 think my first job is to tell you that we're gonna leave plenty of time for you to ask questions and if you have them you should fill out cards and give them to the folks who are collecting the cards. Cynthia is back there she is one of those people but the first question that I have to just get the ball rolling um as as was said before you've been working on this film for for more than 10 years and it was completed in May 2016 well before November 2016. Does it feel more timely than you could ever have imagined it would be? Well I guess Dateline Saigon is the unexpected and unanticipated beneficiary of the Trump election so perhaps some small good thing has come out of it. No I had no idea that that what would be present today would be present today when I started this film it really came out of a couple of thoughts I had. I had spent a few weeks in Vietnam as a field producer for CNN covering one of the anniversaries of the end of the war and I met a lot of reporters some of them had covered the war and were back for a reunion a number of others were still working journalists and I heard some terrific stories especially some of them quite late at night at the top of the Rex Hotel outside the bar probably some of which were even true and I thought I wanted to capture some of these stories I also came to some sort of a political consciousness during the Vietnam War I remember when I was oh I think in eighth grade arguing with a camp director about the importance of stopping the communists and beating the communists in Vietnam and why we had to support what our government was doing and only a few years later I was marching in the streets against the war so this was an opportunity for me to go back and say what happened and give me a chance to look at it all over again and try to figure out what happened to me and what happened to the country. This one I sort of have mostly for you Joel but it's of course open to everybody. This film looks at an era in which reporters in a conflict zone had for time unfettered access and then the more truth they revealed the more better their access became and obviously for journalists today access remains limited at best even not in war zones and is often sort of highly curated and manipulated is you know what can we learn you know both in conflict zones and out of them you know what can today's journalists take from their experience and their solutions. Well that's a that's a pretty big question but so let me before let me make another observation about about what was portrayed in that film which was just how anomalous that moment was really for the media I mean you have to remember you know 15 years before you know during World War two there was a national censorship board journalists did not cover conflict independently it was it was a concept that really basically didn't exist if you were covering a military conflict as an American journalist you wore the uniform of the military and the Geneva conventions which were ratified after the First World War codified that relationship they basically said that journalists who were accompanying military forces and wore the uniform of that military force would be treated as if they were captured as prisoners of war and this was considered a great protection for journalists because prior to the cut the development of these this specific aspect of the Geneva Convention journalists could be executed as spies so this was a protection and then you look at at Vietnam and that was really the transition there you see that when the journalists are out there covering conflict they're often wearing uniforms Neil Sheehan was talking about you know picking up a weapon to defend himself they they you know they went out and they had a certain identification I mean with with the military but they you know the reality that they encountered caused them to redefine their own relationship and and then here's what was what's what's really amazing is in 1977 there was an additional protocol to the Geneva Convention and that codified that relationship in international law it was a new provision that basically said that journalists who accompanied who covered conflict independently in other words were not incorporated into the military force must be treated as civilians and so that kind of relationship and and that still exists today there are two ways in which journalists cover conflict both as incorporated into the military forces and independently and you have different kinds of protections depending on the way in which you you you function as a journalist but but Vietnam completely changed the course and and redefined the relationship that the media has to the coverage of armed conflict that despite the challenges we we can talk about those in a moment and and there's certainly a very significant Vietnam in so many aspects but in that one in particular was it was it was a sea change if I could follow up on that Robin and well first of all congratulations on a really amazing work and the fact that it took 10 years shows in in the film but to follow up on what Joe was saying one of the things that struck me watching it and I'm still processing it now because I just saw it for the first time but one of the things that really struck me was that in in one sense these correspondents are much more cynical than their peers in the sense that they were mistrustful or they grew to be mistrustful of what the government was saying compared to the Time Magazine correspondent they were more skeptical they they became disillusioned perhaps that an earlier date than than others and yet on another sense I was struck by watching their testimony that they were also so much more naive than than we are now and that they didn't see what was coming they didn't know the depths of government lying they they were shocked by the deception that they did greet but they had no idea how far would that go and they had no idea how how much division there could be within the country about a war because they were coming off their experience in Korea or World War two and they were also naive in a way and in a sense that they believe that if they