 Thank you very much, PJ. I'd like to segue right into our panel, and Reginald Dale will be our moderator for the panel, correct? Or do we abolish the coffee break? Yes? He says we've abolished the coffee. No, we haven't. How many of you would like a coffee break? We've abolished the coffee break. So for those of you who'd like coffee, there's coffee outside, but because it's upstairs. See how well-informed I am? If you'd like a cup of coffee, please help yourselves to it. But otherwise, to keep things on track, let's invite our panel up now, and Reginald Dale will be your tour guide and your moderator, and he will introduce your panelists. That was very democratic. Yes, I'm going to get a... What do you want me? These mics are all live. Yes? Hands up, if anyone who can't hear, I'll build a joke. Good. Well, we'll continue with the panel. We were just going to speak briefly, each of us, and then have a discussion. I'm not actually going to introduce anyone at great length, because you have the panels, the bios. Everyone has the bios in their material, and I'd rather spend time on the discussion and lengthy, biographical details, which everyone has access to anyway. I wanted to take the moderator's prerogative just to say a couple of things. First, picking up something that PJ Crowley just said about holding government accountable, the media's role, and he also said that that was the role of the media around the world, which it is, but there's a very big difference between the media in a parliamentary system, like the European and the US system, which I think is not always fully appreciated, which is that in a parliamentary system, a government and particularly a leader, Prime Minister, is accountable to the people through Parliament, and the leader goes and submits him or herself to questions in Parliament, whereas in the United States, the leader never goes to Congress to be questioned as a sort of parliamentary question time, but holds a press conference and is accountable to the people through the media rather than through Parliament. And I think that this gives the American media a kind of quasi-constitutional role that is not the same as that enjoyed by the media in Europe and is accountable in some ways for the very high esteem in which some members of the US media hold themselves as tribunes of the people, whereas some of my colleagues in Fleet Street tend to regard the whole thing as a bit of a game rather than a serious constitutional exercise. It's no surprise, perhaps, that most of the people who write those supermarket tabloids that you find about how I married an alien space invader are actually journalists from Fleet Street who are not fulfilling their constitutional role in the process. I just want to take one or two sort of bullet points about the difficulty of working with the US media today, particularly today, because the political polarization of the country is also reflected in the media. It's a chicken and egg problem. Is the country polarized because the media is polarized or vice versa? I think it's actually a bit of both. Just about two weeks ago I read a column in the Washington Post and right before the end the writer said, used the phrase, I can't believe I'm writing this. And she put that in context. She had been writing about the policies of the Republicans in Congress and she was talking about John Boehner, the Republican leader in Congress. And just before she finished, she said, I can't believe I'm writing this, but I actually agree with one of the points he made. Now that to me was astonishingly revealing. I think it was meant to be a sort of, it was partly that she felt guilty she was agreeing with a Republican. She had to somehow apologize to all her friends, her liberal friends, that she was actually saying that she agreed with a Republican. But she felt that she couldn't agree with a Republican on one single small point without somehow excusing herself or apologizing for it. And to me, I spent many years as a columnist and we were always told that we ought to be unpredictable and surprising in our comments. This was astonishing in indicating that basically what she was going to do in all her columns was to rehash the Democratic Party line. And sure enough, she had a piece in at the end of last week commenting on Republican policies in Congress on jobs. And it was the complete Democratic Party line. And I sort of wonder what's the point of being a columnist if all you're going to do is write the speaking points from the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. And we've got to a point where if you look at the columnists in the Washington Post and the New York Times, the two papers that PJ reads every morning, you can just classify them in advance, know what they're going to say. I might be helpful if they had little blue or red stickers on top. So you didn't have to read the column and you knew which one was identified with which party or maybe a blue sticker with a couple of red dots on because they occasionally agree with one point or a part of it has made. And then I was reading Politico the other day, a serious analysis of what seemed to be a serious analysis of the run up to the midterm elections and the polls and how the parties were doing. And I suddenly came across this phrase, our side. And so, of course, this wasn't written as the writer had maybe inadvertently given away the fact that the writer was looking at it from one side or another, our side. Now, to me, that completely, just as the comment in the column destroyed the credibility of the column, this destroyed the credibility of the analysis. Why should I go on with this analysis if it's written to advance the view of, as the writer put it, our side? And you find it even more, of course, as PJ Crowley was just talking about in the cable news, TV cable news, where actually the last two years show that the more you make a program ideological, the more the ratings go up. But both on the liberal side and conservative side, in fact, more on the conservative side than the liberal side, the ratings go up. You find it in blogs and here again, they tend to polarize because liberals tend to read liberal blogs and conservatives read conservative blogs. And so you're constantly reading people who agree with you and go a bit further, more towards the extreme, and you think, oh, it's all right. And here's this blogger saying this. It's respectable to think this. And so there's a tendency to pull each in the direction away from the center. And the only good news on that front is I read an estimate that only 1.5% of Americans read political blogs. And I also read somewhere else that blogs are actually beginning to decline in quantity, which I thought was splendid news for all of us. First of all, we don't have to read so many and secondly, we won't have to write so many. But I suppose what I'm saying is that more than ever, it's incredibly important when you're looking at the U.S. media to be aware of where this is all coming from and where the particular media outlet stands on the political spectrum or on any other right, left, or beliefs system. And I think one of the problems of people working in Washington is that the main, I spent nine years working in the newsroom of the Washington Post, not for the Washington Post, but in there. And here you have a paper that goes to enormous lengths to try and be, as it would see itself, neutral or unbiased and so on. And to be where the center is without being biased. But its view of where the center of American opinion is is much further to the left than where the center of opinion actually is. And the same applies to New York Times. So if you're just looking at those two papers, you have to keep remembering that you are not looking at papers which reflect the viewpoint of the average American. And is another consequence of that is that for foreign correspondent in Washington is, to me, is absolutely essential to get out of New York and Washington and go around the country and talk to people all around the country. But you won't ever really understand the United States. We, the organization I run actually has a program for visiting European media fellows and we send them out to do precisely that and they come back with the most incredibly enhanced understanding of the United States. I know it's not always easy to do that. There are, I won't belabor that point any further, there are some good things happening I think which is that Americans are, the news consumption of Americans is actually going up at the moment. Americans are spending more time following the news than at any time in the last decade. They're still getting, I have all sorts of figures here, 29% of Americans I think still get news from newspapers, although that's much smaller from the under 30s. And there's a general view around that, I mean what's happening is that American consumers on the whole are adding news from electronic media and websites to the other traditional sources from which they get news rather than compensating by reducing the traditional sources. And there's a myth going around, which I'm glad this is a myth, that people increasingly get their news from the John Stuart show and the Colbert report and so on. And this, I've just have a table here of surveys of big survey that's been done on this. It turns out that in fact that's not the case, that here for example where you go, do you go to the Colbert report for the latest headlines, 3% say yes, do you go to John Stuart's daily show for in-depth reporting, 2% go for in-depth reporting, do you go for entertainment, the figures are in the 40s and 50%. So I mean this idea that somehow we're all being taken over by these comedy news shows is not sustained by the surveys. That said I do think that the biggest challenge is still identifying what is a neutral unbiased factual and so far as it can be reported in the American media and that's what I'm hoping that we're going to pursue with this panel. So the idea was that we were speaking alphabetical order, which I think puts Sean in the next and next in turn. All right my name is Sean Aday and I'm a professor here at George Washington University in the School of Media and Public Affairs and the usually the director of the Institute for Public Diplomacy and Global Communication, although I'm blissfully ensconced on sabbatical this year and so actually my golf game has improved dramatically until the rain started. But anyway I'm supposed to talk about how the US media covers the rest of the world and covers US foreign policy in general, which are not two of the same things. I thought it was fascinating listening to PJ Crowley. For one thing hearing PJ Crowley talk about Twitter is interesting because PJ Crowley has one of the all-time great tweets of the last few months, which I guess is really about the life cycle of Twitter almost, but in which when an