captioning sponsored by macneil/lehrer productions >> ifill: good evening. i'm gwen ifll. president obama submitted a $3.7 trillion budget for fiscal year 2012. it shrinks some government programs while increasing spending on others. >> brown: and i'm jeffrey brown. on the newshour tonight, we talk to white house budget director jack lew and ohio republican senator rob portman about cuts, taxes, and the political battles ahead. >> ifill: then, margaret warner, just back from cairo, helps us look at the role social media and mainstream media played in the egypt uprising.

>> brown: and we report on a battle that pits human champions against a machine. our science correspondent took the challenge. >> i'm miles o'brien. i just played jeopardy against a very smart computer. it was great for the computer. i'll tell you about artificial intelligence and the pursuit of language understanding. for machines. >> ifill: that's all ahead on tonight's newshour. major funding for the pbs newshour has been provided by: breathe in. breathe out. as volatile as markets have been lately having the security of a strong financial partner certainly lets you breathe easier. for more than 140 years, pacific life has helped millions of americans build a secure financial future. wouldn't it be nice to take a deep breath and relax? your financial professional can tell you about pacific life, the power to help you succeed.

>> you can't manufacture pride. but pride builds great cars. and you'll find it in the people at toyota. all across america. >> chevron. we may have more in common than you think. >> and by bnsf railway. >> and by the bill and melinda gates foundation. dedicated to the idea that all people deserve the chance to live a healthy, productive life. and with the ongoing support of these institutions and foundations. and... this program was made possible by the corporation for public broadcasting. and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you.

>> ifill: president obama kicked off what is shaping up to be a pitched battle over the budget today. but emboldened republicans are kicking back. ray suarez begins our coverage. >> suarez: the president's annual budget blueprint arrived on capitol hill this morning. the price tag: $3.73 trillion. and a record $1.6 trillion deficit, the highest dollar amount ever. mr. obama touted his plan today at a school outside baltimore. >> the only way to truly tackle our deficit is to cut excessive spending wherever we find it. in domestic spending, defense spending, health care spending and spending through tax breaks and loopholes. so what we've done here is make a downpayment, but there's going to be more work that needs to be done. >> suarez: under the proposed budget the deficit would drop to under $1.1 trillion next year with some dramatic cuts.

among the items on the chopping block, some programs popular with democrats including community development block grants which help fund low-income housing and anti-poverty programs. they'd be cut by $300 million. the plan eliminates $2.5 billion in home heating aid to poor families, reduces funding in pel grants for needy college students by $100 million. $125 million would be removed from a great lakes clean-up project and expiration of tax cuts are proposed for energy companies and families making more than $250,000 a year. the budget also calls for a five-year non-security discretionary spending freeze. and a two-year freeze of federal government employees' salaries. states would also lose grant money for airports, water treatment plants and other infrastructure. the end of the federal stimulus and the tax increase for affluent americans account for the bulk of the plan's

estimated $1.1 trillions of deficit reduction over the next ten years. but it is ill creates $7.2 trillion in new debt through new spending on investments like high-speed rail, transportation improvement and new education programs. today marks the first time president obama has submitted his budge oat to a republican- controlled house. house budget committee chair paul ryan called it a disappointment. >> we've looked at these numbers. these numbers are very, very clear. you really cannot borrow and spend and tax your way to prosperity, but unfortunately that is exactly what this budget does. >> suarez: while senate minority leader mitch mcconnell called the president's budget irresponsible. >> the president's budget is the clearest sign yet that he simply does not take our fiscal problems seriously. it's a patronizing plan that says to the american people that their concerns are not his concerns. it's a plan that says

fulfilling the president's vision of a future of trains and windmills is more important than a balanced checkbook. >> suarez: the president and congressional republicans are sparring over a narrow slice of federal spending. the 15% devoted to so-called discretionary programs, not related to security or defense. the president's budget does call for $78 billion in reductions to growth in pentagon spending over five years, savings recommended by defense secretary robert gates. but neither party is yet tackling the so-called entitlement programs: medicare, medicaid and social security, reforms recommended by the president's deficit commission. for his part, white house budget director jack lu defended the need for bipartisan action on spending. >> i think that we've put down a reasonable plan, a comprehensive plan. it's our plan. and we understand that that's the beginning of the process.

