the disaster in japan hours after an eight point nine earthquake triggered a tsunami now another threat looms japan's nuclear reactors are on red alert so could your pan be on the brink of its own chair noble. sending mixed messages as the u.s. vice president praises reset with russia and other u.s. officials he seems to be stuck in another decade cold war mentality anyone. and that would be old and in with the new is it time for the new york times to get with the times huffington post seems to think so we'll debate old media versus news .

it's friday march eleventh four pm in washington d.c. i'm christine friends out there watching our city. well to start off today we want to look at the situation in japan where a catastrophic eight point nine earthquake struck off the coast there followed by a devastating tsunami that battered many regions of the country now officials estimate thousands are dead and thousands more missing throughout the day today devastating pictures of cars being fronts on highways by powerful water and people literally running for their lives that the most major damage was to the port city of sendai in the northeastern part of the country and the close of major city to the epicenter of the earthquake and now of the aftereffects include not only aftershocks but fears of a radioactive fallout after a japanese nuclear power plant northeast of tokyo is having the major issues i want

to go now to columbus ohio and speak to harvey wasserman he is the author of solar topia our green powered earth eighty twenty thirty of harvey i know you know all lot about these kinds of things in a looks like there are problems of several power stations in japan but it looks like the reactor at fukushima daiichi power station actually had more serious is it serious issues malfunctions with the coal it cooling for from there i can you tell us what this all means what we don't know yet what it will be that we do know that secretary of state hillary clinton has said that we're shipping in the united states the shipping in whose orders she may have misspoken we could she sending in batteries and a backup generators because this is a nuclear plant right fukushima loses power it's not going to be able to get cool enough to avoid a major disaster this is a very serious situation this is the second time in four years that six or more japanese reactors have been subjected to serious damage at earthquake we hope the

japanese word for this there are fifty five reactors in japan. i feel glad you brought that up because i was so confused by that myself when i heard that the u.s. was delivering coolant it didn't seem to make sense that that would actually be of any help to the people there going to some depth about the chain reactions that can happen here certainly it starts off and the systems fail and you know the cooling system stuff but what are some concerns that could happen you know as the hours and the days go on. well if if the cooling system fails the super heated radioactive fuel rods will melt and if they melt your have of them don't you could conceivably have an explosion if there's too much water in the area and never turns into. steam it could blow off the pressure vessel and could result in a huge release of radiation i've read an article about this we have maps showing

radiation releases but the reality is that it could be literally an apocalyptic event now i don't know if this is too far reaching but i connect the dots a little bit i know you've done a lot of research and a lot of writing about chair noble. the worst nuclear power plant accident in history and this is this happening the area now called ukraine there were a lot of radioactive huge amounts of radioactive fuel dispersed into the air is this something that we could possibly be worried about happening in japan absolutely i mean i hate to say it but absolutely this reactor could blow there could be radiation releases of an apocalyptic scale god forbid seen the pictures japan has been hammered enough but the reality is that they have built fifty five reactors are on or near earthquake faults and you know we have four reactors here in the united states and california that are also very close to earthquake faults

if than eight point nine richter scale earthquake that hit california if you have ok now have no free i know for radiation could have been released to cover the entire united states if this happens in japan this radiation could blow deep into russia and you know all way into all over china russia korea the entire western part of asia could be affected. it's certainly interesting you mention california a lot of people talking about not just the weather effects but sort of comparing as you did you know if this nuclear plants in california were hit in the same way i think it's so interesting to make those connections i'm curious are people in japan right now reacting the right way i mean what kind of aid do they need right now and what should they be doing. it's off scale i mean looking at the damage that's been done by the bird tsunami it's hard to conceive of what's really going to happen

