we will have to create a civilization of lifelong learning spirit and no civilization has ever done that. >> watch >> coming up, the impact of the media industry and so-called fake news. president trump signed to build and a lot related to law enforcement. sean spicer and scott pruitt taking questions from reporters about the president's decision to a straw from the paris climate agreement. house minority leader nancy --osi's weekly hearing on briefing on capitol hill. rise of fake news. topics include the 2016 presidential campaign and the role of social media. this is part of a daylong forum. -- it is one hour.

>> good evening, everybody. . am the executive director in partnership with the carnegie council for ethics and national advance, a network of australians dotted around the world, i would like to welcome you here this evening for what is a very hot topic. i have only been in the states less than 12 hours, almost 24 hours, since i arrived last night. newseeing how big an issue is. as i mentioned this morning when speaking to the very first group, it is a delicious thing that we are having this conversation on the first of april. because of course, it is april fools' day. the significance of that for me

is, the role of a fool in history. as you know from literature and things like kingsley are, the job of the fool was always to speak truth to power. foolse a room full of tonight, if you do not mind me saying so. the people who like to speak theh to power and truth to powerful. it can reside in conventional ideas, assumptions, things that can hold us in sway. we will talk about that in a moment. before we do, let me mention a couple things. if you're tweeting, we have the world's longest hashtag. there will be books on sale privately at the library around the corner. i am hoping distinguished authors may even consent to sign a few afterwards. to, but ift bound

you are kind to them, they will. another thing i will mention is the format. if you just come to this one, there are two empty chairs. they will eventually be opened up to you as members of the audience who might like this take -- like to take a seat at the table. you might have a question or comment -- a brief question, a brief comment, which you will put and allow one of the panel to respond to. it is a temporary chair to you. not that your contribution is not equally valued, but there might be other members of the audience that would like to take this opportunity. our chair will announce and you will line up over there. have a visit, ask a question and make way for somebody else. let's see if we can do the heavy lifting here.

i will not go through all the advisors, you can read about them. have some and rushed he. welcome them. ushdie.ave salman r welcome them. >> our topic is fake news, free speech, and the media. i thought it would start with one of the latest tweets from our eminent leader. earlier this morning, the world woke up to the following, "when will sleepy eyes, chuck todd, nbc news talk about the obama surveillance scandal and stop with the fake trump russia story?" that was followed, "it is the same fake media that says no victory for trump is pushing the phony russia story.

a total scam!" i think what this tweet says as we open our discussion, what we mean when we say the fate -- phrase, fake news? president trump as one idea and i think many other have a different idea. just to lay some facts out on the table before we start a centerion, the research reported that 62% of u.s. adults get news from social media. the top three sources of their social news includes facebook, twitter, and read it -- reddit. at the same time, the senate intelligence committee held a meeting in which someone from the george washington university law center says russia pays more than 1000 people to spread anti-clinton stories online. many of them, frauds.

fake news expands the political spectrum from stories that include hillary had parkinson's disease, to come up trump snorts cocaine at trump tower. jeff green told 60 minutes this past weekend that fake news consumers on the left in particular were more likely to be affluent and college educated right tended to be middle-aged, 40's and 50's. the media has fallen to historic lows, just 32% of americans telling the gallup organization they are confident in the media. where do we draw the line between fact and misinformation? how do we define fake news? when hoaxes take place? that is what we will start discussing for the next hour. include somemight

of my favorite fake news headlines from the election just to get us started. pope francis endorses donald trump. [laughter] >> this one i had to look up to make sure it was not true, ireland excepting refugees from trumps america. and, trump sent plane to transport 200 marines. this was popularized by fox news personality sean hannity. we haven't the status panel and i want to get them before we turn it over to you guys in audience. i thought he would ask salman rushdie first, as a writer of fiction and nonfiction, where do you draw the line? rushdie: i think there is something called the truth. >> a controversial statement. [laughter]

rushdie: if you believe the world is flat, the world is not need you to believe it is round to be right. if you believe it is flat, you're just wrong. that is where i start. been a belief which is enormously eroded in recent times. strangely, the term fake news has done a flip. it started off being as you are saying, crazy stuff from the internet. and may become malicious stuff from the internet put there by russians. i read that specifically targeting bernie sanders voters, and early -- in order to detach them from hillary, with some degree of success. but now, in the postelection