we've also said that we don't have a monopoly on all wisdom. we look forward to working with the congress. >> suarez: congressional republicans will have the chance to question director lu in a series of hearings next week. in the meantime house republicans plan to vote on their own plan to cut federal spending for the current fiscal year this week. >> ifill: for more, we get the view from the white house from jack lew, director of the office of management and budget. i spoke with him a short time ago. welcome. you said today that this budget is all about priorities. can you give us a sense about what this budget tells us this administration's priorities? >> yes. this administration's priorities start out with kind of the big frame which is that we have to live within our means. we have to reduce spending. we have to reduce the deficit. we also have to invest in the future. just like every family that sits around the table and has to make the tough choices in tough times, that's what we need to do in this federal budget. we've made a lot of decisions which are difficult, but we've

made the trade-off to try and ensure that we can have a much better future where we can outeducate, outinnovate and outbuild our competitors so it's about reducing spending in some places, having the bottom line show the results, but also investing where we need to. >> ifill: you're talking about making tough choices. this is a $3.73 trillion budget. where are the cuts coming from? >> the cuts really come from quite a lot of places. in the area of annual discretionary spending we freeze spending for five years which saves $400 billion over ten years. that brings spending, this part of the budget spending, down to the levels that haven't been seen since the eisenhower administration. and we're at a level of savings that are way beyond what one can say you do with waste, fraud and abuse. we're going into programs, programs that we care about, and saying, we have to make the tough trade-offs and cut back in some places. i can give you a few examples because they're hard choices. you know, the community

services block grant program going from formula grant to a competitive grant, cutting it in half, that means that there are going to be fewer community action agencies that get federal funding. the low-income home energy assistance program, a very important program that helps people, old people and poor people, pay their energy bills in cold winter. it's a hard thing to do. why are we reducing it? because in 2008 it went from 2.5 to 5 billion because of a big spike in prices. as we look at all of the areas of the budget we said we can't just level off at $5 billion. we need to go back to where it was before the price spike. >> ifill: even that is only $2.5 billion in a pretty big budget. kent conrad think you should be cutting deeper in the name of trying to cut that deficit. >> i've only given you a few examples. if i move out of the area of domestic discretionary spending, we've taken defense and said it can't continue to grow fast every than inflation

as it has for more than ten years. it needs to come to a zero real growth level. that reduces defense spending by $78 billion for the base defense budget from where it would have been in last year's budget. when we look at defense overall including spending on afghanistan and iraq because of the reductions in troops in iraq, we see more than a 5% reduction in defense spending compared to last year's budget. outside of the area of discretionary spending i think we all agree, we certainly believe, you cannot deal with the fiscal challenge we have by just dealing with discretionary spending. >> ifill: elephant in the room, mr. lew, entitlement, social security spending, medicare, medicaid, nowhere in this budget. >> reporter: let me start with what's in this budget. i'm happy to talk about the things that may not be in the budget. in the budget we take in both entitlement programs and revenue programs very important steps. in the case of medicaid

medicare, for years congress and successive presidents have agreed we shouldn't let a provision go into effect that would cut reimbursement rates to doctors in medicare by 30%. the problem is that for years we've just put it on the national credit card. we've built up the debt. this year we say it's time to stop. we put $62 billion of specific proposals in to pay for that extension of that provision for two years. and we've said with a three-year window because congress did the right thing last december and paid for it, with a three- year window let's figure out how to solve this once and for all so we're not in the business of kicking the can down the road. in the tax code, there's a provision called the alternative minimum tax where because of the way it works middle class families would slip into it. that was never the intention. so there's been a bipartisan agreement don't let that happen. >> ifill: what about entitlements, mr. lew? >> let me just finish that example. the alternative minimum tax, what's happened over the years is we haven't paid for fixing

it. we've put a proposal in the budget that would have real revenue provision that pays for extending the alternative minimum tax that it doesn't hit middle income families for three years. what it would do is it would put a limitation on how people in the top tax bracket-- that's families that make $250,000 or more-- how much benefits they can get from itemized deduction and would limit them to the people of the bracket below them. >> ifill: entitlements? >> the $62 billion in medicare. there's clearly more that needs to be done in the long term. you askd about social security. on social security first let me be clear. there's nothing in the projections for the next ten years that is... that suggests that social security is causing the deficit problem. the social security issues are farther down the road. we believe that we need to address them. the president said in the state of the union that he wants to work on a bipartisan basis to address social security so the current

retirees and current workers who will be future retirees can count on their benefits now and in the future. we really believe that. we think the right thing to do is to work together like we did in 1983 to solve the problem. the problem is that the history tells us that if you put a proposal out there, it doesn't necessarily move the process forward. you know, i saw when i was working on social security on the hill in the '80s that in 1981 a proposal set things back. it polarized the parties. we saw that in the 1990s as well. what the president did in the state of the union was try to set out principles so that we can actually prepare the ground for a constructive conversation. we think that's the right way to move the ball forward. >> ifill: opening bid? >> it's not a bid but a statement of principle. we stand proudly saying we want to work together to make the changes so that we can say social security is sound for 75 years. i want to be able to tell my new grandson that he doesn't have to worry about social security.

