helps troops forget the horrors of war could be turned from a coping mechanism to a killing machine. everybody knows that france is no longer aaa everybody knows that italy is no longer as highly rated as it used to be the market knows all of this standard and poor's as of the european market is well known for or at least worse off than before but in spite of the downgrade european markets are starting the week off strong author and investor jim rogers walk us through the ratings roller coaster. well it's monday january sixteenth eight pm in washington d.c. i'm christine for watching r.t. . well the dances evening on and the state of journalism in america things are changing of course with the addition of facebook and twitter the vehicles that make it so that news is reported as it happens and it's not just people typing up what

they're seeing there are also photos and videos attached so you can see to it when it happens from revolution in the streets of egypt to colonel moammar gadhafi brutal beating and death caught on camera for the world to see to cell phone videos capturing every gaffe of every presidential candidate at every campaign stop it's hard to argue that we're not much more well informed now especially when it comes to knowing what's happening not just in our neighborhoods but around the world i think this is important but also important to note some other changes taking place in terms of the way you get your news it turns out getting it getting it first and getting it right is no longer even enough for the associated press after one hundred sixty five years the a.p. has decided to change its format no longer will they just be laying out the facts now they'll be connecting the dots for you the reader the viewer with more analysis i'll show you a little snippet from an internal memo circulated at the a.p.

recently is that we're going to be pushing hard on journalism with voice with context with more interpretation this is not mean we're sacrificing any of our deep commitment to unbiased fair journalism it doesn't mean we're venturing into opinion either it does mean that we need to be looking for ways to be more distinctive to stand out in the field not just who want where now they'll be giving the why and what does that mean or at least what they say it means while also piers morgan's show on c.n.n. will change to he told t.v. newser that in his show's second year changes to his program piers morgan tonight will include making it quite a bit more mysterious with more humor more opinionated. piers morgan says he's no comedian like jon stewart will never be as partisan as bill o'reilly but he will in nonetheless add humor and opinion there are more changes than examples to be discussed and we'll be talking about a few of them this evening i spoke a little while ago with seton smith comedian and filmmaker in new york i started by

asking him ness why are news outlets which once prided themselves on being objective and only reporting the facts suddenly feeling the need to change here's his take. i mean clearly it's all about ratings which is i guess that ratings for some reason is always the big i mean it's not said it's also it's good i'm actually wondering i want to be in that meeting with a.p. i want to know there had to be one person was like hey well maybe we should just you know do our news based on standards and ethics and then they just got laughed out of the room and i mediately fired and i'm not here we're going to sell us over some ratings you know like that star appeal for their client their peers cannot talk about this or so i can say which one is not i was going to say probably one of the reading the reason that internal memo is no longer internal is because there were some people who had a serious problem with it go ahead and say your piece about here's what we're going to say. but this is a major set up here because i don't know if you read the exact quote he said he

wants to make his show more mysterious so i was we're civitas which is which is got to say because these kind of blatantly doesn't know what day in america it is and it was placed like like bill o'reilly is you know crazy. jon stewart is you know crazy in his own way hannity is threatening to kill the president and we've got this one guy going to be more was to be as you know going to call people into miss t.v.'s he should really figure his zero point out i don't know over the last very long with that mentality it is interesting to see all of these shows and sort of the direction. you know if your mom is anything like mine she probably told you all the time at least growing up to mind your manners and you know for much of my life were you watching the news that's what people did at least for the most part journalists and their interview subjects were respectful even with those they disagreed with that is not exactly the case anymore either people are just more comfortable letting loose or as some sort of memo is also circulating that yelling and screaming and name calling it makes for good t.v.