just told the truth that this would have an effect which we're not allowed to have that illusion now because lots of times journalists tell the truth and it doesn't have any effect so that's one of the things I thought was so amazingly effective about your film is that it portrayed these young men these correspondence as both more cynical and kind of seen through things but also completely naive actually that sort of answers the question that I was going to ask you so I'll just jump to the next one which is that this film shows reporters dealing with a White House or maybe we should say another White House that that tries to dismiss facts or treat them treats them as a point of view how do you see this as being you know the same or different from what we are grappling with now well I'll try to take that first I I think that given the attitude of the current administration calling the enemy calling the press the enemy of the people the stakes have have been raised the electricity amount of electricity has been raised I think it's and this is my own personal feeling having examined what happened what we saw in this film 50 years ago and now I think it's a lot worse we did hear President Kennedy being frustrated and and his cabinet being frustrated because these reporters were were in inconvenience and but I think it's it's gotten a lot worse now and I think it's a lot more dangerous now that which the White House is doing one observation I had was about the size of that I mean you were focused on five journalists and there were there were others there but there wasn't there weren't a large number it was a relatively small number and I mean this is just a more general observation about how the how the media landscape work but I mean the the perceptions of these individuals were so powerful that they transformed the way the whole country perceived the conflict and I think that that it was precisely that which you can hear that in the way for that you know Kennedy and and and with George Bundy and the officials talk about it is you know these are a bunch of kids you know what are they now and they're having such influence over over over the way the entire country you know the you know understands events that are taking place now and now when you look at the media landscape and just how fractured and and complex it is and how how there's so many competing narratives battling each other it's it's it's just it's just amazing to contemplate that the power that that small group of individuals had to shape our perceptions of those events yeah what's what strikes me is that Kennedy was concerned about the conflict between the image of the war that he and his advisors were trying to present and then the shattering of that image by the correspondents like Habelsstrem and his and his colleagues and and that was a problem that was that was a that was something that he he tried to muse about with his advisors what's what's different today is that the current occupant of that office wouldn't be so much concerned with that as as how to discredit those reporters and make sure that his supporters didn't believe anything they said where that didn't seem to occur to Kennedy it's like let's make war on Habersstrem that wasn't one of the options on the table and I think that's did lean on the you saw he tried to prevent them from doing it yeah I don't know about that because I think that they they they certainly used you saw that there was a you know time magazine was portrayed as you know undermining and and and basically carrying water for right and that was if you I mean the reporters thought that was very deliberate they thought they were being manipulated those journals were being manipulated into sort of undermining the narrative that they were trying to present yeah but but conducting culture war against David Habersstrem wasn't like an option on the table yeah it's true for for Kennedy let me just pivot back to the point about naivete when these these were young men and they were really the first to be skeptical of the war there was a comment made by Neil Sheehan I believe later in the film saying we were outliers maybe it was David and they really were 90 percent of the coverage of the early years through 6566 was very favorable to to the American government position these people were really on the outside and and in terms of naivete when they came over and I think David Habersstrem very emotionally as did Neil talk about how they wanted to believe what the government was saying they they were boys during World War two they came to a patriotic consciousness then they they were young men when during the Cold War so they were really cold warriors it took them a while they went over there and initially were all reporting favorably so they all went through something of a crisis of conscience themselves to come to report so critically I've got one more and then I'm gonna open it up at the end of the film David Habersstrem says when the government is telling the truth reporters become a relatively unimportant conduit to what is happening but when the government doesn't tell the truth begins to twist the truth hide the truth then the journalist becomes involuntarily infinitely more important how should we look upon our new era of involuntary importance I suppose is the optimistic way of looking at our current situation well David's words are ever so much more important today that was shortly before he was killed I think we shot that in 2007 David the 10th anniversary of David's death was just last week by the way so was it was very shortly before before it happened please I don't want to love any of you comment on that I think it's the emotional heart of the film I mean I think that's the you know that's that's when everything comes together and you set it up brilliantly because that in a way that's that that perception is the beginning of the adversarial press the idea of an adversarial press and I think what we're grappling with now is that we have an adversarial press but there's a another like an further evolution where the government is trying to discredit not only discredit that