>> ifill: jack lew, director of the office of management and budget, thank you for joining us. >> thank you. >> brown: now to judy woodruff with a republican view. >> woodruff: rob portman of ohio is a member of the budget committee and he served as budget director under president george w. bush. senator portman, thank you very much for being with us. we just heard budget director lew say that this blueprint will cut spending $400 billion over the next ten years. that sounds like a big number. >> well unfortunately it's not nearly enough. i'm quoting here from the democrat co-chairman of the president's own fiscal commission who said it's nowhere near what we ought to be doing. i just listened to jack lew's comments. look, i feel a certain sympathy for director lew having been in his position four years ago. it's tough. but it's tough to defend this budget. he talked about how he's proud of the fact that there's something on social security. there's nothing on social security. the questions were actually very insightful. you know, where is the changes

in terms of these entitlement programs? it's now over 60%. budget and the fastest growing part of the budget. the $400 billion, judy, that you're talking about is a result of freezing so it's not a reduction in spending. it's a freeze. so it's as compared to what the spending would have otherwise been. had we followed the president's budget from last year. so this is is not about reducing spending. by the way that $400 billion is about 4.5% of what we have to do in order to get to a balanced budget. as the democrat co-chairman of the democrat fiscal commission it's about 4.5% of the way there. we need to do a lot more. we need to do it together. i'm not saying that we're looking to the president for all the leadership here but this budget document is a political document today. it's very disappoint to go me because the president's own description of the problem is so eloquent. he talks about our fiscal condition. and the fact that we need to get out from under this historic deficit we have this year. and this debt. and yet the budget proposal calls for the debt to almost

double. during the ten-year period of this budget. >> ifill: when mr. lew says that this budget would get federal spending as a percentage of the gross domestic product down to the lowest level it's been since president eisenhower you're saying that's not significant. >> i was very surprised to hear him say that. the historic level of spending as a percent of the economy is about 20.6%. and this year we will be at 25%. so we've gone from 24% last year to 25% this next year. and my understanding is that the percentage does not go down below the historic level. in fact, because again we're not making some of these tough choices we continue to spend more as a percentage of g.d.p. certainly in fiscal year 2012 which is what this budget is all about. you know, we need to do better. again these are tough decisions, tough calls to be made. but you cannot do it just by sort of nibbling around the edges. that's what this budget does. it does not make the tough

decisions. >> woodruff: you're saying that claim is false? >> well, i don't know. i need to look... i told you i was surprised to hear it. it may be true as to the narrow issue of what the president called about 12% of the budget which is the domestic discretionary budget that's non-security which is the part that i think the director was talking about. but it's certainly not true as a matter of the entire budget. that's because most of the budget is off limits. in other words, it's not even addressed in this budget document. yes, i think it is false. i'll check it after the show but it doesn't make sense to me that that would be true except as to that narrow part of the budget and that may well be true. >> woodruff: when you and other republicans say the administration is not serious about cutting they come back and say, look, we're cutting money in inner city neighborhoods and for clean water and clean air, college loans. we're cutting money for low- income home heating bills. >> those are decisions that they've made, judy. as we talked about and as the director just said, the

president has chosen to have a five-year freeze at the 2010 levels. in other words, the relatively high-level spending that we have now. within that freeze over the next ten years, they're going to increase spending on certain things like high speed rail as you've heard about and reduce spending in other things. the president has made decisions within that freeze. but this freeze, remember, is after a 24% increase in this same category of spending over the last two years. so it's freezing this higher level of spending and then, yes, there are decisions made within there to increase some programs and decrease others. but these are political decisions. then not to touch again the bulk of the budget where you see the fastest growth. >> woodruff: let me ask you about that the so-called entitlements, medicare, social security and the rest of it. mr. lew said when it comes to social security he says it's not a factor in the deficit but the next ten years it should be tackled but there's some time. and he said with regard to the rest of it, medicare and other

so-called entitlements, he said that's got to be a joint effort. he said in recent history it shows that for a president to put his own ideas out there without the other side in essence can set the whole process back. >> i agree with him. it has to be a joint effort. i would disagree with him again on the fact that social security does not add to the deficit. the trustees of the social security system just told us that the deficit is already in place in the social security trust fund. in other words, this year social security will pay out more than it brings in. this was not supposed to happen until 2016 but unfortunately because of a rough economy, because we haven't had the payroll tax revenues coming in as expected it's in a deficit position so i was also surprised by his statement there that social security doesn't add to the deficit. the other issue is we always have a huge internal debt in social security because for years the social security trust fund has been used for every day government spending so this is a huge issue. we do have to tackle it. it will affect people's

payroll taxes and workers in america. for us to just say it's not a problem-- which i'm not saying he said, but that was sort of the implication-- i think just false. we need to tackle the social security issue because it is about the future. those who are near retirement ought to be able to keep the benefits that they've earned but those who are not near retirement, those who are young people who are looking to the future, we need to have a program that works for them. under the current trajectory it will not be there. in fact of about 2021 i think it is there would be under current law about a 21% decrease in the benefits under social security even if you assume that all of the debts build up in the trust fund are accounted for. so we have a real problem in social security and in medicare. i agree with director lew that there needs to be something that we join hands on as republicans and democrats but it needs leadership from the president. that is certainly a lesson we have learned over the years.