there but to add in radiation is is beyond belief you know we're facing in this country a decision there is thirty six billion dollars in the twenty twelve budget for new nuclear plants and how this country or any country could even consider building new nuclear plants in light of what's happened a second time now in japan is inconceivable we hope that the japanese come through this but we're also are really praying that it doesn't wind up being a radio active disaster as well as a tsunami disaster because selous and thousands of people will die as you probably know there's been a new study you shoot about chernobyl the indicates as many as nine hundred eighty five thousand people were killed eternal by radiation release a second feasibly happen again because this fukushima reactor is in a much more heavily populated area then sure it all was in the ukraine in one nine hundred eighty six and as you were just talking there have harvey we are playing

some pictures that are just absolutely crazy these scenes of these houses just floating away what was your reaction when you you know got up this morning and you saw this and did this cross your mind that this could be an issue i know that japan gets the majority of their of their power from these nuclear stations much more than any other country i think other than france maybe. this is a huge issue for them yes because japan much of japan about a third will boost electricity from these reactors at their shirt. god forbid it should be a major accident here and focus shima they may want to actually shut the rest of them without power the situation like this it was bad enough living in a regular time without power but it emergency c time we really do need power. people's lives in hospitals and other situations the pen was just one of the reasons crazy to be dependent on nuclear power these reactors are way too fragile

way to go on rubble and you know i've been up since three o'clock in the morning here i was called by a friend of mine precisely because of this i've been writing on this since pretty much it started when i looked at those pictures. of the wave that came into japan sixty miles from the coast i thought there's no nuclear plant that could stand up to this and we've added reactors that have been hit by the big numbers from the earthquake but thankfully no them have been. inundated by the tsunami the four reactors in california are very close to sea level and there are twenty or thirty four as tsunami smacking into any nuclear plant that closed the steel level would be catastrophic there's nothing you can do to control it and the radiation will go into the air and into the water this is an apocalyptic event these nuclear plants aftershocks certainly an event that we will continue to keep our eye on as things

are changing every moment harvey wasserman author of solar topia our green powered earth eighty twenty thirty and finally when disasters like this occur the aftershocks emotional financial even political are felt around the world we live after all in a time when so much is interconnected the world is changing more so that when it comes to those who are our friends and those who are our potential enemies there are some top officials in this country who like to highlight you know how the landscape has changed all others their rhetoric seems to be saying to hearken back to cold war times take a look at americans right russia as one of the top five countries threatening american security two years ago this year. only two percent. of the entire american population say they view russia as

a threat all this least one very important conclusion in the mind of one vice president and i think is now beyond just. the reset is working working for all of us working for russia certainly the right of the russians have a you know still have a very formal nuclear arsenal even with which does pose you know potentially a mortal threat to us i don't think they have the intent to do that certainly china is. growing in its military capabilities as the full array of whether conventional or simply g. forces that that they are building so they can pose potentially from a capability standpoint. a threat to us as a mortal threat. all right so just to recap we've got vice president joe biden in

russia he's there to highlight the reset only two percent of people in the world he says you know in america actually consider russia a threat well then we have somebody in this in ministration a top intelligence advisor james clapper saying the two largest mortal threat i think he said china and russia clapper later backtracked and said he was simply talking about capability when referring to russia and china as a mortal threat i want to talk about this and to do so i'm joined by ivan eland senior fellow at the independent institute. i mean is this simply a statement of you know weapons versus will where do you think this was irresponsible for our top intelligence official to say well i think the problem that we have here is or cold war thinking and you can talk about bill these intent and we can do that except that we have a double standard in the this country there are other nuclear powers that can hit the united states as well as india and france and britain right and israel those

countries could all conceivable in some way get a weapon here in north korea can't yet but let's just take those countries we don't think of them they have the capability to do it but we don't call them mortal threats whereas china and russia have the capabilities but we call them moral threats and i think this is left over from the cold war we think that all those other countries can possibly be intending any ill will harm to the u.s. but but russia and china might well let's talk about this i mean you take a guy like james clapper certainly older than you and i he grew up in a generation you know a time when it when russia was a threat when he was conditioned to believe that you know this red scare this was a dangerous place it was a dangerous time do you think this is just some mentality that's left over do you think he sort of speaks for a generation that is still alive and making important decisions yeah i think so it's generational but i think they're also in the foreign policy community. here in the united states still still some residue among even younger analysts on russia