we put together a couple examples so i want to play this and then we'll talk about it. but you just said that there were genuine. criminal prosecutor let's think about your i guess a prime security problem for me is i want to ask why why no man is there i realize that james i want to shame senator mary landrieu sometimes your positions are right but i anti-american i don't think you're anti american but certainly the far left look like an anti american snobbish name calling let's not i didn't give anybody any real waiting for the people on the network as get here was noted how i was an editorial i don't you grasp worse and i'm get a little mad at you grasp this little counter on it you got it i hear you say no it's free so we were sitting here arguing about whether we should do the four trillion dollar plan that kicks the can down the road for the president for twenty seventeen or burn the place to the ground both of which are reckless irresponsible and stupid and seen what your line is boiling tensors and then name calling on air

. i love it i don't know why we got to knock this out if you watch the news in the fifty's lately it was incredibly boring you know what we need to make more all our new stuff make it like more povich that's what i want i want more povich that i want i want real issues you know i want the baby to be there's nuclear weapons you have nuclear weapons that's great no i completely support that i want to see more of that i mean yes yes nothing is getting accomplished but you know was things really getting accomplished back and walk the congress was doing things while i'm getting better that would be stupid. and i'm not i mean it certainly i'm jerry springer and its heyday when i had you know amazing ratings and i was it was a bunch of yelling fighting who knows that's going to be next maybe the next thing we see is bill o'reilly is going to throw a punch at one of his gaffes luckily that hasn't happened yet to my knowledge at least i say this yes it is you know i have noticed though that the people if you ever watch political pundits and they you know and then you watch sports pundits and they you know it's like the same yelling except different comment one person

yelling about le bron and this one person is yelling about libya and it's the same thing they're interesting they're third people they argue about random things i know i think that's a really good point i mean there i think is the term out there that's one of my guests used the other day with me call that the e.s.p.n. ization of the news i mean it's a it's a popular model it's a model that works the sports the people that are yelling and i think it's interesting that you do see more and more of that and there's also see in the book go ahead. you all you know there's nothing i want to kind of question about. that's a lot of talent like a lot of people don't really how hard it is to you know about a debt ceiling crisis or something you just wake up out of the morning go to the depths out of it and she just got a look you got to practice it on camera i'm going to yell about you about some new shit like the like of president obama appointing these recess appointments of people yelling about this is that like i had to take a minute but. it's that challenge so we can applaud him on that at the very least

and i think some good point you're making there's also seen it seems to me you know kind of a blurred line now between the news giver and the news maker and i have another example of a you know it's not exactly hidden at all but i think it bears showing some of the latest tweets by none other than rupert murdoch's over murdoch has been going after the white house criticizing president obama for backing down from the stop online piracy act or sopa here's a tweet from a couple days ago he said so obama has thrown in his lot with silicon valley paymasters who threaten all software creators with piracy plain thievery so as attempt to change the architecture of the net for the sake of entertainment. certainly it is very interesting when you when you see what he's going after this is his industry used to project also murdoch tweeted piracy leader is google who streams movies free sells advertising around them no wonder pouring millions into lobbying so you see here this is this is the media mogul rupert murdoch who owns

the fair and balanced fox news channel and also the wall street journal today matthew swimming more than kneedeep in a policy debate your thoughts. anyway we can destroy in our own way but. this sounds very punk on my part but rupert murdoch scares me. because you literally he's a media mogul who controls most of the world and he also has a ninja assassin as a wife but he literally is like a. character you know like you. really can't really say then maybe it was one of piers morgan's or purse bronson's one and it was a very good but still he was there so i have nothing there you know what about this i mean what about this idea that only that the owner of that you know the most successful cable news network a very successful newspaper you know is engaging in a policy debate certainly that doesn't suggest that he's telling the writers what to say or telling the anchors what to say on air about do you think you don't think