>> woodruff: thank you very much. >> thanks, judy. great to be on with you again. >> brown: still to come on the newshour, new and old media in egypt's uprising; plus, playing "jeopardy" against a supercomputer. but first, the other news of the day. here's hari sreenivasan. >> sreenivasan: the budget unveiling had mixed results on wall street today, as investors weighed the impact of the proposal. the dow jones industrial average lost five points to close at 12,268. the nasdaq rose nearly 8 points to close at 2817. china has officially become the number two economy in the world. the country overtook japan after japanese data confirmed its economy shrank during the last quarter of 2010. japan had been the world's second largest economy after the u.s. for much of the last four decades. the ripple effects from the massive uprising in egypt have spread further across the region. security forces in iran clashed with thousands of opposition protesters today, at a banned rally in central tehran. iran's semi-official news agency reported one death in the demonstrations.

we have a report narrated by lindsey hilsum of independent television news. >> reporter: a solitary protester telling others today is the day. the first anti-government protest in iran for a year. tunisia, egypt, now iran they chanted. naming the deposed leaders ben ali, mubarak adding the supreme year. the pictures taken by protestors. no journalists were allowed to film. the several thousand iranians who braved the authorities on the streets of tehran and other cities today. someone filmed the militia on their motor bikes heading downtown. cameras hidden in the car. thousands were arrested and assaulted when iranians protested in 2009. there were scuffles on the street today as protestors tried to burn a government poster and attacked a man who

tried to stop them. iran's main opposition leaders were confined to their houses today. the government determined to stop them joining the protest. by evening fires were burning in tehran. last month alone 67 people were executed in iran. hundreds arrested during the post election protest of 2009 remain in prison. but despite the dangers, egypt appears to have reignited iran's anti-government movement. >> sreenivasan: in washington, secretary of state hillary clinton put her support behind the protesters, and she called on the iranian regime to open up its political system. the upheaval in egypt also inspired rallies in other countries. thousands of people took to the streets of yemen for a fourth straight day of demonstrations. they marched in sanaa to demand political reforms and the resignation of their president. meanwhile, in iraq, hundreds

protested in central baghdad against corruption and a lack of government services. and protesters in the tiny gulf nation of bahrain called for greater political change there. in the west bank, the palestinian prime minister dissolved his cabinet. the government plans to hold new elections by september. at least two people died in a bombing in the capital of afghanistan. a suicide bomber detonated his explosives near an upscale hotel and shopping complex in central kabul. it is the second attack in less than a month on a site regularly visited by foreigners. separately, two british soldiers died in a fire at their base west of kandahar. those are some of the day's major stories. now, back to jeff. >> brown: and we return to egypt, where much of the action moved away from tahrir square to other kinds of protest. >> brown: with egypt's mass uprising having achieved its main goal of pushing president hosni mubarak from power, labor unrest today set off a new wave of smaller protests and strikes. transportation workers marched

in front of egyptian state television demanding better pay and working conditions. >> our wages are so low. there are no incentives for prospects. no medical coverage. >> brown: ambulance workers also joined in the protests with similar concerns. and the egyptian police who had been criticized for their violent crackdown on demonstrators today marched to defend their actions and show their support for the revolution. >> we are marching to retain the good image of the police force in egypt. some of us made some mistakes. we are calling for the excuse of the former interior minister. he is the reason all this happened. >> brown: many in the tourist industry are desperate to return to their jobs. so much so they're begging foreigners to visit and enjoy the historic sites. >> tell everyone that egypt is safe. come back. we are ready to host a lot of people. maybe millions and millions that we uses to have. we are ready. please come to egypt sneef in

the meantime a day after dissolving parliament and promising other moves toward holding free elections egypt's military rulers called for an end to the latest round of strikes and common stations saying the country needs a calmer climate in what they called a, quote, critical stage. in the meantime in the aftermath of the drama that played out in egypt over 18 days, the role of new media continued to be discussed in the region and beyond. for several years on-line blogs and social media have been increasingly important tools used by activists in egypt, a country with 5 million facebook users. in 2008, for example, the april 6 youth movement used facebook to gather supporters and raise awareness for striking workers. more recently that page and others called on egyptians to take to the streets on january 25. the first day of protests. in cairo last week a prominent

activist told margaret warner she believes that social media was a spark to many who had been reluctant to join past protests. >> you see several hundreds of people together which was very strange. very strange. and then we started marching and people are joining for the first time as if the ground is producing human beings. >> brown: one galvanizing force for the protest was clearly this brutal photo shown on facebook of an egyptian businessman. in june he was detained in an internet cafe and beaten to death by two plain clothesed police officers for trying to expose corruption. within days of the beating google's regional marketing manager for the middle east set up a facebook called we are all this man that included other photos of police brutality. within months it it attracted half a million followers.