American was imprisoned in North Korea and former President Jimmy Carter went over and secured his release, PJ Crowley tweeted a warning to Americans thinking about traveling to North Korea we have a limited supply of former presidents, which I thought was wonderful. I also thought it was very interesting the way he talked about how when he comes in in the morning he gets a stack of clips, he gets two stacks of clips. One is of the way the rest of the world has covered America, but the other the first stack that he mentioned was an inch thick stack of clips about US media coverage of US foreign policy and I was fascinated to discover that it's actually an inch high because I can't imagine that it would be and I'm sure either it was much higher much thicker in the past or they're patting that dramatically because I think one of the most important things that he talked about today, one of the little nuggets he said was about the lack of the reduction in journalists US journalists that he has at his briefings and it really goes part and parcel with what I want to talk about very briefly in these introductory comments which is that a couple of things. One is the trend in US media coverage of foreign policy, US foreign policy in general and especially US media coverage of the rest of the world, a trend, a declining trend in both cases, a decline in the amount of coverage, the quantity of coverage and I would argue the quality of coverage and that's for a number of different reasons but I'm also going to talk a little bit about ways in which this is a very interesting time to be talking about this subject in particular because even though the news industry is shrinking the traditional news media industry is said to be shrinking in many ways, a decline in papers, etc. In other ways that's an interesting time because there are alternative means of not only gathering news and producing news, someone mentioned ProPublica during the question and answer but also blogs in the internet and other types of backpack reporting as it's called and ways in which there are alternatives not only for mainstream journalists to gather news if they so choose but also other avenues for the rest of us to get our news for young journalists in the room from S&PA and for others to report on the news but also ways to do reporting, basic reporting, ways for organizations that want to get news out that want to maybe challenge official lines of argument to get that news to reporters. So that's an interesting time whether all those potentialities are realized or not. First of all I want to just talk about these trends towards declining news and the nature of U.S. media coverage of foreign policy and the world and really the short way of putting this is that the best way to understand the way the U.S. covers the world and covers foreign policy is to understand U.S. foreign policy that U.S. media coverage of both subjects typically has been found over the years to reflect U.S. foreign policy and particularly the way elites talk about U.S. foreign policy. So a brief way to think about that is a few studies have looked at say coverage of Darfur and related topics in Sudan before say the beginning of the 21st century or I think even more critically the regional conflict centered around the DRC and have found for instance that you get basically no coverage in the American media and then you get these spikes. So if you were looking at a line chart over time it would go like this and you get these little heartbeat spikes and you look into the spikes and you find what was happening there is there's two pieces of news there one is no coverage and the other is the spike. Well the explanation for the spike is inevitably because some U.S. senior U.S. official secretary of state in the case of the 90s or somebody else decided to mention it go there or do something like that which was always an episodic event they would make a visit they would mention it prominently in a briefing or a State Department spokesperson would mention it or there might be some episodic crisis that happened in a moment as opposed to an ongoing crisis there's an episodic moment of something a particular tragedy that happened or something like that and that's what explains those spikes usually though what it was was something about a U.S. official did something right and that's really one I think one of the really important ways to understand U.S. media coverage of foreign policy is that it typically reflects what the U.S. government is doing so places that the U.S. government cares about are far more likely to get covered than places the U.S. government doesn't care about which by the way is a very different thing than saying places that are truly deserving of coverage and are important and that we need to know about get covered right that isn't necessarily the same thing this is a problem if you will that is accentuated really since the the mid 80s and certainly into the 90s as we see declines in news budgets and contraction in general in the traditional media industries especially on broadcast television and the newspapers because you no longer have first of all you no longer have the budget to cover the world the way that traditional news organizations used to there is also changes in the way that the industry is run that makes it much more important that the news say on television generates a profit which isn't wasn't traditionally the case before the early 80s and therefore news organizations can't just sit there and tolerate losing money on news the way that the way that they used to for a long period of time and so what goes well one of the first things to go is the most expensive type of news there is in many ways other than maybe invest maybe investigative reporting which is foreign news it's very expensive to sustain a bureau particularly to sustain a bureau with multiple reporters and other sorted staff and camera people etc for thinking about television so you cut those things okay so what you end up getting is say one reporter and this is maybe at a newspaper one reporter covering Africa and so we have sort of the Sarah Lopala model where Africa is a country right and you have never said that you may right you may still have several reporters covering Europe right we get a very Eurocentric version of the world in American media coverage but the point is is that as budgets contract you get much less coverage right and so you get what PJ Crowley is describing about his press briefings now that's problematic on a number of levels for anyone who thinks that the world's an important place but I think Cole and Powell actually had a good example of of why this matters but also a strategy for getting around it that some US officials sometimes take one of the really important ways to understand this this phenomena is to understand that the way that elites in America think about the world not just the places they think of as being important but the way that they think about those places is also the way in which or is going to be reflected in US media coverage okay so know is the frames that elites have for the rest of the world are going to be far more likely to be the frames used by foreign policy reporters and others in the US media so when Colin Powell was Colin Powell was very concerned about what was happening with the HIV AIDS crisis in sub-Saharan Africa and this was a subject that was very difficult to get coverage of and so one of the things that he did and it's not like he made this up it was it was a something that was true and is still true and very important to him and others was he started talking about the problem of HIV AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa as as a national security problem and this is before 9-11 he was talking about this is a problem about failed states and failed states are places that produce terrorists and so we need to worry about this not only on a humanitarian level but in the United States we actually have a huge arguing we have a national interest in worrying about this topic this isn't just about being do-gooders as if there's anything wrong with that but there really is from a realistic perspective there is a reason to be concerned about this from a perspective of American foreign policy that if we have failed states if we have all these sorts of problems that this is going to breed terrorism make the world less safe for us make it less stable for us to conduct trade etc etc and this is an argument that had in different effects on the u.s. media in terms of its coverage but it's a strategy that sometimes elites can use effectively to get a subject that otherwise is not going to be likely to be covered very often to be covered is to frame it in a certain way that is more consistent with a traditional way in which us foreign policy is conducted right is it in our interest but also in a way that is consistent with the way u.s. media typically frames things I mentioned at the outset that this is an interesting time to be talking about a subject like this because of new media and its cross pressures and but also its potential additions or ways in which the media can use it and this is an open question there isn't an easy answer here people who say that oh new media are liberating and the Twitter revolution and all that are really way ahead of themselves so we don't actually know I think very much about that on the global scene we have a maybe a better sense of it in America but all that mad address that since he's the expert on it but on a global scene it's it's far less clear the role of new media in general in the various ways that we talk about them in terms of collective action and challenging authority but in terms of the news business it's a very interesting challenge because on the one hand as has been mentioned before it's putting pressure on traditional media as an industry on the other hand it also opens doors in a declining environment for foreign news in the U.S. it creates alternative avenues for first of all cheaply produced foreign news that can be used by traditional media and others but also it creates at least the opportunity for alternative means for the rest of us to get news about the rest of the world that we might be interested in and at least in theory the opportunity to find news about topics that challenge official lines whether that's the official line in Iran or London or here and so that's a very interesting development that we have to sort of see come about I don't want to hog the whole time here I know we want to have mostly discussion but I think those are sort of the ways in which I would lay out the sort of framework here good thank you pass we could move on to I'll know the ball ground with apologies for the laryngitis that I woke up with this morning Saul bellow once said that a great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion runs deep and today