it's crossing the line at all. i know because i feel like of the other things he's been accused of breaking into people's phones socks and shoes in general to him tweeting is the least of his offenses up he as a ninja assassin as a wife just like he just telling you is the least thing he's tweeting us a big that's not to do it's like a it's like saddam hussein tweeting all right thank you we are all right i don't know you did you just know where killed less people did you just compare rupert murdoch to saddam hussein i'm sure you didn't know who i just did but it's better the complete comparing a minute later i think i may saddam hussein is like this current that you know ok there you go would love to talk to you more certainly lots of interesting stuff unfortunately we're out of time comedian and filmmaker as seen smith in new york city. also had here on r t and the horror of war is something not easily forgotten or maybe it is when we come back at the pentagon tries to find a way to help soldiers cope with the traumas of combat but we ask the question is

ignorance really bliss. lindsey lowe and give me the fleet about islam and the young people are saying just the longer you know she says she's a star. the way. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so. you think you understand it and then you get something else here so you saw the part of it and realized everything you thought you knew you don't. think. well talk about a reality of our time that's most likely when

a reality for decades if not centuries but it's one that's starting finally to not be ignored i'm talking about post-traumatic stress disorder and perhaps it was simply because it couldn't be ignored any longer i'll show you some numbers twenty percent of the soldiers who have been deployed in the past six years have p.t.s.d. i was more than three hundred thousand people now in two thousand had the number of diagnosed cases in the u.s. military jumped fifty percent and that is just diagnosed cases and the lifetime prevalence of p.t.s.d. in combat veterans is ten to thirty percent so now the pentagon has announced an eleven million dollar grant to study the effectiveness of a new drug decline. looks like lost or an excuse me or d.c.s. believed to help get rid of filthy fearful memories all right so here's how the study works a total of three hundred patients all of them veterans from iraq and afghanistan will take part in seven individual weekly sessions involving exposure therapy

actually revisiting those traumatic experiences and also taking a pill half will get the d.c.s. half will get a placebo and experts at emory university university of southern california and new york presbyterian and cornell medical center of all study the effects but we also want to talk about some of the other of facts namely what the results will be on a larger level if this drug actually works it's a question i posed to blogger and truth dr jeff k. here's what he has to say. well they wish they could have a memory or reason but there really will be ministers. this drug which is called be thankless erema would be. the tuberculosis drug and is one of the get the latest in a series of different drugs that the military but also medical researchers have been looking for to try and bring in the fact of treatment proposed dramatic stress disorder which is an awful awful disorder to have and it's no surprise that the

american military in the quest to you know i mean all over the world are seeing hundreds of thousands of cases interactive game in san elsewhere and if they really you know the military would like to have soldiers who couldn't. react to the horrors of war but unfortunately that's not orginally depending how you look at it that's not going to happen it seems to me a that this is just another example of you know what some people call the pharmaceutical industrial complex you know trying to put forth a pill and first having this eleven million dollars to study at the put forth a pill that can solve everything. right well this bill what they want to do is use it as an add on to. exposure and response treatment for p.t.s.d. . the studies that were done just last year in two thousand and two

with the same drug showed that it was not effective in studies done in montreal in boston harbor and yet the military is going to put out a living million dollars to study the kind of an industry. of course p.t.s.d. can happen for reasons other than combat is not as if it were not a real accident people who are really great people who are victims of violent crimes the truth is it would be a great move to humanity if some medication were found that could truly help people who suffer p.t.s.d. but it seems really let's get through physical physiological condition the brain does not respond simply to be in the sierras and. the sad those sancho truth is that terrible things happen begin with beings that they are truly affected by the military think that it can develop a drug or mind a drug which will take the terror out of war and then they're really insane. i mean

i know and just for just for the sake of discussion i know i'm sure you've seen that this video that's been circulating around of soldiers or marines actually urinating on the dead bodies in afghanistan just when you think about yourself dr kay you know having to separate yourself from your own emotions in a human eyes in your enemy just in order to make it through the day. it's no wonder there are there is no red flag for some of these military personnel because they say they really have to do this and so i'm wondering. you know what do you think that this will just make things worse in terms of more things like this happening we're showing the video right now of this and if a is soldier then in the future and marines are able to you know forget about it how do we know that it won't happen more more and. right well that's the question what if you created a super warrior who had. you know would what type of.