last friday as protestors celebrated he spoke with cnn. >> first tunisia, now egypt. what's next? >> ask facebook. >> ask what? facebook. >> you're giving facebook a lot of credit for this. >> yes, for sure. i want to meet mark and thank him one day. >> brown: last night on "60 minutes," he said that the egyptian government's decision to cut off internet access had backfired. >> they had told four million people that they are scared like hell from the revolution. by blocking facebook. they forced everyone who just, you know, is waiting to read the news on facebook, they forced them to go to the street to be part of this. really like if i want to thank one, thank anyone for all the... all of this i would thank our stupid regime. >> brown: older media,

television, also clearly played a huge role in the uprising both within egypt and outside. >> in cairo.... >> brown: satellite tv in particular al jazeera offered egyptians a view of events that was in stark contrast to government monitored newspapers and state television. al jazeera provided wall-to-wall coverage finding ways to continue to transmit even as the mubarak government shut down its cairo bureau, seized equipment, and arrested members of the staff. we look further now at the role of media in the egyptian uprising. our own margaret warner is just back from cairo and joins me here. also with us is adel iskander, who teaches contemporary arab studies and media at georgetown university. he writes a column for the english language newspaper, the "egyptian today." lawrence pintak is a former middle east correspondent whose latest book is titled the "new arab journalist." he's dean of the edward r. murrow college of communication at washington state university. and abder-rahim foukara is washington, d.c. bureau chief for al jazeera's arabic channel.

the first thing to say is welcome back. >> warner: thank you. great to be back. >> brown: we heard the woman activist in the piece there. that was a common thing you heard from people about the role of social media. >> warner: it's important to know that she has been leading protests ever since her husband who dared to challenge mubarak in a president shl election was put in jail. she said to me, we would take a protest, say, to parliament. we would have 80 or 100 or 120 people. on the other side... and we'd be outnumbered by the police. on the other side of the street would be people looking at us with sympathy and support. we would say join us. we're here protesting for your rights. no one would join. she would say what is wrong withy gyp egyptians? . she said that day was incredible because she was leading one of the four marches coming into the square. it was suddenly as if the ground was sprouting human beings to join them. another woman who is a former

parliamentarian said i used to dismiss twitter and facebook as kind of the pastimes of the well to do young people. she said i was so wrong. >> brown: at a very small and narrow level. >> warner: a very narrow level of society. she acknowledged she was dead wrong. >> brown: you've looked at how social media has developed in egypt. as it's developed, who does it reach? who has it been reaching? how did that change even in the last few weeks. >> it's important to note that 20% of the population in egypt has access to the internet which is a slim number if you think about it. how many of those have access to facebook? how many of them are prepared to use it for a political means? now given the fact that these numbers are small, it shows that there was an early onset. there was sort of an early phase whereby people came together and used the internet and used facebook, used these social networking sites to come together and coalesce these groups. because social networking

brings together communities of friends, they can come out and protest as communities which is sort of a different dynamic than anything else. once that happens, then you go on to the next phase. the second phase is where people descended to the streets and they scream out to people in neighboring homes and say, "come down." as the numbers swell all of a sudden you're accessing a community that has never touched a keyboard before. even though the numbers are fairly small, that number increased over time as people realized the utility of facebook that was evident. >> brown: in this case it was all in a very compressed period of time. >> absolutely. an incredibly short period. in 18 days you had even the website such as the names we're knowing. it had 400,000 members just before juary 25. now it has somewhere in the range of 700,000. the numbers have increased since. >> brown: larry pintac, we've watched this social media and al jazeera.

does al jazeera and satellite tv reach a broader audience, a different audience? how does it interact with what we're talking about here? >> this was a digital one-two punch. the social media allowed the activists to network. it got them organized in those kinds of communities, got them on to the street. but it was television that really dealt the final blow. the fact that egyptians and arabs across the region could sit in their homes watching this play out on the street meant they were inspired. so all of those people who, you know, never logged on to a facebook page could suddenly go out in the street and take part. >> brown: mr. foukara, i want to bring you in. does al jazeera see its role as you're clearly reporting this story but ear also clearly a player here, right? >> al jazeera just to add to what lawrence said just a little while ago. al jazeera is obviously the scope of the viewership is much much bigger.