house from white nowh all untruth flows is itsping it and accusing opponents in the mainstream media of being liars. truth and lies have done a curious backflip and it is worrying. if we are going to live in a truth is simply an aspect of your personal belief system, that is a very unstable society. practitioner -- steve bannon calls the opposition party. healthld you assess the

of the so-called mainstream media, or the media more broadly today? i do not think it is particularly healthy. we have a larger institutional problem with dealing with questions of fact and truth and reality in the political process. is in theat russia headlines as often as it is and we are discussing it here. i would recommend to anyone interested in this idea of 21st century information environment to read a book called "nothing is true and anything is possible. the it is an account of post-soviet russia from the perspective of a british reporter, born in in britain, went back to soviet russia after the fall. oligarchs used minute of truth as a political tool. it is not pressing views on

it is much more free-flowing, mercurial, harder to nail down. you see it at work at a place like pressured today, which is in state affiliated server the united states and europe. it manifests itself in extensive coverage of conspiracy theories and highly entertaining, but very fringe type news coverage under the guise of news. but a royal -- a loyal russia today viewer comes away not knowing what to believe. that is the real danger, a post-truth populace, but -- is much more easy to manipulate. in that sense, that model of propaganda where you are not telling people what to think

that making it impossible for them to know what truth is, is the real danger. unfortunately, and you mention statistics in trust in media, another institution woefully incapable that has fallen down on the job is the news media. it has to do with a lack of humility in political coverage. with people not knowing what they do not know. and with thinking their opinion is valid and important because they hold it. -- i live iniew washington, d.c., where everyone has an opinion and everyone can write. that does not make you special and no one cares what your opinion is. unless you are a george will or renowned commentator -- >> who cares about their opinions, either? mr. markay: you should be

measured by the fact of what you bring to the table. that is an increasingly rare trait among reporters who see more value in telling people what they should think instead of simply putting information out there. mr. continetti: we have boys struggle with this problem, right, mollie hemingway? it is not as though the media always gets it right. how do we get to it? ms.right, mollie hemingway: thes issue it has always been a problem, it is or is been with us. i like it when it was more in enquirer, hillary has an alien baby type of delightful form of fake news. now it has spread in nefarious do some seems to people. it is a real thing and real research has been done on it. research has been going on for quite some time. shortly after the election what should have happened in our media environment is reflection.

self reflection about what a poor job we had done understanding the populace, the people, people who think differently than we do. rather than do that, many people in the media chose to latch onto this idea of fake news and turn dgel, one political cu that did not have much substantiation. it did not have much impact on the election and whatnot. mention, but credibility from the media is at historic lows. you mentioned the gallup polls show 32% -- this was in september -- probably more since then, 32% of americans thought mean stream media, big newspapers, big tv companies did a good job conveying the news fairly, accurately, honestly. among conservatives, that number plummets to 14%. there is a no trust in these institutions.

that is something that happens of time.ng period we just heard the white house is the font of all untruth. in recent years, you had a main rapea push to talk about culture on campus. it was something you saw a lot of stories on, a shared interest. part of that was that "rolling stone" put out a story about the rapes and itg animated a lot of people. it was a story based on something that no cover story for a magazine should have been based on. an incredible report, turned out to not have any substantiation. only the most recent example of the big media outlet getting something completely wrong on a very important topic and pushing narratives over facts. you do that enough times -- we could going to many examples of how this has been done over

time, you lose the trust of the people and great an environment where it is difficult push back against fake news. on election day i was at an event at the new york times at 6:00, 6:30 in the evening. all the heavy hitters from the -- hitters were there. not one of them had any sense of what was about to happen. this is a three hours before trump was president. "then your times" was talking about what the headline should be the next day and they decided it should be "madam president." itn they were discussing it, was a foregone conclusion. that "the new york times" could get it so wrong when the polls were actually closing, the 11th hour and 59th minute, is a shock. you are right, it should have

led to some reflection. sometimes i think between the reporters who stay in washington and new york, the editors based in the major cities, are susceptible to bubble thinking, group thought. i had a conversation with a "the new york times" correspondent who was following then candidate trump about what a shambles his campaign was, from a fashionable standpoint. she turned to me and said, you know what, i think he could still do it. the reason she said that was because it she was on the road, following him into her world communities and these distressed, former industrial areas. she said, i was consistently surprised by the people who would approach me and sotto voce say, i am still going to vote for him. mr. rushdie: the trumpet but was completely underestimated. you could call it an irrational