I think we're living the illusion of a well-informed citizenry in my 62 years in the news business I'm about to enter my 85th year I've gone from the morse code and key to telics to satellite phones wireless laptops which is what I used it during the battle of Torah Bora in December or one when we failed to nail Osama bin Laden but all those bells and whistles in my judgment have not improved our understanding of the world around us in fact that understanding has diminished perceptibly aggravated at recent by recent in recent times by our crisis in journalism that we're all talking about the average age of a newspaper reader I've read recently is 55 many newspapers are dying or born again online tech savvy bloggers have already revolutionized politics yet again though I hear that might be changing to from Reggie and some of course would argue not for the better and Twitter following YouTube my space Facebook and many others caused a near revolution in Iran two summers ago but the quality and quantity of foreign reporting for American publications has declined in my judgment precipitously foreign bureaus as you heard have been closed prominent foreign corresponds have taken buyouts or studied their own blogs and in my judgment Americans have seldom been as ill-informed about global trends and crises as we are today frequently our three major networks CBS NBC and ABC do not carry a single item of foreign news even though one of them calls them calls itself world news tonight which reinforces my conviction that TV is to news what bump the stickers are to philosophy as the economy summarize the media crisis many newspapers and television producers have discovered that people have short attention spans and a hunger for scandal gossip and disgust they feed them accordingly often below the belt by bugging telephones and bad ring celebrities we now have a new journalism the journalism of assertion which has replaced the journalism of verification which I was trained with beginning with United Press in London in 1946 with 24 seven news cycles we have neglected our duty to arouse public interest where it did not exist before and to take what's important and make it interesting as a result few democratic leaders today seem to grasp that we're living through a period of social change that is more profound than anything we've experienced not in 5,000 years of recorded history and all of that is now on fast forward there are of course exceptions Al Jazeera being a notable one its coverage of the world's most important stories out shines in my judgment all other reputable sources I watch it every day morning and evening in the Gulf recently I was reading the peninsula news and the Gulf news each one of those newspapers carried 12 pages of foreign news the Financial Times and the International Herald Tribune are now the very best newspapers in the English speaking world they are first among the seven newspapers that I read every morning I believe the root of my criticism stemmed from the situation as we emerged triumphant from the Cold War editors and TV producers decided in their infinite wisdom that Americans no longer cared about foreign news and decided to focus instead on easier to cover certainly less expensive to cover domestic stories that gave us two years of OJ Simpson the infamous skater Tonya Harding according to a detailed study done by the Pew Foundation got more airtime in a comparable news period than the fall of the Berlin Wall there are many such examples as you know superb reporting was done on the Iraq war until it became too expensive to cover including the high maintenance of life insurance in a combat zone which in some cases was $1,000 a day 9 11 woke us up again from the deep sleep about the world beyond Iraq but Al Qaeda and its associated movements is a tough and very expensive war to cover below below the radar screen that stretches from the west coast of Africa to Algeria to Sudan Somalia Yemen and back to Pakistan very difficult to cover I'm not the central street street and international studies and we've just started a massive study of AQ Al Qaeda AM and associated movements that'll take about six months Al Qaeda radicalization from Stockholm to Madrid to Minneapolis is taking place on the Internet where a global caliphate in cyberspace provokes a much more exciting view of the future than life in a rundown Muslim suburb of Paris or Birmingham in England so those are the problems as I see them today at my advanced at the advancing age of 85 and having spent 62 years in this nutty profession called journalism thank you very much and I don't think we're going to get such a sweeping viewpoint from anyone else of our panel here I would like to add I think another reason why Iraq coverage diminished was when the United States started doing better in the war there was more of the coverage seemed more appealing when the United States well when you look at the situation today that should be massive coverage than today since now the power of the most influence in Iraq is not the United States but Iran yes but that's I couldn't agree with you more but that's a very big story they're they're not having a set piece battle unfortunately or fortunately perhaps I should say anyway next in line is Robert thank you I took it as my my instruction to talk to those of you in the audience who are foreign correspondents trying to figure out American politics and American media about this question of media bias and it's already been alluded to by almost everyone who's spoken so far and I guess I'm going to provide a slightly different point of view on that I think that in the mainstream media that remain the most important sources for news for the people who are influential that is the New York Times the Washington Post the network news shows the AP wire time in newsweek still I think the national public radio CNN most of the reporters coverage is not structured by a desire to push the coverage in the direction that they personally might favor I think they they try very hard to offer consistently nonpartisan reasonably balanced and fair reporting of the political process so if you go to any of those media I think you'll you'll get something like that or at least that's what they're trying to do but what my research is showing is that despite this commitment to balance on any given issue the media are quite likely to be out of balance and to to strong favor one side of a controversy to strongly favor one candidate or party position typically this is traced to their personal beliefs and this idea that you know I I'm I'm being favorable to Barack Obama because I'm a liberal and I think that that really it can't be sustained by by the evidence so what I'm saying is is a slightly more nuanced argument is that yes indeed the media will frequently be very one sided in covering controversies but it's not because of the journalist's personal views usually the there's several other forces that are shaping that slanted coverage most importantly there's a constant battle between the Republican and Democratic parties that's the heart at really the heart of American political discourse and one of the most important places where the two parties and their politicians and officials like PJ Crowley place place their time and that that is to try to get the media to skew in favor of their position so that's what the Republicans and Democrats are trying to do they're trying to push the coverage in one direction or another and if it does push in one direction or another which I would argue it frequently does that more than anything else there are several factors but more than anything else suggests that one of the parties is doing a better job at spinning the news and they get away with it for a variety of reasons even though the journalists the reporters themselves not so much the columnist but the reporters are trying to provide something that's balanced and fair so let me give you just an example that I think is telling I could give you many many if you look at the coverage of the US presidential election in 2008 in the the fall campaign from late September through election day it strongly favored Barack Obama it was very favorable to Barack Obama and very negative for McCain however in the first three weeks of the fall campaign it was extraordinarily favorable to the Republican ticket mostly because of Sarah Palin who got extremely favorable coverage and very unfavorable to the Democrats now their reasons for this having to do with the incompetent Democratic orchestration of their convention which happened at the beginning of this period relative to the actually at least for a certain point time the brilliant political strategy of McCain and choosing this electrifying new figure who would predictably generate lots of copy lots of interest lots of attention Joe Biden got almost no coverage he was predictable he was you know everyone in Washington knew him there was no news there Palin was news and she got a lot of positive coverage for a few weeks that completely swamped the Democrats so if you if you look over the period of this these two months you have a a swing from a very one-sided pro-Republican to a very one-sided pro-Democratic coverage that I would argue is not atypical even though the journalists themselves are trying to balance out the coverage and what they might say is well if you average the early part and the late part you come up with something like balance I don't think that's quite right but my main point is to convey to those of you who aren't maybe familiar with the American media that this is what's going on how do you how do you challenge that or get beneath it I would say one is to constantly look for your own data so when they're telling you for example here's a good current example that the Republicans are gonna are gonna swamp the Democrats in the in the election race next month you can go and look at the public opinion data yourself you don't have to listen to these spin meisters telling you that even if spin meisters in this case on both sides both Democrats and Republicans tend to be spinning this the Democrats are sort of minimizing the heavy losses the Republicans are maximizing them but there's other data out there that might say something different so be independent of the people who are trying to create that slanted news and often succeed in creating the slanted news despite the best efforts of the journalists in my view I think that's what's going on with mainstream journalism okay that's it that's it wasn't that pithy enough it was absolutely wonderfully to pick you off no no great thing is that the pithy like that you get your message across Matt all right well thank you thank you Reginald my name is Matt Heineman I'm a professor here at the School of Media and Public Affairs and I've been invited along I believe to talk a little bit more about the online news