and for al jazeera you don't need to be educated. you don't need to be fluent in arabic. you don't need to be fluent in the internet. the picture speaks for itself. i think what's happened both in tunisia and in egypt is there's been a marriage of al al jazeera conventional television with new media in terms of reaching the information. al jazeera both in tunisia and egypt relied on information relayed through the internet and gave it a bigger platform, not just within egypt but also in terms of informing other people in the region about what's going on inside of egypt. you know, the old political axiom in the region, if you will, is that if it happens elsewhere in the arab world, it does not necessarily mean it will happen in egypt but if it does happen in egypt you can be almost sure it will spread to other parts of the region. >> brown: larry pintac, looked at the development.

what gave al jazeera such power this time? >> let's put it this way. 20 years ago when iraq invaded kuwait, most saudis did not know about it for three days. because the saudi media sat on it. al jazeera comes along in '96 and changes everything. suddenly you have a channel that is seen across the region reporting in a relatively unfettered way. fast forward to today. you have almost 500 satellite channels. al jazeera played a key role here. there are plenty of other satellite channels including many private channels based in egypt that were very important in this. >> brown: on the ground, how does it play out, the mix of the social media, the internet, television. >> warner: i think what television today was amplify it. for the non-facebook generation. i'll give you one example at least. retired egyptian diplomat said to me, this was... now go back ten days. after mubarak gave his speech where he said he would not run again and his son wouldn't run again.

it was a moving speech. a lot of egyptians were kind of, he said, feeling warmly towards mubarak and that he had done the right thing. tuesday is the day that whoever it was sent in the thugs on the camels and horses. he said we watched that. we watched our young people getting attacked. he said suddenly he said i was overcome with a sense of guilt. that i had... that my generation had stayed silent and been part of this. and had not given our children a politically healthy government. he said now they're being forced to do this. he said i couldn't stay silent any longer. >> brown: he's watching on television what his younger generation had created. >> warner: exactly. and been forced to create was his point. his generation had let the kids down. and the same thing happened the night that while gonim did his first interview, the movement was starting to lose a little steam. suddenly it was on tv. he's crying as he's told 300 young people have died.

he flees in tears. somebody said to me everyone at home was sitting there watching this in an endless loop because it was picked by al jazeera. >> brown: is it also possible at the same time to overstate the role of social media, television in something like this? you know there's a great debate now about kind of twitter revolution, of facebook revolution. >> sure. >> brown: what leads the way? what is this... still the power of humankind getting out on the street. >> i think it's important not to fall into the incredible appeal of these two arguments, the argument that the technological determinism that if the technology is there that everything will fall into place, that we'll have a revolution. the other side which says it's all about people and the new media technology has no role to play. both malcolm gladwell, you know, clay sharky are probably wrong. >> brown: prominent people who made these arguments. >> probably wrong. the reality is somewhere in the middle of that spectrum. you have to remember that the majority of the 80 million or over 80 million egyptians do

not have access to the internet. many of them for some time had no access to al jazeera as well. when it was pulled off the plug or when it was pulled off. some of them were able to scramble to find other sources of information but egyptian propaganda was quite influential in the early days of the revolution. in the end it was about the grievances of the egyptian population and their ability to see others come out to demonstrate in large numbers that compelled them to come out and really ask for their rights. >> brown: larry pintac, what do you think about this question because it comes down to controlling the message and governments can be very adept at doing that as well. >> well they can be but this showed us that there are limits to that. i mean you can't plug all those information portals now. and while social media, television are just tools, the bottom line is that this revolution started a week after tunisia. it was a direct cause-and-effect. it may have happened eventually but it was the catalyst of seeing tunisia on television that brought people

out on the streets. >> brown: from watching as you have in the middle east would you expect social media, other media, television to continue to play a role? >> absolutely. i think you saw with egypt tv fighting a rear guard action talking about foreign intervention, et cetera, it was one voice. it was effective. it got people out there to attack foreigners and journalists but the overwhelming noise, if you will, from satellite tv and other sources really overwhelmed the government's mouth piece. and now we're seeing across the region these little hick cups that are a response to all of this. i think basically governments will see from this that the old ways of doing things, the old ways of controlling the message or killing the messenger really are over. >> brown: mr. foukara, i assume you have to expect all of your team, wherever they are, have to expect that government s will do all they can to try to curtail your

coverage, right? >> absolutely. i just want to go back to what adele said about the truth residing somewhere in the middle. i think that is absolutely crucial as a new auns to make. but having said that, this is not a chicken-and-egg situation. what you have in the case of al jazeera, for example, you have a channel that has invested over in... over a period of over ten years in understanding these... how these situations... how these systems work and what the real problems are. but the fact of the situation is that there have been problems. the problems that we saw that lead to the uprising and revolution in tunisia was somewhat similar in egypt. so you have that political keg in the case of egypt waiting to happen for 30 years. but then you have that convergence of the new social media with people's wide access to television. basically governments, especially the government of