hatred of hillary clinton, including by many women voters. an, i can vote for her thing, that was much larger than we thought. mr. continetti: salman rushdie began the conversation by saying he believes in truth. it occurred to me in the course of our discussion, that is a contested a man, isn't it? we have lived through a generation where the idea of truth has been disputed. the idea of deconstruction, national literary theories. from the academy, what is your perspective on that? >> i want to speak on salman rushdie's premise, which i share. there has the long -- been a long tradition of the misperception of the consequences of the theory of fortivity, for example, appropriation of an idea of

uncertainty. and the influence of the observer on a scientific event. these are scientific things that have sunk into popular and academic culture to puncture the notion of absolute truth. there has been something of that. issue,ant to go to the people of gotten stuff wrong all the time. what is the idea of truth about? it is about rules

i think it makes voters think there is nothing we can do to keep the media from being just hostile to whoever a republican nominate. >> thereat's not fair. the public aree, responsible having an overheated interest in the private lives of candidate. i'm interested in what they want to do for the country. i don't really care about the private lives. but we like to read about them.

it is a commercial operation. want to dig up dirt. second, you're absolutely right. both candidates were irresponsible about giving true, reliable information about their health. i understand that because they are relatively old people. at the age of 70, they are not fundamentally healthy, because they're, their connection to mortality is a lot closer. so, there can be with them. so, i don't expect either of them. mr. trump is not a healthy person and mrs. clinton. is giving pot doctor him a drug for his hair growth, which when you look it up, does not actually work. whether is only that i, mitt romney is a liberal republican probably he is, i accepted. you would know more about it than i. i just never thought his

candidacy was harmed by this uniform. we need to put a stop to reading it. they are feeding us what we want to hear. i agree on the personal front, on the health front, neither distinguished her or himself. mollie's larger point, when you're dealing with political information and the day-to-day of our political system, it is not a perfect academic test environment where you can determine truth and falsehood in that sort of sterile way. instead, you are getting information to people who are themselves fallaible. who say things they should not or inject their own personal bias into the things they cover. so, the challenge for the press is to minimize the degree in which-- through which that information is transmitted.

we would regard as the normal scientific process of discovery of truth. >> and presidents have lied about their health for a long time. look at wilson, for instance. roosevelt. >> roosevelt. getting away from the health aspect and that specific question of that particular election, i think, you know, t he, the fact that journalist by a large, and i am one of these, i was raised in new york and lived in washington. i'm very much a creature of the -- and i try to recognize that on a day-to-day basis in my work and try not to make pronouncements that might be informed by some of my cultural and political biases with the understanding that if i put an opinion out there or projection or something like that, and it ends up being wrong orients of disregarding a very large segment of the political populace -- or it ends up disregarding. readers.ying

i think there is a human element here that makes it much more difficult to conduct those sorts of dispassionate -- >> we'll open it up. >> the creature of the corridors. great title for a horror movie. horror film. [laughter] it seems to me we can all come up with occasions when the press have it horribly wrong. we can equally come up with the opposite. when the press did us a national service and getting things right. that people try to conceal, which only because it is the most famous -- watergate comes to mind. i think part of the reason for this is that the mainstream media have been financially impoverished. there are fewer working journalists to dig out truths and larger and larger of numbers of opinion people filling up the spaces which report high should -- reportage used to fill in.

that is a problem. it seems to me that we live in a change situation. we live in a situation where on his first day in office, the president of the united states declared war with the news me dia. and declared them to be his enemy. and afterwards expanded that to make them the enemy of the people, a term whi ch stalin would recognize. i'm sure that mr. trump is unfamiliar but he may of heard of stalin. if he hasn't then steve bannon has. if you are in a situation where the most popular authority in the land declares the news media to be not only his personal adversary but also the enemy of the american people, that is a changed situation in which carpi

ng about this and that imperfection about the media is no longer -- >> i think it is time to open it up to. >> i think this is undermined also by the fact that with the internet we have the ability to silo ourselves. to confirm our beliefs by not, we don't share a common source anymore. thatthink it must be noted throughout this campaign, the media were openly oppositional. on the front page of the new york times middle of august 2 had the media reporters say, what do you do when you think donald trump is a threat to the republic? was acknowledging that reporters think this and they need to behave in an oppositional stance, that they are going to be accused, they're going to be accused of not upholding journalistic standards. it is such an important issue that you have to see this way. the idea this is just coming from president trump when it is a two-sided war.