environment and the online public sphere in the United States so I want to suggest to you today that in many ways the online for we've heard a lot today about how chaotic and how new and how dynamic the online environment is I want to suggest that that's largely wrong or at least that's not true at the top and that's not true in terms of the sources that people are actually reading we heard PJ talk about about how the how the fundamental issue of the politics maybe that's too strong fundamental issue in terms of the media escape is the expansion of the number of outlets and that's generally true but in many ways the internet is really an extension of something that has been going on of course for quite a while and I think that it's easy for particularly reporters but also for members of the public for politicians for interest groups to look at the changes and make the draw the wrong conclusion so just a couple of years ago at a very similar event to this Brian Williams his anchor of NBC said well you know and I'm paraphrasing here apologize if I'm not going to get the quote right lot quite right but he said you know all my life you know I've been struggling trying to get credentials to cover my line of work and now I'm competing with a guy named Vinny who lives in an efficiency apartment in the Bronx and he hasn't left that efficiency apartment in years I want to suggest to you that that gets blogs and and the phenomenon of blogs exactly backwards right so I want to use my time today mostly to talk about what online news consumption actually looks like so let's start out with so what portion of America's online media diet what portion of web visits go to news outlets actually not that much only about three or four percent of web visits go to online news outlets but if we restrict restrict our search I restrict the question just to non-commercial or online only outlets the sort of outlets that aren't just an online outpost of a traditional media organization the amount of actual web traffic that goes those kind of outlets on you know online only news outlets interest group sites anything that doesn't fall into the category of a traditional news organization is only about two tenths of a percent right it's really a rounding error that's not to say that it's not important in certain circumstances but we shouldn't confuse this with something that is a mass phenomenon sweeping the Republic so are people getting more of their news diet online yes I don't think there's any question but at the same time it's also clear that a much more important part of the American news diet comes from television and even yes still from network news then comes from from the online world our ways of measuring this aren't perfect one of the one of the best long-term measures we have comes from questions that are asked by Pew in their center for the people in the press and they ask they've asked since for 20 years and what portion of what are your what are your most what's your most important source of news and if they give one they say well okay where's what's your next most important source of news and now as I believe Reginald mentioned we're now finally up to the point where more people say that online news is more important to them than than a traditional newspaper right but that's still behind all of these other outlets it's still far behind television which is 70 75 80 percent of the public says that that's an important source of news to them now but even though people say that increasingly the web is an important source of news it's important to understand exactly how they're using this how they're how they're using the source and actually when they're using this source most visits to news sites online news sites are quite short and they kind of have to be short because they're during the working hours most news consumption online news consumption especially is not like it's not like reading the newspaper it's not like watching TV news it's it's an activity that's done primarily at work and for those of you who are working in news organizations I'm sure that you get the you know get you get the heat maps you get the internal reports that tell that that suggests that this is that this is a phenomena that you're seeing so I think that it's also we need to be careful in terms of interpreting what it means to say that news consumption is up and I generally think that you know by by some metrics that's actually true but the broader phenomenon that we've seen in American in the in the American media and frankly in the American public sphere over the past 20 years is that it's less about a change in the mean than a change in the variance that is what happens when you get something like CNN well turns out that some people really like news so they're going to watch news all day long right and most rest the public is going to instead watch other things watch sports you know watch you know whatever the latest USA drama is right watch you know whatever's on the family channel right and so what you've seen is not so much a change in the mean but it just a dramatic differentiation and more inequality in terms of how much news Americans consume and how much Americans know about politics and that shapes and that shapes the that shapes the the concrete economics of news in powerful ways instead of instead of being geared instead of being geared primarily at the mass market you can see certain segments of media that are geared much more towards niche segments of the public and I'll be talking I'll be talking more about that later but that shows up particularly in terms of the questions about polarization certainly the economics of the online media market promote polarization and promote in general many of these outlets that do have strong reviews this again is not a new phenomenon when Ben Franklin moved and set up his the second newspaper in Philadelphia his market was to be well essentially more of an 18th century tabloid it was trashy it was it was flamboyant it was well-written and it got a lot of attention right and it was anti establishment right and I think you can see that the same kind of economics at work online but also want to suggest I think one of the most fundamental misconceptions about online news is that online news is deeply decentralized right we hear all this talk about bloggers and people are going to all these tiny little news outlets now it's certainly more decentralized than say the American news market was in the Cronkite era but actually online news is dramatically more concentrated in many ways than print newspaper readership which is the area of media consumption that has been most directly affected by the rise of the internet the top 10 outlets online account for almost a third of all online news readership whereas the top 10 newspapers in the US account for about 20 percent of print readership at the same time if you can in fact look at the long tail of online content sites that are tiny in terms of market share say sites that are ranked below 500 in terms of their total audience are about 20 percent of the total American news consumption online whereas newspapers that are ranked below 500 only are only about 3 percent of the print circulation in the US so instead of the simple story the simple narrative about how everybody is going to the tiny outlets in fact more people are moving to the very biggest outlets then are moving to the smallest a couple more points before I finish up so even though we have all these online greater diversity of online outlets does that mean that we have more diverse content to some extent the jury is still out on this but the early reports early recent research suggested the answer is actually no and partly for reasons that we've already heard about today it used to be very difficult for during certainly during the middle of the news cycle for news organizations to get a really good job to do a really good job of monitoring what their competitors were doing now it's almost impossible to avoid and so in a variety of contexts you see more duplication of stories in many in in in terms of the the herd mentality the echo chamber in ways that were were familiar with and let me suggest let me conclude by talking a little bit about blogs I don't suggest I'll make a grand statement I think blogging is dead fact I think that the extent that you could talk about blogging as in the in the ways that you that you often heard Boggs discussed in two thousand two thousand three blogs citizen generated citizen generated media I think if you in that sense blogs really never existed in the first place in reality when you start looking at the backgrounds of these these organizations that were found that these pop in these blogs that that were founded in two thousand one two thousand two or even earlier you have a bunch of well gosh I've he educated white guys talking about how blogs are empowering ordinary people like them right and in fact that's quite true right we're really blogs really were you know there were really were at that particular moment it was relatively cheap to start a blog I think it's quite clear that to actually be read as a blogger that that moment has passed you look at the two thousand one two thousand two election cycle there's a lot of new blogs two thousand three two thousand four a few a few of them got really big two thousand five two thousand six only a couple and the two thousand seven two thousand eight cycle there was only one new blog that made it into the list of top hundred political sites over the course of the two thousand seven two thousand eight campaign anyone want to guess what it was five thirty eight five thirty eight dot com right and and not only that this is a very different model of blog initiation right it was started out as sort of a spin off of daily coast not as a sort of a one-man band site initially and of course what we now see is that blogging isn't a separate category of content it's just a subgenre of opinion journalism and it's done overwhelmingly by professional journalists right yeah now five thirty eight of course is now has now been you know is now providing content for the website of the New York Times and I think this has dramatic implications for how we read things like blogs what is a blog well now it's just the default way of publishing any sort of time sensitive information online and so the ways in which we evaluate sources really depend particularly on in much our are still in the online world quite traditional and we and I think that that and I think that that is good news for the reliability of blogs but probably contradicts a lot of the a lot of the narratives that we still hear about guys and efficiency apartments in the Bronx and how that they're take how they're taking over journalism I think it's I think we need to be very careful not to be too self-aggrandizing thank you I think that was quite