egypt in this case and the government of tunisia just didn't have anywhere to hide from that. >> brown: in our last minute you were talking to people looking at how the government was trying to deal with the media, right. >> warner: yes, jeff. their only instrument seemed to be a crude old technology of state television and professor pintac is right that they did manage to, for instance, turn out some egyptians to attack foreigners and foreign journalists. but basically they didn't have the tools. they had unleashed all of this as part of economic globalization, remember. that's how everybody got cell phones. that's how the internet suddenly got penetration in egypt but they had never mastered the art themselves. while they could try blocking the new media, they unlike some other governments in the world were not adept at using it for their own purposes. >> brown: all right. we will leave it there. margaret warner, larry pintac, thank you all four very much.

>> ifill: man versus machine, scientists just love putting that notion to the test. now a competition is under way to judge whether the latest and greatest super-computer can actually think. the faceoff occurs this week on the popular game show "jeopardy." and newshour science correspondent miles o'brien jumps right in. >> reporter: ou... now i'm not a guy to make a lot of excuses but i didn't get a lot of sleep the night before i found myself here getting ready to play watson arguably the smartest computer in the world in a game of jeopardy. >> same category. 1200. >> reporter: that's david, watson's proud papa. >> you're looking at 10 racks of power 750. there's ten racks. 90 what they call power 50 servers. >> reporter: he introduced me to his silicon progeny. >> overall it's 2,280 cores in

that system. about 15. >> reporter: for those of us who don't have a doctorate in computer science, watson is equivalent to about 6,000 high- end home computers. but the secret sauce is the software that gives watson the ability to understand language like no computer ever has. >> kathleen's excavation of this city mentioned in joshua showed the walls had been repaired 17 times. watson? >> what is jericho. >> correct. >> reporter: well enough to play jeopardy at the highest level. with top money winner brad rudder and ken jennings who won 74 games in a row in 2004. jennings' amazing run caught the nation's attention including i.b.m. executives who were looking on for a follow-up to their man versus machine triumph. the computer they called deep blue beat the grand master in a celebrated tournament in 1997. they wondered if a machine could beat the best humans at

jeopardy. >> we knew it would be hard. we knew it wouldn't be easy but to have an opportunity to get the resources to sort of push the limits in advance of technology was just irresistible. >> reporter: getting machines to truly understand language is the holy grail of a field called artificial intelligence. you know, making computers more like us. able to comprehend, learn and solve problems. in the early days of computing, it seemed so easy. >> i confidently expect within 10 or 15 years we will find emerging from the laboratories something not too far from the robot of science fiction fame. >> reporter: artificial intelligence is already here. it is used to make more accurate weather forecasts. it decides what movies and books you might like. but a computer that can match human intellect remains an elusive goal. >> there's still no machine that can solve everyday common sensical problems. >> reporter: marvin of mit says that with a healthy dose of chagrin.

he told me his colleagues got on the wrong track a few decades ago trying to create a single mathematical model of the human brain. >> i'm a little disappointed that most people look for the magic bullet. what's the trick that will make machines more intelligent? and it seems to me that we know from brain science if you look at the brain it's like 40 different computers. in fact if you look in a big book on neuro science, you'll find maybe three or four hundred descriptions of different parts of the brain. that do different things. >> reporter: that's the way david sees it. he and his team of two dozen wrote many formulas or algorithms to teach watson language skills. >> language is not going to emerge from a silver bullet. there won't be one algorithm that just understands language. it will be a lot of different algorithms. they're going to look at and interpret the language from different perspectives and somehow we'll be able to combine them. >> reporter: it took four intense years for them to

write all the algorithms that make the machine ken jennings ready. the behind the scenes drama played out in the pbs nova special the smartest machine on earth. >> administrative professional day and national cpas goof-off day. watson. >> what is holiday. >> no that's not even close really. >> reporter: for a computer jeopardy is much much harder than chess. deep blue beat caspar off by playing out every possible outcome of every possible move every time. >> it's just doing a logic puzzle very quickly and computers are good at that. >> reporter: futurist ray kurz we'll is author of the age of intelligent machines and several other books on the rise of artificial intelligence. he's impressed with watson's ability to understand something as knew nuanced and complex as human language. >> a query involving metaphors and puns and similes and jokes and other cultural references, it has a wide knowledge base

it can parse these complex statements that have different attributes organized in a hierarchical fashion. >> reporter: watson cannot be connected to the internet when it plays jeopardy. woint be fair. so the team filled its memory bank s with the entire world book encyclopedia the internet movie database much of the "new york times" archive and the bible. but synthesizing all the data is the key. to do that the team turns to a technique called machine learning. which teaches computers by example. rather than trying to define the letter a, programmers instead give the machine millions of examples and it figures out a unifying pattern so it can recognize an a that it has never seen before. watson ingested thousands of correctly answered jeopardy questions so it could learn the patterns of success in the game. do you find yourself want to go call watson he? >> i make an effort to call it it. yeah, occasionally i slip into the he.