a historying from of, you say the presidency and powerful. the media are also powerful and the media tend to have of your own no set of corporate ideas. if you're someone who does not share those ideas, it does feel like you are under threat, under assault by the media that will literally go roaming the countryside trying to find people, heretics who do not share the same views on sexual ethics, to highlight them as shame none and go after them. that does feel very threatening and should not be surprised when people react as if it is a threat. >> let me say two the media did an enormous job in making the trump candidacy possible. they gave him colossal time. cnn despises -- loved having him on because it is the thing he most admires, which is ratings. i think the media did a great job enabling it in the first place.

thing, at this encounter at the new york times, one of the things that the editor said is, during the course of the campaign, they have far more protests from the hillary camp then they did from the trump camp. but the hillary camp believed themselves to be badly treated, more than the trump camp did. ms. hemingway: in their defense, they did a good job covering it, despite the first page story. mr. rushdie: it was one-sided. mr. continetti: as a practitioner, we have heard about standards and practices from two people, how do you suss out the truth? what should reporters be doing? my day-to-day is trying to find some new bit of information and then confirming the information. it can be something very small, a panelnot have to be

of papers. my background is in document digging and investigative reporting. i find that much more -- i feel like i am on firmer ground when i'm dealing with public records and investigative reporters. they confirm some sort of drama i the white house because find comfort in that factual basis for the things that i write. --i think to the degree access journalism, there is a proud tradition of that in american politics. and bernstein had their anonymous sources, obviously. but i think that grounding whatever you are writing in fact, that sounds obvious to say that, but rather the end and speculation by a apolitical staff with an ax to grind, i

search for something concrete that i can use as the anchor for the things that i write. there was a shift where a lot of media went. that may be because of the economic reasons you pointed out. the advertising injury -- industry. this is a very bad trend. it leads people to jump to conclusions. if there was less focus on the outcome and more focus on the process we could ground ourselves in facts. when a powerful person like a prime president or minister says something that is not true, it has the consequence far more

reaching than media searching might be. here is an example. hungarye minister of -- the television to say central european university was in violation of a hungarian law. there is no such law. he said it over national television. newspaperay, even the had to say, they were not in violation of any law at all. the retraction has this bounce. that untruth has this bounce. because, who is the voice? the prime minister, the leader of my country. they do not expect a leader to lie in such a boldfaced manner. saveontinetti: you president trump has been singularly unsuccessful -- the rating is upside down. a. hemingway: think about

single statement, if you like your health care plan, you can keep it. the media was not skeptical of president obama for his entire eight years. now they want to do journalism now that trump as president. six times, they raided some version of true before they named it after he won the election and obamacare was passed -- this is the media question. the way you build credibility is holding all people accountable, whether they are people you absolutely adore and love, such as president obama, or for those that you have absolute emotional dislike. [applause] >> i do not love any of these people. the explanation president obama gave was ahead of putting in the program. determine that he lied or made a mistake, right? ms. hemingway: there was

analysis going into it. i am not defending president obama. theory, twohics wrongs do not make a right. ms. hemingway: there were so many scandals people would have loved to have the media care about. now they care about everything whether it is a scandal or not, and now they have lost their voice because they just took in eight years now. mr. rushdie: i do not believe the media was deeply in love with president obama. it is a retrospective thinking to think so. as i said, change the trajectory. president declaring the media to be the enemy of the people, that is the situation we are in. at earlier moments in american history, they are not comfortable. the entire force of the state is aimed against -- it is an

extremely important part of democracy. [applause] during the obama presidency you did have attacks on the media. people who had charges against them for reporting. you had actions taken against reporters. people should have been alarmed at that time. last week in california you had action taken against reporters for how they did their journalism. you do not hear people upset about it because is it conservative journalists against a liberal attorney general. these are things people should be concerned about, no matter what. >> we have some questions, so please approach the table. >> why do we have the french flag on the table? [laughter] >> it is subtle.