because of the cold war and to some extent china as well because of the history of the cold war you know that's forty some years of hostility and it takes a while to get rid of that and i think the obama administration is moving traction i think the intent of the obama administration and the arms control treaty and other improvements in u.s. russian relations i think is moving the policy but you still have people who talk this way and he does probably he probably was talking about capabilities and intent but the problem is his mindset is still in the old ways and it's probably somewhat generational yes well that's what i was going to ask i mean why do you suppose when asked you know directly asked this question i believe from senator from west virginia don't mention writing you think that he didn't say pakistan or india or iran well i do i just think you know that china and russia traditionally in the

cold war were the enemies and they also had the biggest nuclear arsenals and of course by his standards the u.s. would be the biggest enemy of those two countries the biggest mortal threat as senator levin pointed out to him that if you take a standard the other way you know you have to you have to deal with that so if you're talking about capabilities the united states has the most robust nuclear arsenal on the planet. how do we change this you know how how do you see in the future this changing i mean do we just wait for this you know the new generations to sort of take charge of the new way of thinking where you know we grew up in a time where we have the start treaty where we have you know we're friendly with russia. what needs to change for these statements not to be made anymore but i think time will help and i think the more the more we can improve relations and the more we get past the cold war both in time and in mentality you know these people will retire and that sort of thing i think the situation will be improved so i think you know that as long as we improve relations and keep keep things moving in

the right direction this mentality will pass. certainly you can talk about these fears and these strong fears without mentioning propaganda and some of the messages the ated you know strong messages associated with us and it can be argued that there are some strong messages now and one of our correspondents r.t. r t is on associate turk and i took a look at this we want to show you her partner i'll talk about it. well that's a little hate here a little fear mongering all day i mean these guys can really damage america could these reaching positions from the pundits be simming from something a little deeper than moodswings. because propaganda images dating back to the cold war i mean look out the it now you see the reason why we are spending billions of dollars in. the ideas of embedding a message could turn out to be more relevant than ever but some of the cold war style propaganda and that of the modern day having

a little too much in common for comfort. weeks. the pentagon has proven time and again its love of creating chasing and trying to undermine what it calls and in what. you know afghanistan as well as several other nations he deems rogue the united states is always involved in some kind of war of aggression it rarely goes spends an entire year without invading some for some foreign country and the media is almost constantly right there march in lockstep we have a military industrial media complex today most of the media is sort of zoned in india logically into what the government is saying just as the pentagon likes to get carried away with its military if you call the pentagon they can't tell you if it's seven hundred eight hundred nine hundred or thousand bases so does the media

american media is saying as a matter of fact that iran has a nuclear weapons program there are the drums beating for war in washington are being echoed by our mainstream media and the list of antagonists grows one after another the government of china ironically is voyaging ties with al qaeda and the danger that this country poses to the world in the. media there are a lot of countries that are deemed the game at least suspicious if not enemy countries meant to be a fourth independent branch of power and watchdog to the powers that be the media is learning in need of a ministry of propaganda for the white house instead of c.n.n. fox news you get these hyper adrenal arguments. between two combatants one allegedly from the liberal point of view one from the conservative point of view but the context is so narrowed that you don't get any critique of the national key

security state nor the military industrial complex nor the corporate structures the lack of substance and narrow context is becoming all the more obvious in the age of the internet that makes alternative often more relevant information available to anyone while the establishment politicians corporations and media giants in greece and widen their circle of bodies it's not only government it's in coalition tacit or otherwise with think tanks with hunger it's with others who have big money interests certainly with lobbyist planting stories with planting stories comes the imbedding obeys dia's the united states has officially been in the state of emergency for the last nine years our nation is that you are against a far reaching network of violence hatred and with more comes fear which gets deeply rooted into the system from the top down people or out to kill us propaganda