fascinating I would just ask would like to ask you one point of clarification talking about going for news online and going to newspapers as if those were two contrasting separate ways of getting news but aren't a lot of people going to the online sites of newspapers I mean to newspaper websites yeah absolutely how does that affect your statistics so if you look at what are the what are the most read online news outlets they are all familiar names they are yahoo yahoo news CNN calm the New York Times and on and on you know NBC on and on down the list these are these are generally traditional outlets with some exceptions like like yahoo yeah yeah yeah thank you and now I'm finally to a European practitioner of the art of the foreign correspondent from Washington Gina thank you yes I'm a correspondent with the Swedish radio and I might as well begin by by declaring I am completely dependent on US media as a correspondent I would like to to confirm what Frank Cessno said in his opening remarks I re-report a lot of stuff I I report what American media has already reported about and that's part of my job so I would be nothing without you let me begin by declaring that I've been with the Swedish radio for 20 years and the the last 15 years I've been covering mostly global and foreign news I've been reporting from from the Middle East from all over Europe I've been covering the the latest three presidential elections here in the US and I've been been appointed Washington correspondent 2007 so I have been based here living here in in Washington for the last three years and in other words I've seen the changes that many American newspapers and many American American media outlets have gone through the last years and that that you all have been talking about with layoffs in the newsrooms with cutbacks that have resulted in thinner papers and and less resources we have gone through the same thing in Sweden and all over Europe as you know but I must say in in comparison with other parts of the world that I've been covering I still find American journalism to be outstanding we all know there are huge differences between different media outlets between different newspapers there are of course exceptions and all sorts of variations but overall when I open New York Times in the morning when I read Wall Street Journal USA Today when I listen to NPR I'm I'm deeply impressed by by the knowledge by the ambitious and by the thorough reporting that are being presented here each and every day just this past weekend the story in in Washington Post about soldiers coming home from Afghanistan with with brain injuries I mean did you see the article it was it was a great story and the story in New Yorker about how how the Senate and the White House missed to make a deal on climate change that's what I call good journalism so I want to begin by expressing my gratitude my gratitude towards many US media outlets and and I'm in awe of a lot of things you do with that being said ready you asked me to talk about the pitfalls of relying on US media outlets and there are quite a few one pitfall for a foreign correspondent is the risk to buy into the American view of the world too much it's easy to get to get used to defects in one owns home and I think that there are some issues some subjects that American journalists overall don't report on as much as one could expect one example is the capital punishment I mean there are certain cases of execution that gets a lot of attention like recently the woman in in Virginia who was executed but overall why isn't there a nationwide debate going on about the capital punishment why isn't there debate in the media every week about the fact that you are still uses the death penalty from a European point of view from a European perspective that's astonishing the death penalty was also a non-existent issue in the presidential election I don't think the candidates were asked a question about it and that's also surprising for for a European correspondent another such issue is Guantanamo and the the other detention centers around the world that that us has abroad there is reporting about certain trials but overall again from a European perspective perspective where is the sort of constant coverage where are the constant questions about what's going on there and why aren't there again articles every week about the fact that US holds prisoners year after year without prosecution in my job as a correspondent I should both try to reflect the debate going on in US report about what is being reported here but also try to keep my my Swedish or my European glasses our perspective in the sense that we need to as foreign correspondents see and point out things that are different and things that are happening but that are not being covered as much so my advice to foreign correspondents would would be to always keep an eye on the under reported stories as well another possible pitfall is is what some of you already has mentioned the trend toward more opinionated journalism that is obvious to me in in US right now and you see it most obviously maybe on Fox News but but also on MSNBC and as Jamie McIntyre the former CNN correspondent he he he was interviewed at reliable sources at CNN yesterday and he said we see a journalism that is more interested in in flaming the public on the public opinion than informing the public opinion and that is certainly the case with with certain media outlets I think fact-checking is is always important but with this trend toward more opinionated news it's even more important fact-checking is more important than ever another obvious pitfall the news cycle is so fast that the speed that 24 seven news cycle is is wonderful for us news junkies but but it's also a risk as we all know and and there's a tendency to especially in cable news channels to over dramatize and to focus on events rather than facts and analysis and and I just have to mention the balloon boy right we all we all know what we're talking about and and for me it's a problem and a blessing sometimes but but sometimes a problem that my editor is back in Stockholm watches CNN 24 seven and and they follow those events and and they call me and and think that there's a drama going on and and sometimes I have to argue with them to to be able to go out and do my own interviews about a completely different topic than the balloon boy we didn't report about that much about the balloon boy but caught in the drama as well it's easy to get seduced by a story like like that one where you see a balloon in the sky with a possibly with a little boy in it and there is an obvious risk that we as correspondents and as as foreign correspondents get caught up in the day-to-day drama instead of doing deeper analysis and instead of seeing the big picture I have to mention one other one other possible pitfall I think as as foreign as a foreign correspondent and maybe especially as a European journalist I think that I need and we need to be extra careful and extra watchful when it comes to our own biases towards the US American politics is something else and and we as Europeans tend to I mean let's be honest we mainstream European politics have more in common with President Obama's views than with President former President Bush and and it's it's a huge risk for biases there from our side and we should be watchful of that and and if we do want to do fair reporting about American politics we really need to make an effort to mirror both both sides and both parties in in a fair and respectful way and to be aware of our own European prejudices thank you well you certainly brought your Swedish and European perspective to us particularly by choosing those two subjects Guantanamo and the death penalty which are issues which are throughout Europe are subjects that people constantly think about when they think about the United States I think it's true to say one of my American colleagues will correct me if I wrong but I think it's true to say that no American presidential candidate has ever campaigned against the death penalty I think they've all every single one has been in favor except possibly John Kerry who at one time was against it was he against it but it's very very rare well you saw what happened that's why nobody has been I think another point that is happening a bit with all this vast amounts of information that's all over the place is that actually editors are becoming more important because they have to decide which bits of these which stories they cover which parts of this information they use and that when Bob you talk about that the writer not being not thinking there the prejudiced I think let's remember that there's a huge function of the editor deciding on what to assign them what not to cover which is just as important as what to cover I mean it was quite remarkable the way a large part of the media here did not cover the T party because they thought they didn't approve of it somehow or thought it would hopefully would go away I mean there are the editors at the same time I'm showing in my view that they often show a habit of deciding what the story is or the conclusion of the story is and then ordering up the inquiry is come a certain reversal from the traditional way of sending out the literature is kind of interesting on your point about how the U.S. media this is I think important for the people in the room thinking about how the U.S. media cover social movements in general in the U.S. and thinking about pitfalls and what we don't cover in the U.S. I mean one of the real consistent findings in academic literature is that the mainstream press goes through predictable patterns in the way that it ignores and then eventually covers usually in a sensationalistic manner social movements on the left and the right and I think the T party movement could fit that definition of a social movement by just about any one's definition but we are it's early in that process to to have data on whether the pattern has been the same in the media coverage of it but I think if we look at the history of U.S. coverage of social movements it follows this pattern of ignoring them for a while initially covering them in a very predictable way in which they focus on violence usually in a way that is not actually consistent with the reality of the movement so in other words exaggerating violence making them things like vandalism into violence which are two different things and it takes a long time for the U.S. media generally speaking the mainstream media to cover a social movement in some way that even remotely resembles fairness and I think that the literature would say that that's true on the left and the right social movements on the left and the right so it's kind of an interesting thing. I think it's important in fact to understand that journalists are and this I think reflects Washington as well very distrustful of any form of mass