why don't we begin here. i am name is rick solomon, the chair of the advisory board that was just established, called shadowing trump. i urge you to follow it. i do have a comment. it is 17 different cabinet secretaries, including bob rice of the clinton administration, laura tyson of the obama administration, larry tribe of harvard law school and others speaking truth to power. truth trumps lies. i think huxley said it best, facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. and to the comments, i would like to ask -- i think we are living in truly unprecedented times. i can see no analog in this country. when there is contempt for science, dissent, the media, the judiciary, it could lead to

authoritarianism. i would welcome comment. >> any response, or should we move on? >> i think there is a problem in the respect for science evidence and there is a link between the attack on the state and also truth that one does not want to believe. it can do great damage. there are some things we do not know exactly what it is. and that should be made clear, as well. but i think that this is unprecedented. .nd the disregard you see it also the proposals to the budget to really diminish the investment, the american investment in basic science and the science of enterprise. but the public is slightly hypocritical. when they walk into a hospital, they expect to get the best benefits of science. history politics or

that it matters. but when it comes to my blood pressure, science matters. [applause] i have a question on the different models of media that are evolving. you have spoken about some of the new models, such as millennials get a significant amount of their news from snapchat and other social media networks. use, is also crowd sourced where you upload or download, and that determines what news gets read more heavily. there is a new model in some countries like the netherlands, called bundled news media, which is evolving again. each of these are fraught with the issues we faced with fake news, etc.. -- what areerits the merits of news media? what will it mean for the consumption of news media going forward? i get my news daily from

twitter, for the most part. that is my homepage. but i have found it has a tendency -- our self reinforcing tendency, partisan news, social media. easy to become siloed in an environment like that. i found that each of these sites, facebook, twitter, reddit, has its own character and the type of content recirculated. since the election, late in the campaign, i found twitter being less and less useful as it became louder and more shrill. toound myself migrating back the so-called mainstream media. delivery is a less important characteristic for news than content. i inevitably find myself going

back to places that do content well, no matter how i get there. this is just my personal news consumption habit. there needs to be an effort made on part of the news consumer to seek up that content. whatever delivery mechanism they used to find it, as long as it is exposing you to new information, i think it is great. problem with ae lot of the new media information sites, they are aggregation sites. they are gathering stories from elsewhere. they are not really journalists in the old-fashioned sense. they are not going out to get the news. they are going out to read the news and extracting those stories which they want to pass on to their particular audience. until the internet world can find an economic model which allows journalism to take place,

original journalism to take place, then it is a much lesser form in the form that is being damaged by it. which is old-fashioned leg work. it is a great trend in journalism that billionaires have decided their new hobbies will be newspapers. jeff bezos, and so on. they want to put up the money to support quality journalism, i think that is great. i heard he was hiring 60 new journalists for the washington post newsroom. >> my application is in the mail. mr. rushdie: 60, that is a lot. two quick points. i am troubled by an attempt to evaluate trump's pushback against the media on in

anational basis -- on irrational basis. it is the result of emotion. the guy petulantly tweets. does that have to do with any rational analysis of the media? i remember that moment after donald trump won the presidency. he even said he would not tweet as president, but the next morning he was out with a string of insults. you could people -- you could see people thought, oh, this will keep going. i am active on twitter. twitter is an amazing place were people reveal what they think about things. including journalists, constantly signaling to each other. trump tweets and journalist had the same snarky reaction and same approach.

they are all sharing it and saying it. i do not know what is more discouraging, that he is still tweeting, or that they are still having the same reaction to it. you have to decide whether you want to enable it. i feel like trump and journalists are in a dysfunctional, codependent relationship where they thrive on it. [laughter] mr. rushdie: i agree with that. and i think your question is very good. my fear is that it is not a person, is irrational think it is very calculated. if you are just a nutty guy who cannot contain his immediate responses, and happened to be president of the united states, you are right, there is no codependency. he just woke up this morning, forget about it, like the boy who cried wolf. i think this is immensely calculated and very effective for his base. >> i do not know if it is

