer the question -- >> my question is similar. we are seeing around-the-clock coverage on cable on the campaigns.

i wonder if a lot of times, as olivia says, looking at the empty podium, waiting for trump to appear, or when you get one side of versus the other side giving talking points of the day. i am wondering if a whole lot more coverage -- but, is cable dumbing down the coverage in this election campaign? we are seeing more than we have ever seen before but is there -- going into the general election, is there going to be a shift where we are going to get more serious journalism from cable? also, your impression of their coverage so far? >> a great reporter, asking 13 questions in one. [laughter] look, cable news operations are successful because audiences watch them. i think the mistake might be for us to assume that all media is alike and all coverage must be like. there has to be a menu for people to choose from. a lot of the work that the post and 80 and the times are doing to put serious material before readers and viewers in an interesting way doesn't mean that there cannot be other stuff that appeals to differing kinds of readers. i cannot watch many hours of it because it is very repetitive but that seems to be a system that works for them. >> are they just incapable of changing their ways? >> that is a question about viewers. >> why would they change it if it is working? >> why would they change? a few of us up here -- because a few of us up here think that they should? >> this is what i was talking about earlier with the tension between the desire to do smart

journalism as a public service and getting the ratings or clips. >> the maker to this question here. >> i would like to ask a question. you asked whether the public cares and, yes, i do. i think about the people on the team that i lead. i find it thoughtful and analytical and the story. i remember reading -- it gives context. we have talked about the nature of the relationship between the presidency and the press as a dialectic and i think that is a necessary dialectic.

moving towards antagonism -- does that hurt your feelings? had you see that evolving? >> what you mean by antagonism? >> the way in which mainstream media is now the punchline, that you are inherently biased because you are the press. i find that troublesome. >> i would like to find person who convinced the public that biased means "i did not like that story." it is hard because a couple years ago i did a series on big donors being nominated for ambassador ships from which they were unqualified. my reporting ended up killing one of the nominations. in one pivotal moment in this

series i did, the story got a lot of comments. yahoo! generates a lot of traffic, but even by our standards, it was more than i thought i would see. do not ever read the comments. no one has ever been to the comment section to say " that was a perfectly adequate story." the comment that most people had liked had moved up the chain, the number one comment was, "this is crap." >> we have one last question and we will have to be quick about it. >> why don't politicians and reporters take a speech course in college? i hear a lot of that in bill o'reilly, president obama. "uh...".he gaps with

trump sounds like a football player being interviewed. >> i knew i should have cut it off. [laughter] >> i apologize. in any event, we are done? thank you very much. [applause] >> all right. >> thank you very much. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2016] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] >> hillary clinton is in indiana this weekend at the mayor's conference. we will take you there live tomorrow. later that day, our conversation with vermont senator bernie sanders. he talks about the presidential race and his future plans. you can see that interview at 6:30 and 9:30 on c-span.

[cheering] >> the hard-fought 2016 primary season is over with historic conventions to follow this summer. >> colorado, florida, texas, ohio! >> watch c-span as the first delegates consider the nomination of the first woman ever to head a political party. watch live on c-span. listen on the c-span radio app. or get video on demand at c-span.org. you have a front row seat to every minute of both conventions on c-span, all beginning on monday, july 18. announcer: monday on me communicators, talking about cyber and data security.

and the report released in may on the management of information. that the federal government has almost 11,000 data centers. cracks facebook one of the in the data centers world has two of them. there is no reason the federal government should have 11,000. --gs for rage and seats have --for agencies have realized and announcer: watch the communicators. next, a communication with facebook operations director sheryl sandberg. she talks about bringing people together in the quality for the workplace. asking the question is arthur brooks. this is one hour.

>> welcome, ladies and gentlemen. welcome to aei. i am arthur brooks, president of delighted to welcome sheryl sandberg, the chief operating officer facebook to join us. been a busy day. this is something i've been looking forward to for a long time. in interview we have been hoping to do for months. we have had this on the books for four months. is one of you know, this of the last events we will do in this building. ofwill talk about somebody the issues that are important to you and important to me. file. give you a quick it is so impressive. the person we have on stage.

i want to dwell on what success looks like in america today. sheryl sandberg has been the ceo at facebook since 2008. when she first came to facebook, facebook had 70 million users, which seemed like a lot at the time. and 550 employees. the like button had yet to be invented. today, facebook has 1.6 billion users. over one billion users every day. 70 million was not that many, turns out. and more than 13,000 employees. she has done more than just that. and i say just that under advisement. she is the author of the 2013 best seller " lean in." she is also the founder of leanin.org. a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering women to achieve their ambition. -- should know that leein leanin has spawned circles of

women who are talking about the issues they are facing. this is social capital building. this is activism at its best. believe it or not, sheryl sandberg began her career here in d.c. good things and entrepreneurship can happen here in washington, d.c. it is a rarity for silicon valley executives. after studying at harvard, she later served of chief of staff in the treasury department during the clinton administration. sheryl sandberg, welcome to aei. ms. sandberg: thank you for inviting me here today. and thank you for your friendship. mr. brooks: we have been wanting to have this conversation for a long time. you and i met in 2006 and we were both interested in philanthropy. i had written a controversial book about who gives more to charity, conservatives or liberals? i was talking about it at stanford and sheryl sandberg was very interested. she came to a talk that i gave and she said, that is one of the most interesting people i have

ever met and it is great that we are going to meet again for this particular conversation. i have got a lot of questions and so does our audience. i want to get right to it. you are kind of in the belly of the political beast. one month ago, facebook was in the middle of something that had flared up in which people had asserted that the trending topics at facebook had been either manipulated or had done something to suppress conservative views. i do not want to get into the weeds, but can you discuss the controversy and how it was dealt with? then we can move on to other topics. ms. sandberg: facebook is a platform for all ideas and voices. as arthur said, we have 1.6 billion people using the platform which means all ideas have to be able to be expressed. trending topics is a product which says which topics are trending. we have an editorial team but that was impor b