political participation except voting and truly they don't think it's very legitimate I studied for example the nuclear freeze movement which was similar with with ignoring then emphasizing the hippies and the guitars and all that the radical and the radical elements and then essentially going back to ignoring when there weren't kind of something going on as a march when in fact there was huge public support for their ultimate goal and journalists just saw that and spoke of it in terms that were demeaning throughout the period so it's an interesting contradiction I would say an American political culture that we're always telling ourselves and I don't know if this happens in Sweden but we're always telling ourselves we're the greatest country we're the most powerful country we're the freest country we're the best democracy the world's ever seen and yet when it comes down to it journalists and I would say generally the Washington political culture don't don't really appreciate anything but citizens kind of quietly casting a ballot Sweden I should tell you has been defined as a moral superpower but not by ourselves because we're humble people let me put one more thing before we go to the floor it seems to me as just as an observer of the media for a long time there's been a huge growth in emotion in the media as opposed to the what where why when there was a point perhaps around 1990 where if you had it you might have a huge train crash and someone who comes staggering out of the wreckage and if there was a journalist with a microphone they'd put it in the face of the person coming out and the first question would be what happened and now the question is how do you feel and there's enormous people on TV Mrs. Jones how do you feel that your son has just been convicted of being a serial murderer I mean how do you think I'm very proud if you listen for it it's there the whole time or how did you feel when and to me that's part of the sort of subjectivization of news that I think I see going on I think one of the phenomena that's related to that perhaps that we haven't we've discussed I think on the outskirts today is the rise really since the early 80s and especially the early 90s of the celebrity of news you mentioned the OJ trial coverage and Tony Harding but there's there's a lot of good analysis especially of television but also a print media newspapers in an age of chain ownership etc. and declining budgets of decisions made to shrink the news hole in favor of of course advertising but also just to shrink the news hole so you produce less newspapers and use less newsprint and then on on television of shrinking the news hole to add ads and teasers so that people during your commercial don't change the channel and never come back because they found an exciting episode of Seinfeld or Friends or something but the other thing is that the nature of news that fills the news hole is more likely to be worse than hard news and certainly more than foreign news which of course is gone. Now could you have some questions from the floor? Yes, could you step to the microphone and identify yourself? Hi I'm Matt Keller I work for the Embassy of Liechtenstein here in Washington. My question is towards the gentlemen regarding the sort of statistics Mr. Hinman about the number of people who go to media online versus television and my question is as we've all been discussing as well like the Swedish correspondent has been saying as well she gathers information from all around the United States and sort of filters it and gives it reports it back to Sweden. I also see that kind of happening with the television media relying on the online media for their information. I've noticed that for example you know if you want to know what's going to be on the day show tomorrow read a combination of the Huffington Post the Drudge Report, Talking Points memos and the Daily Beast and you'll find out 50% of what's on tomorrow's news and that's just sort of my point is that you know even though we can say 70% of people are watching television the people that are reporting on television are getting their information online. Yeah I think that there's this increasingly on cable news you see this strange melding of you know this is what people are twittering about I said five seconds ago which is kind of a strange variety of performance art I guess I'd call it but yeah I think that that's exactly right and I think that I think that you are also starting to see well I'll take a step back I think it's worth as important as cable news is I think that it is important to remember that its absolute audience is actually quite small in terms of mid hundreds of thousands of people in a nation of 300 million people so I think that whereas Fox News may be important in a variety of ways I think that in terms of the number of say independent voters who are going to be swayed by what they see in Fox News I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that number is approaching zero so the extent to which cable news in general is important for that reason I think it simply isn't How do you see things working out with the next 10-20 years that more and more people are online around the world today we have four and a half billion cell telephones for 6.8 billion people we have two billion people online how does this all play out in the next 10 years well normally I would defer to one of my colleagues Winston on many of these questions I think the answer is quite country specific that the effects of the internet the effects of mobile telephony depend an awful lot on what the pre-existing conditions on the ground are so I think it's very hard to make a sweeping statement about what this means for politics in terms of the US media I think there's a lot of people who sort of assume and continue to get less and less concentrated so for almost more than a decade now we've started to have this data on how it turns out that online news is actually concentrated and that can't be true because we all know that the internet is democratizing so let's wait a couple years and it'll be much less concentrated in fact concentration levels have been pretty much absolutely stable for a decade and at this point we're just waiting for cadeau and how is the average person supposed to detect truth from disinformation from misinformation it seems to me that it's all become one of the same kind of mix on line and no differentiation between what is correct and what is incorrect there are no editors online and I know a lot of people get their news online but if you actually look at most of these new outlets the ones that do comparatively well like the Huffington Post, they actually do have editors and I think in some ways the most pernicious parts of things like the Huffington Post have to do with sort of an intensification of sort of phenomena that were already available before so one of my favorite things about the Huffington Post is that the stories in the Huffington Post if you read them are pretty dull but the headlines are often, I mean they could be pulled from any tabloid New York Post whatever as it turns out what's going on there they're writing a bunch of different headlines for each of their different stories and they're putting for the first couple minutes that it's up they see which of the headlines gets the most clicks and then they pick that one and that becomes the real headline well Ariana Huffington's book is now called World America which is a very important subject the more you travel around the world the more you see how far we're falling behind in all sorts of areas so I don't see too much reporting of this in the media except when the pipes the drain pipes in Washington are discovered to be over a hundred years old and suddenly there's stories but this is happening all over the country especially because of Europe well that's a good example of how the politicians are more important than the media although there's an interaction so you're not going to get much help to your political career if you stand up and say explicitly our infrastructure is deteriorating we are now falling behind we are weaker that's not the message that generally your consultants will tell you as a politician is a political winner in the absence of that you have media coverage which may be quite favorable toward building up the infrastructure and so on when on the few occasions they mention it but it won't be part of the agenda because the politicians aren't making I think Obama did actually make that point with the stimulus plan he did say we don't want all these green jobs and all the new developments to be in China we have to spend money on our infrastructure but that actually goes back to Sean's point because how is that framed? that's a national security issue I don't think there's any question that certain frames are favored so I think in some ways it's a lot easier to get people interested in a story depending on the frame that's offered I think you really have a lot of trouble finding much in the way of the frame in the mainstream media of a narrative of American decline and we really need to focus on strengthening our scientific research and our infrastructure and so on I mean look at the current campaign how much are we talking about that versus how much we're talking about Christina O'Donnell's witchery and so forth anyway the main point I want to make is that if you're interested in what's in the media and this is what Shana Day said as well it's really what the politicians are talking about the only caveat I'd make to my own point is that there's another way to understand American journalism and that's to understand that it is produced by and reinforces American culture and so one way another way to understand American journalism is to understand American culture and that's why I think the project that you were talking about originally about where you guys take foreign correspondence and send them I think that's a wonderful idea not that you're going to find a definitive answer about what an American is but you're going to find like you would in any country if I went to Sweden or anywhere else the diversity of viewpoints but there are certain things about American culture there are certain ways certain norms that are true I think about American culture and in fact some of the more landmark studies of American journalism have found that the kinds of biases we are most likely to find in American journalism aren't really ideological biases those are so obvious, journalists are sort of vanguard against them but more cultural norms like a sense of individualism and things like that but some of them include things like the sort of mythology that Bob is talking about that I think we all subscribe to I know I do as an American that we're so awesome and you know when you all you have to do is fly through European airport to realize how awesome you're not