press but break off a portion of the public and so that the president our current president can speak directly to that 20 to 40 percent of his base and make the president the primary source of information for that base about what the White House is doing that is an amazing development in the history of the adversarial press but I think it's incredible that you've that you that you got that quote from from Haberstain because because that's the origin of something that now is like in peril it's in peril yeah I think that that really was the the the essence and the kind that you know the kind of lesson that is the straight line from you know Vietnam to Watergate to the kind of modern can you know framework that that many journalists have when they decide that this is the profession that they want to pursue but you know another moment that resonated for me in the film was and I don't remember who it was it might have been how were some of it I don't recall was talking about how personally painful it was to feel the kind of orchestrated criticism if you will of their role and their efforts and how they felt in their own minds that they were engaged in a kind of patriotic exercise and how how just undermined and demoralized they were but by those attacks and I think that you know we're living through that now on it on it you know on a massive and unprecedented scale because it's orchestrated and it's systematic and it's deliberate and it's not in effort to undermine the work of a handful of specific reporters who are reporting things you know that the government might find objectionable it is the entire institution and the whole exercise of independent journalism that's that's under attack and so that that was a moment another moment in the film that resonated powerfully yeah it's not just they're under attack it's it's a coordinated assault that starts at the very top of the hierarchy with the president of the United States leading the charge in a way with the press as enemy of the people then you have at the base of the pyramid you have an army of online activists trolls bots foreign agents trying to discredit the press attack stories that they don't like and then in the middle mediating between the top and the base you have institutions like rush lombard talk radio daily caller drudge bright part etc that that mediate between the top and the base that's like far more sophisticated operation than just attacking reporters that you don't like so that's another sense in which they're they're they're sadness about about being attacked for telling the truth is almost naive right compared to what we face today all right let's let's take some questions okay this is for Tom as the film says your five heroes were among the US press corps as a whole exceptional most of the White House reporter most of the Vietnam reporters sorry swallowed the Pentagon line why do you think that was and why didn't more of the others experience crises of conscience well I for one one thing these five individuals were extraordinary reporters extraordinary human beings they were very courageous they they looked inward they analyzed things they didn't accept they didn't go to press conferences and repeat the press conferences and their dispatches I so perhaps that's the most important reason and then I another part of it and I'd like to hear the other panelists so you on it as well is most of the others were under pressure from their their news gathering organizations whether for example in this film we saw the UPI but there were also many other print publications which didn't want to have the government criticized and wanted to have stories of the hometown boys and they were mostly boys back then I mean not that's I don't think I can elaborate further since you know this this is your your story and I don't know what motivated the other reporters but I mean just again taking drawing drawing from the film and knowing Peter I mean Peter I'm not certainly was you know one of the founders of CPJ and I work you know work with him and traveled with him on CPJ missions you know he was just one he's one of the most intrepid reporters ever in the history of reporting and and I I the other the other reporters you portrayed in the film sort of have that same approach I doubt there were many people who frankly you know had the had the guts and the and and and the and the kind of determination to get out there and see for themselves and you know that's that's a dichotomy that still exists today in journalism you know the people who go out there and want to see it with their own eyes and want to experience it than the people who you know are like to you know maybe get the more official version or comment so that was just a really a takeaway from the film yeah I have reporters have this interesting expression foreign correspondence of going out which means a lot different than what it would mean to an adolescent teenager so going out is leaving the press room leaving the official confines of your beat and going out into the countryside into the into the danger but I want by way of commenting on your marks Tom competition means something very strange within the world of beat journalism reporters think of themselves as intensely competitive creatures like nobody in the world is more competitive than they are but what they mean by competition is everybody who competes for the same story but wants to get it five minutes sooner right it competition doesn't mean a totally different definition of the story or a completely different sense of who's believable or where the truth lies that they don't compete on those grounds they compete on grounds of everybody kind of agrees with the story is and then I try to get it five minutes before you so what's what's different about these reporters is that they were competing on premises on credibility on who's credible on on the entire thrust of the narrative one other point that I that I do want to make is that so many of the reporters as as so many as the majority the vast majority of people in this country were caught up in in the Cold War were caught up in understanding that it was