calculated so much as trump is a creature of the media. it is the environment in which he was brought up. there was an anecdote in the campaign about how he will go back and watch his own appearances on tv but do it with the sound off. he will look at his physical presence on television. i believe there is social science that suggests that your physical presence on television determines viewer reaction much more than what you actually say. to me that demonstrated he has a profound knowledge, maybe natural knowledge, of how media works. whether or not that is intentional are calculated, he is clearly very good at it. as a media: manipulator, he is very smart. that as atunate president, he shows himself to be an incompetent authoritarian. if he were a competent authoritarian, we would be in

much more trouble. [laughter] >> thank you for being here, you touched a bit how the role of traditional media has played, but i think there are other aspects allowing this to happen. one being the actual algorithms social media uses to allow these echo chambers to exist. another being, the discourse, we have seen it here today, that of the elites should be mistrusted. the people who are teaching information should be mistrusted. it is interesting to see that coming from people who are doing the thinking, the teaching. i think that contributes to distrust of truth as fact. how can we address that? >> this is something like facebook, a major social engine, the main propagator of news, real and fake, is taking it as seriously as they can. they are having difficulty. they are trying on projects,

establishing institutions to fact check content that has been flagged by users. they have to massage this algorithm. at the end of the day, they are looking to make a buck. it is a countervailing pressure, as well. the so-called left, which does not exist, in my view, they are partly guilty for this elite discussion. in america, egalitarianism mixes with anti-intellectualism. ien i go in for my surgery, expect the person, she who operates on me, to be a member of the elite. [laughter] >> i did not choose her at random. and there are some things where expertise legitimate that i need to rely on. of massivekind reaction, you're right.

a mistrust, because the elite, which we are part of, has been unbelievably smug, unbelievably arrogant, has forgotten how to talk to ordinary people -- we talked to ourselves. we do not go out to places. agnostic or have no respect for religion, but it is a mistake. they need to go out and talk to people who think differently. we are partly prisoners of our own mistakes. ms. hemingway: also consider the possibilities in the minds of many people. it is not just a reaction against elites or intellectualism, but the belief that elites have been truly wrong. you would not go to your doctor if you was killing every third patient. shouldld understand that affect where you are going. a are people that really do believe that certain beliefs, whether in media or politics, have not done a good job. it is based on more than just a motion. -- emotion. mr. rushdie: can i say something

about this word? coming from what used to be the left, the term elite would seem to apply to a government of billionaires. if they are talking about who is the elite -- when we see the studies about the tiny minority of americans that controls almost all the wealth and america, that seems to me to be an elite. what we are talking about is the operation of the professional class. the professional class historically is considered middle-class. the idea that that has been transformed into an elite, when these people have the mega elite presenting themselves as the men of the people, it is an upside down world in which we live. my question is, we are

running ahead with all these things, redefining the original premise of, what is media? for some reason, media means liberal in some way. it is like fake news, all the way back to the mainstream media. people say, that is fake news. real news is always about liberal. type --tive -- the fox it is always taking shots at the media. or people will say, that is fake news, look at this posted on facebook or some obscure website, as if that is not a news source. whether it is real or fake, left or right, what is news? or anytime somebody researches or makes up something and puts it out, it has to be considered media. thatt is a false dichotomy comes from a leftist viewpoint. i do not even know what they

collect, a secret minority that is oppressed. but they are both putting out news, whether it is from a red state or my blog or fox news or cnn, it is all considered news. news has to be real or fake, news or not news. what is news these days? i always, as an editor of a site that tries to do hard news, i find it something i did not know. something that is new to me, literally, novel. >> i think the question is good. the news has to go to a basic truth. it is hard work to figure out whether something is true. you read it, it looks plausible, but how do you know if it is true? the theory of the press is that it was independent and had standards and could ferret out -- was there a flood in miami or was there not? >> but then there is news, and

there is the media. the medium is more what the question was. what delivery mechanisms, what organizations that are delivering the news we consider the media? i do not have an answer to that. i think anyone with a snapchat account or what have you can be reporting news. does that make them the media? i think it is an issue of shorthanded terminology. you will have different definitions from different people. mr. rushdie: i think we have to work very hard in the next period of time to get the american people to have a belief in truth again. a truth which is based on evidence, etc. >> it is hard when you spent 22 years in an educated person's life telling them there is no such thing as truth, that you

have to look at everybody's subjective perspective, that there is no one truth. >> i feels ari for education, if that is what they taught you. [laughter] it right. >> thank you very much for having me, and the great discussion. -- thing i noticed was funny i believe it is a bipartisan discussion where everyone is very comfortable, laughing at the president. it is funny, to some extent, i agree. just hadstrikes me, we a long conversation about affirmative action and schools having benefit, different effects in a school system, enormous value to everyone. as i look at the news media, it seems to me in the mainstream news, it is a group of very liberal people reporting the news to basically everyone.