and we're talking about infrastructure etc but those don't fit sort of not only what politicians are saying but our own sense of ourselves sometimes so I think thinking about American culture and what those values are is really important I think that just reminds me of a point I wanted to make about in bemoaning the decline of foreign news one factor is the demand structure that the American consumer of news is laying out there which is ethnocentric the public we're demanding I really need to know what's going on in Congo and all that horrible stuff I want to know all about you know the media would provide it but we have a uniquely heavily market driven media system much more so than in most of the other affluent democracies and you know that's the bad side of it is that in fact it is fairly responsive to the consumer taste and when the consumer taste is ethnocentric and not terribly interested in getting into the market details of other countries unless they happen to be a place where maybe we have a crisis conflict and even then the detail is fairly superficial and America is fairly provincial too we have two borders and one of them is Canada which we don't count as a border so it's hard for Americans to wrap their mind around a rural we haven't had wars here and there are many historical reasons but I'm saying that all of this is rather predictable but I mean the consumer taste is also shaped by what you give to the consumer so it is the circle I think certainly it's very convenient for editors to be able to say oh my audience is not interested in foreign news so we don't have to give it to them but in fact if you look at the research done by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs there's astonishing high percentages of Americans who say they are I mean 70% it's how you frame it American media wants you but it's so convenient for them to say wow isn't it great if people don't want us to do this very expensive that's what I mean Reggie is the result of all of this it seems to me that it's now glaringly obvious that there is a growing abyss between the geopolitical, geoeconomic geostrategic military, scientific, technological and even psychological knowledge of the masses and their representatives on the one hand and on the other the knowledge that is absolutely indispensable to make logical, rational and moral decisions how do you anticipate the future if we're not going to be reporting about what is coming down the bike because politicians certainly don't have enough time to do that it's our job to do that and bring it all to their attention but we're not doing that Don't think if you look at foreign news and analyze what it is that Americans are getting it's basically I think four categories it's conflict human interest, disasters and sport it's not analysis it's the sort of thing that Arna is talking about or how is the world going to be and what is America's role in it and it does all of that episodically as a result dysfunctional government and dysfunctional congress but I think I think the other the other thing to keep in mind here particularly for those of you who are correspondents covering the United States is the shift in US media particularly the trend towards quote-unquote hyperlocalism which is more powerful in some areas than others but I think that it's certainly reshaped the news agenda at a lot of midsize metro which is an awful lot of that's the iron core of journalism in the United States is midsize metro daily newspaper reporters and this shifting economics has really has really taken a lot of attention not just off the international stage but off the national stage as well I think there are also changes that have been found in the way Americans go after their news I mean the way they I'm not talking about the supply side of the news but the way the demand side of the equation works and there are some huge shifts with now that there are online all this information online and one is that a lot of the American consumption news is search led that's to say that there's a subject they've vaguely heard about and they want to follow up or they're curious about one thing or they want to know the result of a football game so they go and google something and pursue it that way and so they're not getting a broad picture was it you who talked about being in the office also and just sort of quickly looking up this is grazing I mean they often just read one headline in the first paragraph and then move on to the next and this is totally the opposite to the traditional way of reading a newspaper where you turn from page to page and read all the stories and learn about a whole lot of topics that you didn't know about before there's a lot of it comes from what you know and what you want to look for and it's I think that last point is definitely supported by there's been a couple of studies that suggest exactly that that you know newspaper front page online and giving somebody an actual newspaper that somebody who actually looks at a physical copy of the newspaper tends to be peripherally aware tends to learn a little bit about a lot of things that they're just thumbing through and that perhaps that might be consequential in terms of actually how people are getting to these online sites it's true that a lot of it is search led but by far the most important component of search led is navigational searches people searching for specific outlets typing in the New York Times or Yahoo News or CNN into the search box so I mean it's a little silly sometimes why don't you just put in CNN.com but sometimes it's easier I just put in CNN into the search box so I think that you really do see people so much of online news consumption is habit driven. People go to the same sites today in general that they went to yesterday and the importance of portals in a variety of senses online I think it really drives a lot of that behavior. There's something you said before about cable TV news being only a small viewers not being very nice show but one of the pure figures I was looking at the other day said that actually 30 I don't know it's 34 or 36% of Americans say they get news from cable cable TV news so they do go there even if they're not sitting they're looking at it all day I have some other figures that are relevant perhaps here Pew asked the question what did you do yesterday to get news as a sort of hypothetical day and 34% said they went online for news 58% said they went to TV which bears out what you said only 17% said they looked for no news in one particular day which I think is remarkably small maybe people don't always answer 100% honestly to these people always don't answer 100% honestly that's one thing we know 26% of Americans said they read a newspaper every day although only 8% of those under 30 the average age is 55 I'm getting older I have a deputy at CSIS he was 40 years old brilliant young man just turned 40 never read a newspaper in his life was that Tom? sorry any more questions for the audience yes could you come to the microphone my name is Mark Etzold I'm studying at American University I'm from Germany so I have a question from a European point of view about the Iraq war I think Mr sorry Mr Crowley already said in his keynote that the US media didn't do the best job 7 years ago today we know that the former administration lied to us today we know that the media believed in these lies we also know that this was some kind of rally around the flag effect that they thought that they have to be loyal what do you think what do you think it's a situation now did they realize what happened did they learn something or in general did the American society learn something about that event I had a feeling that the word lie was going to create some issues Matt before we pass this panel I'd love to hear their views I don't believe there is any proof that the administration lied so you'd have to produce some evidence of that I would cite Colin Powell who said that the evidence he presented in front of the United Nations Security Council were constructed that's my evidence I would give you how about if we do this since we're going to have a row since we're in European audience I'll say row we understand that yes exactly instead of the word lie I think something we can agree on is that this information there were faulty intelligence, stove piped, etc we can use all sorts of synonyms I think Bob and I along with Professor Livingstone who was mentioned earlier are writing a book about media coverage of the Iraq war and I think one thing that I would say that I think would be sort of value neutral about and answered your question to today's discussion is that what happened in turn one way we can think about what happened during that period without getting ideological or partisan about it is that the press accepted certain claims and that those claims were mostly claims from the White House when they had the option of other official claims by the way from the intelligence agencies but not at senior levels so for instance in one of the classic examples that's often bandied about on the same day that there's an A1 story in the post touting official claims about I think it was Illuminatude in this particular case on page A18 there's a story questioning those very claims not from Code Pink and other lefties but from intelligence analysts so the question an operational question is so why does it look like that why does the one story get here and the one story get from page coverage and I think one of the arguments that Bob and Steve and I are making is that this isn't something that just happened in 2002-2003 that really this is a pattern in American media coverage during the lead up to major American wars is that that cover and this would span Democratic and Republican administrations which is why it's nonpartisan that it's the tendency to privilege White House claims over other claims and those other claims could be a foreign opinion it could be international agencies UN etc it could be lesser members of Congress the point is that there is a certain pattern that we see that is repeated through history and sometimes those claims are on the up and up sometimes those claims as in Vietnam are proven to be actualized sometimes at the very minimum in say the Iraq case it's people believing one set of data that they like and not believing another set and that argument getting primacy over other arguments so but the pattern there isn't really a partisan pattern it's a pattern about accepting White House claims over other claims which is kind of the point we are trying to know. At one point sir 60% of the American people believe that Saddam Hussein was behind 9-11 which I think indicates how well the disinformation campaign started by the neocons and I saw it myself at Vice President Cheney at a reception he was giving for Scooter Libby's paperback of his heart back called The