us against the Soviets or us against the Chinese and that colored the whole philosophy it covered colored their reporting Halberstam Sheehan Peter Arnett and the others were able to break through that it wasn't easy for them but I think it's a lesson and I've talked to to to other reporters who are covering conflict today who are struggling to sort of break through the accepted wisdom to see what the real truth behind it is I just know that the thing that most again I don't remember who said but you know think that most offended one of the one of the reporters was the implication that they were sitting in the bar getting that that was a grave grave insult after they'd you know risk the butt to go out there and tell those stories hi so I'm gonna actually read the questions that I've collected some of them are actually for Robin and I'll still be coming around to collect more so this one is for Robin a fair amount of research in political science suggests that facts have a little influence on the partisan positions of motivated reasoners how does pro-publica contend with this phenomenon actually don't think that we sort of buy into that notion I think that we there there are definitely people who maybe cannot be reached by facts because they are so sort of either extreme or or just cemented to the ground in their in their views but I actually think that we have found that lots of people can be persuaded by fresh facts ultimately I guess we on some level have we need to believe that because we're gonna keep presenting facts we love them we're we're sort of addicted to them and we can't quit them to broke back mountain it but I think that we actually feel like you know facts combined with moving and powerful storytelling continue to bring us greater and greater readership so we we have every reason to believe that that we haven't we haven't reached the last person that we that we possibly can't so there's a little dash of optimism okay another question over here for anyone in the panel about 15 minutes left so maybe whoever jumps in first obviously the White House deeming the media the enemy makes for a very different journalistic climate but do you think it's harder for journalists to speak truth to power and shine a light on world conflicts in an era when it does feel like a lot of mainstream media has an agenda often based on the news of those who fund their these source their sources where does this leave us in our search for the truth well I think it's important to distinguish between journalism as a craft and occupation with a calling and the media as a sort of industrial complex that monetizes our attention and a lot of journalists have to work for the media because that's where the jobs are but they're calling and their principles sometimes cut in a different direction and so they're caught in this institutional setting where what they might want to do and what the employer requires them to do is not exactly the same thing so lots of times what they end up reporting is sort of a hybrid product between what what they would do as journalists and what the media requires of them as an industry and I think a lot of viewers listeners readers users of the product are totally onto this and this is one of the reasons why trust in the news media is declining and this is this is one of the reasons why we're searching for alternative business models that would allow journalists do what they what they ought to do but when people perceive commercial imperatives overcoming journalistic truth they're not wrong so we have room for about two more questions some of these are difficult to read so I'm gonna do my best okay this is for Tom and the panel do you feel the massive shift of public opinion during the Vietnam War due in part to the reportage of these five journalists had more residents than today because the stakes were higher for the draft age for men look I I think it continues to be debated and and I debated it with the people you saw on the screen whether they're what the impact of their reporting was each of them to a person felt that they failed to to break through with their print reporting at any rate Mal Brown talked about this a bit at the end of the film and once he was able to to get on TV he saw it had a much much more powerful impact Halberstam said the same thing oh I I'm struggling with with trying to come to to a conclusion to an answer that question maybe I'll pass it off to one of you two one of the three of you it's it's it's difficult for me to to assess the answer to that well I I remember my brother registering for the draft and I remember I was too young but he had a number in the in the draft and I remember us hoping his number was low or high whatever it would be to you know exempt you from the Vietnam War and I do think that that sense that not everybody is eligible to fight I think that has an effect on how people view America's entry into violent conflict and and I think that does change change the politics of it yeah I mean in some in some ways it seemed that the you know the resistance came from the notion that this war was unwinnable you know that it was it was not the fact that people were dying it was that people you know to take John Kerry's crib and we're dying for no reason you know so and I think that was a narrative that that that you know was created by you see you see the beginnings of that here and certainly as the war progressed you know that became dominant and I think you know if you if you think that you're being asked to make a sacrifice for your country you want it to be meaningful and if what you're encountering in the press is that it's pointless that's that's got to create a that's got to feel very real and I think what because of the draft many more people were involved in the war than are involved in our wars today so it touched many more families which caused many more people to pay attention and once people started paying attention with the groundwork that the the people we saw in this film was being laid by them and then others who came after were really reporting from from a point of view that had been established so it