 Thank you for joining us today for How Can We Trust the News, an event jointly sponsored by the Librarians Association of UCI and the UCI Libraries. Information, its veracity, accessibility and effective use is at the center of what the library is all about. And judging from the size of the audience, I think we are in for a lively discussion about the future of the news industry, journalism, and the information of information. Our special guest speaker, David Folkenflick, is someone whose voice is familiar to those of you who listen to National Public Radio. As NPR's media correspondent, he is featured regularly on NPR's Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and Talk of the Nation. He has covered a wide range of media-related topics. In recent weeks, he has been jetting between Great Britain and the United States to cover the ongoing story of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation and the allegations of phone hacking. David is a Southern California native who grew up in Laguna Beach. And we are lucky to have in the audience in the front row his wife, journalist Jesse Baker, who also works for NPR, Slate and ESPN, and also his parents, who are both faculty members at UC Irvine, Roger Folkenflick, Professor Emeritus of English, and Vivian Folkenflick, Humanities Lecture. So it is a distinct pleasure to have David as our speaker. When David was an undergraduate at Cornell University, he served as Editor-in-Chief of the Cornell Daily Sun. Continuing to follow the sun, he began his professional career at the Herald Sun in Durham, North Carolina. And from there, he worked at the Baltimore Sun for nearly a decade, covering higher education Congress in the media. David has received many awards and honors during his career. They include the National Press Club's Arthur Rouse Award for Press Criticism, which he has received four times, and the Monverson Award for Investigative Reporting on the News from the University of Virginia's Center for Governmental Studies, as well as top honors from the National Headliners Club and the Society of Professional Journalists. David has just edited a timely new collection of essays entitled, Page One, Inside the New York Times and the Future of Journalism, which expands on the themes from the documentary film The Same Name by Andrew Rossi. Thanks to the UCI Book Store, copies of this book will be available for purchase, and David has graciously agreed to sign books after the talk. We will have plenty of time for questions from the audience after David's presentation, and then we will invite you to continue the discussion and join us for light refreshments in the plaza. I should mention that David's talk is being videotaped. In a few weeks, the video will be posted on the library's supporters and friends website, as well as on the UCI Open Courseware website. Please feel free to share this with friends who are unable to attend and who may wish to view it later. So now, without further ado, I give you David Folkenflick. Well, I want to thank Lorelai for that very warm, perhaps I could turn this off, for that very warm introduction and for the ability to come here to a place where I think it was my home. I grew up in the Munimete, as she said, and I felt the campus to be a second home for me over the years. I've certainly bothered enough people on this campus and squandered there time enough that I'm sort of astonished on a day as beautiful as this before the start even of the academic year that this many people would come endorse on the afternoon. So thank you to all of you for coming and joining us today. As she mentioned, I have edited this book. It's a collection of essays from some of the, to my mind, most interesting thinkers in the journalism business. It was prompted by a new documentary of the same name by filmmakers Andrew Rossi and Kate Novak, husband and wife team, who were able to get surprisingly good access to the New York Times through the keyhole of the guys who knew what I knew for a living, the media desk, people like David Carr and Brian Stelter, to sort of understand the moment of a real challenging crisis for journalism and to one of its exemplars, the so-called paper of record if such a thing still exists. And I'm proud of what we did here and certainly I hope you take an interest. A lot of it deals, not all of it, a lot of it deals with the sustainability of the news business, how its finances have become a couple from the creation of news. And I think that's an interesting dynamic that actually increasingly is something of interest more than just the people who are in the business itself or in the worlds of finance because I think it very much has an effect on what we see and read. Today, however, I'm going to talk more about something that strikes me that people who do research for a living and people who do scholarship for a living think about it in different ways in different disciplines and that's the question of trust. So for me the question is how can we trust the news? And I guess a way to start is who do we trust in the news? Who do we trust in terms of where we go to get the news? Do we trust the Los Angeles Times locally? Do we trust CNN or NPR to major national and international gatherers and providers of the news? We try to in their own terms and in their own minds play it down the middle. Do you trust Mother General's crusading and operating publication that comes from the ideological left? Do you prefer to go to Fox or MSNBC to see some of the most dynamic we have an answer to in front of? To see some of the more dynamic figures offer supplemental commentary and sometimes that can actually substitute for the news itself. Even though both news organizations