there are certainly exceptions to this. but is there any merit or consideration, at least in the major news media outlets of enforcing the equivalent of affirmative action, which is different elite systems in the news? ms. hemingway: i've talked about this so much because i am a media critic. there is very little diversity of thought in newsrooms. it is not just a political problem, it has to do with other things like religious issues, racial issues. there is a general group that sameoughly the socioeconomic status, similar educational backgrounds. it creates a lack of understanding about what is happening in the world. there been programs that have attempted to reach out and bring different people. racially, they have tried to have more diversity in newsrooms. but it is not worked well. i thought about other things. maybe since you cannot actually

higher people -- maybe you could have one person that serves as a soubles advocate -- devil' advocate, to show you what your newspaper missed. it is not just reporters, it is editors. not made these moves in the last few months is deeply disconcerting for the project of having credibility. >> a final question, please. >> the day of the london terrorist attack i turned on the , i do not have a pedigree in politics, i am just interested. flippinglly, i was through all channels available on my tv set, stopping regularly at cnn. i do not know what the trump was, but atr

intermittent moments from when i woke up when it happened until night, not one word until the very end of the day what happened. we talk about a media final -- funnel. at what point was the media responsible for putting trump in office? i was listening to that all day long. at the end of the day, no matter what it is, that is what you heard. that day stood out to me because i was looking for something. colloquialism is an old problem, most americans read books by americans. most americans want to hear news about americans. but international coverage in the news media generally is lacking. if you come from reading british and european news it is very clear how different that is. >> there is a trump-specific

element to it. the president of cbs news says try may be bad for america, but he is damn good for ratings. >> the press actually being the most powerful country in the world, we deprive citizens of a real understanding. our relationship with the world abroad is handwritten by how little news we have from around the world, that actually in the end does affect who we are. >> thank you all for joining me in this conversation. [applause] >> it's been fantastic. let me tell you what's about to happen. in half an hour, we will be moving to something different. we will be moving to a

hypothetical. youngs when the panel, leaders of the future, we are going to work through a fictional set of issues arising in a likely or possible future. it's a different format. i don't know what the scenario is. they will be asked to react as it unfolds. the books will be available. pleaseeverybody departs, join me in thanking our guests at the table. thank you. [applause] pharma fbi director james comey testifies next week before the senate intelligence committee is part of the investigation into russian activity during the 2016 election.al

we will have live coverage of the open hearing thursday starting at 10 a.m. eastern on c-span3. you can also watch live online at c-span.org, or listen on your apple or android device with the free c-span radio app,. . >> don't be afraid of your ambition, of your dreams, or even your anger. those are powerful forces, but harness them to make a difference in the world. stand up for truth and reason. >> remember this. nothing worth doing ever, ever, ever came easy. meansing your convictions you must be willing to face criticism from those who lack the same courage to do what is right. >> remember what it felt like to gain that new perspective, to understand that new knowledge, to eestnet test, to master a new skill or maximize your talent. and iife knocks you down,

promise you, it will knock you down, you will get back up because you know what it takes to rise. >> saturday night at eight eastern, 2017 commencement speakers. this weekend's speakers include hillary clinton wellesley college in massachusetts, president donald trump at liberty university in virginia, senator bernie sanders at brooklyn college in new york, rep. mia love at the university of hartford in connecticut, u.s. deputy attorney general sally eights at harvard cambridge,in president and ceo of hewlett-packard meg whitman at carnegie mellon, and national institute of health director dallas.collins in saturday night at 8 p.m. eastern on c-span and c-span.org. at the white house on friday,

president trump assigned to bills into law. one provided funding for law enforcement agencies to recruit and hire military veterans, and another allows family members of officers killed in the line of duty to collect benefits faster. the bill signing ceremony is just under 10 minutes. pres. trump: hello, everybody. thank you all. it's a great honor.