is known to be a very powerful for any government and with forces joint in the political establishment the corporate elite and the media sitting in the same bed with a message of fear history shows kicking off that we're taking years if not decades if this interpreter right seat here. so let's talk about this live and i mean what role do you think the american media play and you know outlining who our friends are and who our are enemies. well i think in your report it's very it's correct the security establishment does look for new threats because they have to justify the multibillion dollar weapon programs that they have that's called the military industrial complex but it's also the press and congress are involved in the press certainly echoes a lot of this simply because that's the mindset now i think one thing that will occur is that china will probably become the biggest threat because of the economic growth and the double digit increases in defense of course their defense budget is still much lower than the u.s. has but this will become the threat so actually russia may benefit from that

because one of the reasons that we're the united states is improving relations with russia is to use as a counterweight to china and this is the exact opposite of what richard nixon did in the seventy's he developed a relationship with china which was more radical than the soviet union to use as a counterweight against the soviet union so it's just a reversal of policy but it's the same it's the same sort of containment strategy and we saw in the situation we showed earlier james clapper you know kind of grouping russia and china together we remember we have this strategic arms reduction treaty with russia we don't have it with china do you think that's going to play or or in like you said making china the next target well i think so but i think actually it's reversed i think the arms reduction treaty was a result of the improvement in russian relations and i think that the reason for that is because u.s. is you know encircling china we're improving relations with india which we were a traditional foe during the cold war and we're strengthening the alliances in the

east around china as well so i think you're seeing in and circumvent of china and u.s. russian relations the improvement of those are designed to you know complete the circle and i that's what i was going to ask about you know what's next in the circle what's the next step but i think you know what russian and u.s. relations will continue to improve in the be continued to cop cooperation will be still some differences course of. the countries still don't see eye to eye on politics and human rights as pointed out in the speech but i think china is a menacing threat in the minds of many in the security community i don't really think it is yet but but they're planning ahead and china has high growth rates and as a result it's increasing its defense budget and so whether china is really a threat or not i think that's what the security people are already focused on you know they're already you know they plan ahead and afghanistan and iraq are passe

they're looking down the road and of course when you fight counterinsurgency warfare it doesn't justify these huge weapons you have to have a peer competitor threat and that's where china comes in very very interesting the way that the government does that we saw that of course in the iraq war with these weapons of mass destruction that they sort of created as a reason to even have to start there. i guess if i want to talk a real quick you know back to dance class where there's so much interesting stuff to talk about with these statements but have you heard anything from i haven't seen any people in russia being offended by the statement have you heard anything or do you expect the reaction from officials in that country well i think they realize that he's kind of a loose cannon because he's made other comments and you know the higher ministration officials are much more willing to. be friendly to russia i think and so i think russia will probably take their comments with a grain of salt because i think his standing is probably despite the

administration's overt support flubbing up and i think he'll probably go probably eventually ease him out i would think i had a few instances if i want and during the crisis in egypt when he called the muslim brotherhood secular i know he there's an interview with diane sawyer in which he was very surprised to learn that there was a problem with terror arrest in london yet even heard about it so. certainly it does sort of reduce the credibility of somebody so for a while i think he's an intelligence analyst by trade he's not a politician and so when they asked him well who's going to win the libyan thing he said well i think doc is going to want you know because that's what he thinks and he thinks in terms of capabilities of countries i'll give him a break on that one but when you're the head of the directors of intelligence you can't just blurt out anything you want all right ivan eland senior fellow at the independent institute. well moving on now to a different kind of tension that exists between the old guard and the new i'm

