lee bollinger is the president of columbia university. he's made a study of the first amendment and a little over a year ago in the columbia journalism review made a dramatic proposal for how he might address issues of the internet and the state of journalism today which i'll ask him to do in just a moment. then we'll hear some remarks well from rebecca mckin who was for most of the 1990s, well, for nearly all in beijing for cnn. the bureau chief. almost raised to that task taken been taking by academic parents to beijing as child and put into public schools an went on to report at bureau chief in tokyo and now is a senior fellow at the new america foundation. her book "consent of the network" examines the very challenges that we'll be addressing here. holding a copy there. lee ballenger, you've made the most explicit proposal for how we should address journalism in the digital age. give us briefly your diagnosis of the problem and what the solution should be. >> sure. i mean, my expertise is really about the question of development of th

. >> lee bollinger, is this what you've heard?s it define, alter, lead you to rethink your proposal for an american world service? >> well, i mean, i don't want to be the advocate for a particular -- i mean, i think it's interesting that i think almost everybody on the panel probably agrees that public funding of journalism in some forms is a good thing. you don't have to make the case that journalism about the world by traditional media is declining. you don't have to make that case in order to accept the proposition that we should have increased public funding. so i think that's cynthia's point. i share that view. i do think that we are living in a world that we're just not thinking about seriously. in how to get the information and the ideas we need about the world and to get ideas that journalism provides to the rest of the world in the way that american journalism can do. i just think we are still -- we're not doing what we did in the -- with the development of the first amendment. we're not -- which was, you know, really a 2

but to david ensor and chrysta freeland and lee bollinger and rebecca mackinnon, thank you very much. >> thank you. [ applause ] >> excuse my back. my name is christie hefner. i'm chairman of columbia journalism review's 50th anniversary. so i just want to join in thanking all of you for being here today. for five decades cjr has believed that you can be both a watchdog of the media and an ally in searching for the models that sustain quality journalism. i think we can all agree that those worthy goals are more critical than ever before. i think today's discussion, whether it was around public spaces, funding, and values, twitter as a curation of access to academia, the role of universities, or indeed the role of the relationship between privacy and freedom is a discussion that's going to be ongoing. we hope you'll join us for a short reception afterwards. we hope you'll pick up a 50th anniversary copy of the magazine. and i just want to say thank you to jim and to shelby for being such great partners, not just in hosting us here at the newseum but in very much developing this program

. >> lee bollinger, you had a forum on these issues at columbia in which a singaporean government minister spoke. and he made some very crudely this case against the american notion of a first amendment. he basically said, look. we're an island, we're a city-state, a small city-state with big neighbors, we have a very fragile ethnic balance, we prize stability. we have a very open economy. these groups that rate freedom of the press rate us below guinea and iraq and zimbabwe was the other one. singaporeans aren't killing one another, this is a stable society, as long as the media operate within certain constraints, so be it. singapore is a very small place. but that seems to be -- this seems to be a view out there, certainly in the far east, that you can develop your economy, moving people in larger asian countries like the ones that rebecca covered by the tens to hundreds of millions out of rural poverty, is more important than having an argument about which person should be running which provincial government. we don't need your -- your ideas are culture-bound. what's our answer to that