all it kept building and we kept not winning yeah and World War I World War II Korean War you didn't have journalists letting the public know maybe this is not the country you thought it was but in Vietnam you did okay so here's our final question and it actually kind of covers other ideas that similar the other people had what do you think these esteemed journalists would think about the retreat of mainstream media from going out and getting the story I'm a working journalist and we do a lot of collection from the web and a lot of what's called UGC collection user-generated content collection in order to report especially in foreign conflict zones and we rely oftentimes on people having an internet connection out there are activists like the white helmets in Syria to understand what's happening and that happens for a lot of different reasons insurance right they can't ensure their guys to go over there without having a pretty deep set of pockets and a lot of other factors which you guys all know because you're all in the industry so I find that a lot of a lot of larger organizations have pulled back from some of these areas that we have our blood and treasure invested in and I'm wondering what the gentleman you know and interviewed and know intimately think about the retreat from going out and getting it these guys made their names on being there and because they were there they were able to do they were able to break ground I am certain that they would be very disappointed at the pullback on on foreign coverage they'd be very frustrated at the same time it really for many men and women covering conflict today it's much more dangerous than it was in Vietnam so I think that that's a big difference a big distinction nevertheless with the cutbacks in foreign coverage which you alluded to with the the danger so it's very difficult to go into some of these some of these areas so you have to rely on people who have an internet connection or who can blend into the local scene it's it's a very very different environment two follow-ups on that one is the the origin of almost all authority in journalism is something like this I'm there you're not let me tell you about it or I interviewed that person you didn't here's what he said or I looked at the documents you were raising your kids that going to work you didn't have time to do that so let me tell you what I found and to the degree that journalists aren't allowed to do that kind of work they lose authority second observation today still many journalists are in danger zones and conflict zones and and deadly situations trying to bring us news of what's going on you you deal with us all the time and I think the press as an institution should be much more vocal and forward about the sacrifice and danger that its members are in to bring us the news to fight the kind of hatred and just attempt to discredit the institution that they that they face now I mean these are people on the front lines but the kind of authority that the reporters in this film have results from the fact that they are able to say with conviction I'm there you are not there let me tell you what I found yeah and and and I think I think another part of that is and this was true in Vietnam as well if you talk to these reporters they will talk about all the support staff they had in the bureaus the Vietnamese staff many of whom or some of whom certainly were left behind and suffered grave consequences as a result but today that that that kind of relationship is even more dramatic I mean you you you sort of described it there are a lot of places that journalists can't get to I mean yes it's it's always better as Jay said to have that first-hand observation but there there are places you can't get through that that journalists have to cover and they can't get to them because sometimes it's too dangerous or sometimes they don't have the resources to do it or there are there are multiple other reasons and really what the global information ecosystem depends on to a tremendous extent our local journalists activists sort of purveyors of information these eyewitnesses if you will and now those you know those eyewitnesses are using this technology to transfer their knowledge to journalists who then report it that's not ideal but it's still it's still in some circumstances the the best option and and the other thing we really have to recognize and throughout the history of conflict and coverage of that conflict by journalists is the role of these local stringers fixers support staff or local journalists working for the local for the local media who sort of inform our understanding of these events and again if you look at our data at the committee to protect journalists these are the people who are on the front lines these are the people who are getting killed these are the people who are going to jail and these are the people we depend on we depended on back then and we still depend on today to keep us informed to that I I only add one or two thoughts one is that I worry given how much we rely on people that we used to think of as being sources as to be themselves reporters I think that that divide had the blur the blurring of that line is a troubling thing and would have been troubling I think to the reporters in the in the film and is troubling to me the other thing that I saw certainly in the last especially in the last part of my sort of active reporting career is sort of this almost fake access to the field that sort of proliferated the the embeds that you could get in places like Iraq that were sort of access but not access sort of go this way go that way access I think that the reporters in the film found ways to break through that they developed networks of their own sources they they they found ways not to be in that echo chamber and in some of the conflict areas that we deal with in the world right now it's that is extraordinarily treacherous because there are no clear lines at all it's just all chaos but at the same time those techniques and those practices and those ideas I think are still probably the way through it all anyway that's shall we leave it there