talking about journalism and what is often a tug of war between the alder and more established press like say the new york times and the new or well centered publication like for example the having to post in fact there is a battle brewing between those specific organizations that started when editor bill keller wrote a piece starfleet critical of the huffington post and its format you know linking to several different sources on its on its site here with us georgetown university professor journalism professor chris chambers chris let's talk about this is really turned into an interesting. sort of take place because back in forth now huffington post we've all been on the site big headlines or a lot of different subject matters we say bill keller new york times calls this aggregation and he says quote the queen of aggregation is of course arianna huffington who has discovered that if you take celebrity gossip adorable kitten

videos post from one pig bloggers and news reports from other publications he says you know people will come so you know on one hand we've got a look at the numbers here arianna huffington elise estimates there are estimates that she has seventy percent more unique page views than the new york times so what's going on here with this back and forth it's a lot more complicated than a battle of you know godzilla versus rodin in the old japanese monster movies it's it's not an ego thing it is a structural thing but it's also not as. complicated not as simple as old media versus new and new york times has invested a lot into beefing up its online presence your store area and it turns around and says well we have a lot more people coming to see you know us the new lot a lot more people go see a stupid romantic comedy than a really good. plex drama i mean there's no mystery there and the fact is we're the new york times is the source of

a lot of the news that the court aggregate on the other sources in other words yes they do pick and choose and cherry pick other stories your base their essays and their stories on other people's work because there's not a lot of original news gathering here anymore and we've talked about that people cutting back your successor so that does happen they do yes but they're not as much of show business or stupidity as keller might think either i mean they do have a have a pretty good professional staff and we should mention that the new york times has lost some of their you know most well known staff members to the have two hundred post in the daily beast and others i mean yes so they they are in the circus that every but the killer seems to think they are he referred to them once as a as a slave girl you've commanded by pirates the there are some. there but he is he's being a little bit too split simplistic she is probably being a little bit too high in my the i think the truth is in the middle somewhere well

as it always is but we also have to look at the money and follow the money that across new york times is losing money and how much longer does this continue i mean certainly bill keller said in his article he said you know we inferred that they're a real journalist you know and that our own huffington should pay some of her wheelchair let's not just use their content on her website but the fact is when it comes to a business deal and a well then my new york times a.o.l. i haven't because it's not as a good deal but you know it can i mean. there's a cadillac and there's a subaru i mean the new york times is still a cadillac it's going to be plodding it's going to be slow but it has that it's called the green lady it has the brand and it's worth a lot more money believe it or not then the huffington post than what a.o.l. paid for huffington post because it is creating real content the reporters are really going out and tracking down sources etc etc so they have that going for them

but but again in the present climate where people are mining news for people are looking for stuff that appeals to them and a validates their own point of view you could say well it's a liberal point of view with huffington post well it's a conservative point of view with fox and certain blogs people aren't looking for that deep analysis they're looking for stuff that the validates their own opinions or they can get those quick hits be about politics or charlie sheen i was just about to say here you know people also look for even intelligent people look for that regard that they want for those cute kitten videos do you need those cute kitten videos those got those gloves yes to be successful yes if you use or you do but you can mix and i think that again the times is a little bit over here but moving towards huffington post having been posed as it is way over here but it's moved everything is moving towards the middle you need to kittens you need charlie sheen but you need the real news you need the sources of news not just aggregating and putting your name on stuff and i think that that had

a lot to do with the problems here i think she got a little miffed because he more or less accused her personally of plagiarism so yes it did jump to the ego thing but again there's something beneath the ego and she grabbed a bunch of examples to say well you know liason had plagiarized her piece and it by the way with your current bell in this battle in this fight which could be so much play for who wins who wins this argument and who wins long term success i think i think they're both when i mean again your turn bill obviously there's something. i mean you don't have to be a media specialist to see that somebody is setting up for it some for some more insights and more talking on the news as we are now i think they both were in new york times is building a wall so that people will they can charge people for their content she is obviously building a huge brand over a day oh well they both went along and i don't see the new york times going down anytime soon are a journalism.