terrible things would could you do with them in warfare and what those soldiers showed with the euro nations and the desecration of corpses this is something has happened in warfare going back thousands of years in fact the first the iliad which is the beginning of western literature the primary event that occurs in the claimant's of that great epic poem the desecration of the birds affected by achilles in the order that it brings in everyone who watches them go through this madness because in fact war isn't it isn't it reduces madness in the people who engages. yes. you know rather than be looking for ways to find ways to settle conflict without work there instead we have a militaristic government who is injecting american military troops around the world and they have a serious problem because they're getting injured they're getting very seriously injured manages them their body we're losing limbs with their very souls are being

injured their psyches and they're looking for ways to solve the problem but there's no solution there. we need to do is to find a way to stop the motorist of the united states and when other troops as well. because that's how you're going to actually bring down the not through you know some magic drugs that to accomplish that i mean it and you and said yourself and i read that this drug whether it works or not will be used alongside as an adjunct to exposure therapy the the process of trying to go back and revisit some of these horrific traumatic experiences but what in your opinion is the military really missing in terms of how to deal because as we showed some numbers earlier i mean they cannot ignore this this is an epidemic that's widespread this affecting

hundreds of thousands of people. and it's affecting their ability to stay with their families to keep down a job so what do you think the military needs to do better and more of that they're not doing it all. well i'm a clinician i was a psychologist and i work with patients in hundreds of patients over the years and many of them with p.t.s.d. the truth is the way the military has to put the resources out each person responds differently to different kinds of treatment there is no one treatment for all and it takes months if not years to treat p.t.s.d. and there is not just exposure therapy even in the government's own indications. eight to ten percent of people are helped through flow through therapy those coming with the behavioral therapy interpersonal there are three other drugs the f.d.a. right now really approves two drugs. the that is the one to be present drugs paxil and zoloft. other drugs are used people it's

a grab bag we military need to take seriously it wasn't so president obama. some of the rules about allowing people to be. with a counselor that i do that this we presume a lot of it is because they were being done need to die we were being told they were a personality disorder with v.a. and so they need to take it seriously they need to put more resources into the preplanned individual least of the each and every one of those hundreds of thousands of soldiers all right i mean certainly an interesting discussion to have especially as eleven million dollar study gets underway water and tricked out contributor dr jeff kay. an american soldiers aren't the only ones dealing with the horrors of conflict after almost ten months of violent and often deadly protests it seems that syrian president bashar al assad has met at least one demands made by the international community syrian president has granted amnesty to prisoners

guilty of quote uprising crimes and also the army deserters however it still remains unclear whether this move is too little too late to stem the some of the violence r.j. sara first has more. the prisoners. you can see that. this is the. president. for everyone he's not being released from detention questions. actually why they were detained in the first place. i've been in prison . i was accused of weakening national security i didn't protest they brought me

here by mistake. to use a good step just hoping to do everyone. i had some weapons i had inherited from my grandfather and was accused of bearing illegal weapons i've been here three months when people heard about the amnesty they were ecstatic they never thought this could happen. here in the. military intervention in syria the. president of. the arab world. some critics of. this. situation. the amnesty shows that syria is trying to find a political solution rather than a security side and that the country is succeeding in implementing the plan agreed by the arab league.

all political prisoners and number one the rest since the beginning of the crisis have been released then the amnesty will have been. yes but the answer is c. does not consider this the start of a dialogue but you know i just found it just is welcome when does it take to be free for the coming days but outside the prison rules people in the country remain trapped in a situation that escalates the violence in which they father seems to be the scylla state so. give us this. turning now to the crisis in the eurozone and the fallout over the downgrade by the ratings agency standard and poor's for france and other eurozone countries it seems as of now at least the fall out is minimal the french president nicolas sarkozy is downplaying it and saying it will change nothing and it seems at least for now many investors agree there's no