Apprentice and that was one year before the war and at one point I said well if we should go to war and I was shouted down by the neocons what do you mean if we should go to war it's been decided we are going to war so I'm sorry there was a major disinformation campaign there it was the most unnecessary war of my career and I've covered 18 wars and I served in World War 2 I think it was an utter disgrace. Well the line between disinformation and lies is one we'll have to talk about but let me just say one thing in response to one of your questions which is do the media learn from these experiences. Another part of our research would show that no that even after the New York Times and Washington Post both published admirable mayocopas and analyses of how we got the pre-war stories so wrong and so on they continued to do the same thing that Sean just was talking about that is relying very heavily on the White House even publishing literally a false White House claim on page one the next day this was a claim about Iranian supplying weapons to Iraqi insurgents the next day on A18 publishing the chairman of the joint chief saying we don't know anything about the Iranian's publishing weapons there's no evidence of that so in other words the learning from the past mistakes is not something that goes on in the media at least not in covering foreign policy maybe more so in other issues however I should also say that the learning doesn't go on in government either very well because there are all kinds of lessons we might have learned from some of our previous difficult protracted wars that we didn't seem to apply in the current situations and the oh my god story is page one and the oh never mind story is on A18 or A20 and even if it's not so much of an oh my god it's okay you know it's another really it's a predictable White House release but it's the president and I think there's so much privileging of that that it sort of overcomes even standard news judgments yes and it also makes the White House correspondent the senior correspondent in the American pantheon you know the White House is the apex of the most privileged senior correspondence that's a very good point because they're not in a position to necessarily know for example in that Iranian weapon story that was debunked six months ago by the way in the very same Washington Post that then put it six months later on page one last time a White House reporter broke a major story about the White House the stories come from intelligence reporters they come from other beat reporters they come from independent reporters they come from foreign reporters I was credited to the White House for five years and I used to get that they're basically stenographers well they don't have time to do anything else but they have the status especially now because they have to also be blogging and tweeting all day and if they're on television then they have to be doing stand-ups all day and if they're on cable they have to do stand-ups like CNN they have to do we had a former student come here a few years ago and it was for CNN, Dana Bash five stand-ups, well when does she have time to do any reporting how can you hold any official accountable if you're doing five stand-ups now but they also don't have specialist knowledge in most of the subjects that they cover I mean you give them an economic story I mean it's a disaster I remember when the G7 they started having summits economic summits and of course the White House correspondent went why does the White House correspondent go to the G7 but they were terrified that they might have to write an economic story that's a whole other problem they didn't know so actually the leaders got very smart and on the first evening they would always slip them out a political story to say that they had something to write about they were so relieved they didn't have to write about economics they would devour whatever political line they were fed now if there are no more questions does any other panel have a final we just got room if there's another question then we're going to finish yes I can't see because of the spotlights and I was just wondering you all kind of touched upon this earlier each of you what do you all think is the most underreported story today in the media do you want to take the next one and answer them? yes I think in the world of confusions I think the media and what I'm understanding by your discussion that you're creating more confusions by the media in the world okay just a simple question that how do you see the conventional and new media in the world where the literacy is the major problem but if you see the whole world if the more than half of the world it's under literate and we are talking about the online media the satellite and so many things and where do you see that technology matters against these actions and I think I mentioned the technology the 4.3 million cell phones that we have now and you get news with your cell phone and if you've got the right set instrument you can even get CNN on the thing and BBC on your cell telephone in the middle of Africa so I think that answers your question about how we're going to cope with illiteracy and how does one get news to people just run around the panel and this will be the closing around most least covered topic least covered topic gosh I think from my money it's got to be Obama's appointments particularly his appointments to the Fed that just languished even as economic policy interest rates fiscal policy is absolutely the critical issue in American politics and these nominees were just sitting there not being acted on and I think that was a I think that's not too surprising but I think it represents a structural failure of US media I already mentioned what I think are underreported stories by US media but I can switch the question and I think there are some things that we as foreign correspondents underreport on in Europe I think we should report more on congress actually we tend to focus on the White House and don't do as much stories about the congress and people in Sweden everybody knows President Obama but I don't think that many people know who Harry Reid is or John Boehner it's true in America too it is but I think from a European perspective we should really and I should be better at reporting about the congress it's not as sexy as doing the White House but it's very important I interpreted the question as maybe America and the world and I'd say poverty and its structural reasons and its implications from national security to gender violence and violence against children et cetera but I think poverty and all of its attendant issues is really the core question facing the world and development et cetera the most underreported story from my standpoint is what we've allowed to happen to democratic capitalism since the end of the Cold War a beautiful system that gradually morphed into crony capitalism and then casino capitalism and then bandit capitalism to the point where now Pete Peterson says we have a coniferous and animalistic system Pete Peterson made about a billion dollars for himself but this is what he said at the council on foreign relations the other day oh I just agree with everything that's been said let me add an underreported story from my perspective of course that's a value judgment what's underreported you know the little league scores in Little Rock are underreported but the no not one comes in with it no the United States has 865 military bases or more around the world the United States spends more on defense than most of the rest of the world combined we keep some 40,000 troops in Germany to deter the Soviet Union from invading West Germany that's really not focused on and particularly the opportunity costs of maintaining these unnecessary structures when China and our other friends and competitors don't suffer under that burden including 9,000 tanks that we still have in the arsenal and no one see a tank war coming anytime soon unless you go back in history yeah well lots of other people got tanks we could have a just for fun tournament I would say that this question of following the government's lead in the subjects that are covered is really important and is even more important in foreign policy because in domestic policy people do dig around a bit and they try and get dirt on people during elections and they wonder what the Pentagon's up to and is somebody pulling the wool over our eyes and foreign policy it doesn't happen at all and the whole of since Obama came to power the reporting of his foreign policy has been dictated simply by where he's been and what he's done and there are huge gaps I mean as a European and I'm sure my Swedish colleague will agree that there's no reporting of Europe in this country or very little and it's certainly no systematic and when the president does make a foreign policy initiative it sort of automatically assumes that it's a good thing he's reset relations with Russia he's signed an arms agreement bravo a plus but nobody actually looks at is it a good idea to have this arms agreement was it well negotiated answer no there's no analysis at all of anything foreign that's an agreement is somehow a plus and yet and at the same time the sort of preconceived ideas Obama is multilateral after Bush was unilateral but there are two huge multilateral events going on or not going on in the world today but the two biggest in multilateral issues are the climate change negotiations which Obama has been a complete flop at and the Doha multilateral trade talks which he hasn't even I'm not even sure he's even aware that they exist he never mentions them but there are these two huge multilateral operations which completely vanished from the radar screen and nobody seems to bother but the trouble Reggie is that that doesn't exactly dispatch you out of the western hemisphere does it reading about the about the Doha round and things like that it's very difficult to turn that into a story that's comprehensible for the average reader it's very hard to put it in one of those supermarket weekly weekly things you know you should get these Fleet Street hacks going going on it put the sex in Doha I think a frown on that anyway I want to draw it to a close now thank you very much for staying with us and for your questions and particularly thanks to panel for I'm glad to very glad to have moderated panel where not everyone agreed with each other which is a very nice change but I think it's been highly enlightening and I thank everyone who participated including the technicians and the people who organized this one of whom my bank coordinator Sarah sitting in the front row thank you all very very much indeed and I think you have family connection with this as well yes my son Max is the videographer back there coincidental it wasn't an insight John so thank you all very much and thank the panel stay here enjoy it