>> to waste little by little. watson? >> what is printer. >> man, he's fast. >> reporter: he, i mean, it is a formidable foe as i was learning. did i mention i didn't have a very good breakfast that morning. >> let's finish the northern most capital city. >> let's do it. manila. kathmandu and jakarta. >> what is kathmandu. >> he was fast on that one. he knew that category. let's do president sham rhyme time for 200 please. >> here we go. bram... pack animals? >> what is obama's lamb as. >> obama's lamas. that's what this category is all about. >> reporter: it amazed me how watson gets all the jokes the word play and the puns that are hallmarks of jeopardy. and watson gets smarter with each answer. >> it learns based on the right answers how to adjust its interpretation. and now from not being

confident, it starts to get more confident in the right answers. >> watson surprises snu. >> absolutely. in fact, you know, people say why did he get that wrong? i don't know. >> reporter: computers that rern, understand and even surprise us? what could go wrong with that? >> do you read me? do you read me, hal? >> affirmative, dave. i read you. >> reporter: oh, yeah. there is that. a machine that becomes a psychopathic murderer. >> open the doors for me, al. >> i'm sorry, dif. i'm afraid wra do that. >> artificial intelligence can be destructive. it's already used in our weapons. we have smart weapons. we sent a missile across the world. it intelligently navigates and makes its own decisions. technology can be destructive particularly in the wrong hands. the positive side is that these tools can help overcome

human suffering, help cure disease. alleviate poverty. solve the energy problem. clean up the environment. i mean there's a lot of good things we can do with more intelligent technology. >> reporter: if you get a machine that fully understands language and can learn, you just sit back and watch, right? >> right. we're not quite there yet. we're not there. where we can get a computer that completely understands language. there are all different ways of learning. you know, this way of learning is very powerful. but if you compare that to the enormity of the ways that humans learn, again, just scratching the surface. >> reporter: if watson is only scratching the surface, where does that leave me? pretty grim, eh? did i mention i've had some terrible stiffness in my thumb lately? >> ifill: you can watch all of miles' battle with watson on our web site.

>> brown: finally tonight, at last night's annual music world celebration, the grammy for "best new artist" went to esperanza spalding, a jazz singer, bassist, and composer you might remember from a story we did last fall. here's an excerpt of her song, "little fly," from the album "chamber music society." ♪ ♪ little...

♪ >> brown: you can see our interview with esperanza spaulding, plus reports on several other of last night's

grammy winners, by visiting "art beat" on our web site. >> ifill: again, the major developments of the day. president obama's budget proposal for the next fiscal year came in at more than $3.7 trillion. it includes spending hikes for education and energy efficiency, but also proposes cuts and tax increases to bring down the deficit. and the ripple effects from the massive uprising in egypt have spread further across the region, with opposition protests in iran, iraq, bahrain, and yemen. >> ifill: and to hari sreenivasan for what's on the newshour online. hari? >> sreenivasan: we explore the economics of valentine's day. on our "making sense" page, find out if buying a gift for your valentine could outweigh the financial cost. we have a slideshow and video from russia, where scientists are engaged in an 18-month experiment that mimics the pressure and isolation of space flight. today-- the halfway point-- the crew experienced a simulated landing on mars. and join us at 2:00 p.m. eastern tomorrow for a live chat on the historic changes in egypt. newshour extra, our education

page, has partnered with independent television service. two of the participants join us from egypt, a teen reporter and a filmmaker. all that and more is on our web site, newshour.pbs.org. gwen? >> ifill: and that's the newshour for tonight. on tuesday, we'll talk with rand paul, the freshman senator leading the new tea party caucus. and we'll look at this year's medal of freedom winners. i'm gwen ifill. >> brown: and i'm jeffrey brown. we'll see you online, and again here tomorrow evening. thank you, and good night. major funding for the pbs newshour has been provided by: >> oil companies make huge profits. >> last year, chevron made a lot of money. >> where does it go? >> every penny and more went into bringing energy to the world. >> the economy is tough right now, everywhere. >> we pumped $21 million into local economies, into small

businesses, communities, equipment, materials. >> that money could make a big difference to a lot of people. >> moving our economy. bnsf railway. pacific life-- the power to help you succeed. and by toyota. foundation. and by the alfred p. sloan foundation. supporting science, technology, and improved economic performance and financial

literacy in the 21st century. and with the ongoing support of these institutions and foundations. and... this program was made possible by the corporation for public broadcasting. and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. captioning sponsored by macneil/lehrer productions captioned by media access group at wgbh access.wgbh.org