major earthquakes in the markets have been experienced by the downgrade author and investor jim rogers gave his take on all things euro to artie's own and he said now way take a listen you shouldn't but bother to pay any attention to the rating agencies everything they've done in the past fifteen or twenty years has been wrong i stopped bothering him long ago everybody knows that france is no longer aaa everybody knows that italy is no longer as highly rated as it used to be the market knows all of this this is not news i know you have to report something but this is not news to people in the market nevertheless sometime markets do react to these rating slashes bias in p. and other agencies specifically saying this time around that europe's austerity a budget policies which you argue we already obviously know are not enough to get out of the debt crisis what's your view specifically on the crisis and how to get out of it. but the best way to get out of it is to go ahead and let people go bankrupt let the people who made mistakes take their losses the banks who made the

bad loans the people who invested in in the bad and the bad banks they should take their losses and start over it looks as though the e.u. is about to make some of them take some losses and that will be good that way we can start over and go forward the problem ms no way is they're not doing enough they're not taking enough losses they're hoping that they can get through the next election or two and then everything will be ok this is not going to solve the problem it may delay the problem a bit longer it does not solve the problem germany's foreign minister is proposing europe have its own credit agencies right now all the giants are u.s. based and aren't thought to have a fair grasp on the e.u. how do you view germany's proposal of europe having its own agencies well whether it's european or not is irrelevant the fact is you do need somebody competent and somebody who can examine and decide who is who is solvent and who has not sought you know its own until a few months ago that they had the united states as

a aaa credit united states is the largest debtor nation in the history of the world it's absurd that it's true as was aaa now you just need somebody competent who can go in there it doesn't matter whether it's russian or australian american or european just so you have somebody competent and these guys s. and p. and moody's have had a semi monopoly for decades they have gotten corroded and lazy and sloppy and they're no longer cooperating and let's talk about greece the country struggling to get agreement with its private investors needs of for the next battle outruns how likely is athens to return to the drachma after march as deadline it's been a warning of course if we hear from wants of different analysts that that's possible some of them think that that's what's needed. but it's certainly possible it's not going to be good for greece if they do it if they did that who's going to lend money to greece any time for decades i mean if they go ahead and withdraw from the from the euro then they go back to the drug may everybody knows they're going

to print drug was day after day after day just is that good before you're going to have recurring periods of bankruptcy and crisis and you can grease your they can do that they were a basket case before they will be a basket case again if they do it it would not be the best thing for greece but it does not mean they won't do it politicians do police things all the time but that said germany and france have repeatedly pledged their commitment to the euro which chancellor merkel saying she wants all states within the single currency to say how far do you think the powerhouses are prepared to go to prevent a greek default. well greece it has to is going to default and it's now right there's no question that greece cannot pay its debt but it can do it in an organized manner where they can say ok we're going to put this together we're going to take fifty percent losses or whatever but they can just walk out the door and cause a crisis you're going to have some kind of default there's no it's one hundred percent chance of bad weather is down and organized manner by disorganized matter with

europe with greece leaving the euro going back to the drug more causing chaos i don't think that will happen not this year anyway it might happen some day but not this year. that was investor and author jim rogers and that's going to do it for the news tonight but be sure to stay tuned for the big picture with tom hartman that is coming up in just a half hour on this martin luther king holiday tom will tell you why the legacy of dr king encompasses so much more than racial equality he was also a strong critic of war and an advocate for economic justice for all some themes important for even today and later thomas the down with author neal as very to talk about the employee rights act and what may be some issues with it. for more of the stories we cover here on the news go to our to dot com slash usa also don't forget to check out our you tube page that address you tube dot com slash r t america and

see what i'm doing when i'm not reporting the news you should follow me on twitter at christine for for now have a great night. culture is that so much as i am and i'm going to call on a compliment a recasting america mobile military strategy or just more of the same problem obama's new vision for the pentagon is aimed at saving. me please be. seated.