do have many journalists who do an excellent job. Do you go first to Ariana's Huffington Post? Do you go first to the big government sites of Andrew Breitbart? Do you rather tune in at 11.30 at night to Stephen Colbert to see what the news really means? These are all choices that people are actually making right now. There's a truism which I think is fair to point out which these days increasingly people are not so much finding the news as the news finding us. So for those of us like myself who sign on to Facebook you may see stories posted by other people. You may see little trench at one liners on Twitter as I do. Guiding you to other people's stories or video clips or things you fail to observe yourself. We have what we like to call an NPR the NPR driveway moment. A story so captivating, so compelling that even though you've arrived at home or at the office you stay in the car and the engine turned on because you want to hear about what that last thing is going to be. Well, at work in New York I don't drive around. I had what I would call an elevator moment. The guy riding up to the 19th floor with me would not get out of the elevator car because he was so interested in this little screen on the upper left-hand corner of the elevator. There's this thing called Captivate. It's out here as well. You can see it in gyms and in dentist's offices wherever you go and they give you little nodules what we used to call news nuggets of information. There was something happening. The markets were collapsing a few weeks ago in the wake of the argument over the debt ceiling limit and this guy did not want to leave until he saw the last third sentence on that Captivate screen. So people are finding information all over in new places that are a little bit surprising. So this leads, I think, to a couple of fair questions. They're questions like not only where do you get the news but do you care where to get the news? Do you care how they got the news? Do you even know how they got the news? And as readers and listeners and as viewers, as consumers, I think those are pretty important questions because that leads you to the next question which is are we getting the information that we need to act as citizens? I mean, after all, you know, if you're reading People Magazine, if you're reading Glocker.com, not that I would ever do that, you know, you're not necessarily doing that to become a better citizen. But in reality, you still need information in a way that helps you operate as a citizen. I think that's important. I think about the L.A. Times, which despite the presence of the Register, I grew up thinking of it as my hometown paper. And there's some terrific people who've done terrific work over the decades. My old employer, the Tribune Company, upon acquiring it, cut it back significantly. We thought they were bad. Sam Zell took over with his cohort in Chicago, and he cut it to the bone. And yet the L.A. Times has been able, if you look at the small, very gritty city of Bell, California, and not so far a drive from here, to do some astonishingly capable, smart, insightful, and muscular accountability journalism there. I mean, they were able to expose, as most of you all well known by now, not only in city as corruption, but corruption that really had a stranglehold on every possible institution in that small city. And it wasn't done by the community papers who covered the area. I talked to a guy who does a lot of the coverage for community papers in that part of Los Angeles County. He says, hey, I cover 11 communities. There's no way I could have done something like that. It wasn't done really by blogs which have been offered to us as having the great promise to replace major news organizations. There was a guy who was blogging about this anonymously because he feared for his own job because of the managers in that community and around that portion of Los Angeles County. But he didn't have the muscle power to follow it up. He didn't have the muscle power to force government agencies to be accountable. He didn't have the lawyers to defend him. Had he come under attack. And he didn't have the audience to make it have an effect. And it tells you that Los Angeles Times reporters told me that at times they relied on tips from the guy behind that blog, who still has not been willing to be named publicly. But they needed sort of these layered approach reporting. You can't do it without each other. And I found it very moving to see what the LA Times was able to accomplish with its attention. So that takes us to question of trust. In 2009 the Pew Research Center and the Projects for Accidents and Journalism, which are part of Pew, did a study that found that trust in the news media, however one finds that, was at all times historical since they started measuring it. They released that and I believe it was September 2009. I touched base just this morning to say, hey guys I know you do this every other year. What are the chances that next month in a couple of weeks you release a report showing that trust is up from those historic lows. And the head of the project said not a chance. I'm not sure if it's lower than it was. I just know we can use the word historic and distrust. Not so good. Not so good. One thing I did after that study two years ago was that in 2010 I went to the city of Atlanta and I used it as the backdrop for a case study to say how do people think about the news media? And so I went to Atlanta for a couple of reasons. There are news organizations Tiny, there are regular size metro regional news organizations and there's CNN, a global news organization. I thought pretty good backdrop. So I walked around and talked to people. I talked to guy named Cliff O'Connor. He's the top fiscal official for the agency that oversees child welfare in Georgia. And he said this is a direct quote. I'm a big newspaper fan. I subscribe to three newspapers. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal are real high quality. The Times from the left, the Journal from the right. I talked to an executive chef by the name of Glenn Law who works downtown. And he said I came up in the monthly Brinkley Walter Cronkite issue. There's a big difference between then and now. Did I believe everything Walter Cronkite said? He said absolutely. I talked to a 26-year-old music student who went to Georgia State Downtown and I said how much do you trust the news media? I said well, you know, you've got to take into account everyone's got to slant one way or slant another way and you've got to kind of figure it out. Now the interesting thing was in every single question I would always ask about trust and in almost every response I got a response about bias, about perceived and cloaked ideology. That was pretty interesting because while it's been an element of discussion about the press, it has been the overwhelming dominant element of discourse I think in recent years. When I talked to folks at CNN, I talked to a Vice President there named Richard Griff who is a distinguished guy known only to people inside CNN. But integral to how they gather, acquire, disseminate the news. He said I said what's your number one issue when you think about viewers? And remember CNN, which defined cable news, created cable news as badly lagging compared to Fox News and often against MSNBC as well. It's sort of a real struggle for them. Why do you turn to them this day and age? People have alternatives, they don't have to turn to a TV news version of the Associated Press. And he said trust is our critical issue. He looked at conservative critics like Fox News and said you know these guys have been chipping it away at us saying that we ought to be trusted and there's a certain portion of the public in which that's resonated. There were others who talked about CNN and a number of other major news organizations failing to hold, say for example President Bush's Administration Accountable some key issues. And they say why bother? You may not be ideologically conservative but you're not doing your job. This is a road in their standing. I talked to this tiny news site called the Atlanta Progressive News not surprising their self-identified progressive liberals. And they say we can hold local officials accountable in a way a lot of news organizations care about issues of poverty of economic justice, we care about racial justice, we care about sexual orientation and we're going to be relentless on those issues. Totally honest about where we are. That's how our very small leadership knows how to trust us. The Atlanta Journal Constitution which is at one time was one of the larger regional newspapers in this country and has a storied history of both reporting on racial segregation but also crusading against it in the United States. And I think it's important to note that the liberal editorial pages it took the decision that year to dump the liberal editorial pages. So forget it. This isn't useful for us. We've done focus groups, we've talked to readers. They don't want us telling them what to think. They want us to serve up a different varied and often in opposition points of view. And they were pretty honest. They said we need to reach out and chase down the oppressed. In this day and age also you have to evaluate a lot of new players that ten years ago you might not have had. So you think about Politico which a lot of people go to online I sure do. It's sort of almost like the sports pages of politics. If you think about ESPN the magazine it's one of those rare examples where a broadcast outlet has come up with a print product that's been a success and they've hired some of the most wonderful reporters and writers in sport that you've heard of including the Los Angeles Times. One of my favorite sports writers from Baltimore and the New York Times, Buster Olman is a writer for them. A wonderful place that takes a different approach to covering it. It really worked for them. Online you can think of Talking Point's Mellon, liberal outlet, The Daily Caller, a new conservative one run by Tucker Carlson. Gawker as I mentioned before which sort of combines a very snarky take on gossip, politics, finance, computers, whatever you want. And then there are ones that have been around but have suddenly emerged as new players. So if you think about Bloomberg News it's a very serious news organization with global reach that is expanding simply beyond its financial element that really pays its bills. There's NPR which I think has gone from a good to listen to to probably a must listen to for a lot of people who really want to be informed about news and about context. There's The Guardian which has done very successfully in expanding on this side of the Atlantic, its readership with clearly liberal outlook. And there's The Daily Mail which has taken a very tabloid, very gossipy approach, not always a de facto approach to drawn larger audiences and is sort of one of the, I believe one of the largest English language news sites in the world. And that's through an exceptionally aggressive approach to aggregating others news and putting it with its own web pages just as a side note, one of my colleagues did a story for our Planet Money team that covers finances which suggested strongly that part of the reason there was a battering of European stocks was because a French banking company had been written about in The Daily Mail as having its shares plummeting to almost zero and there being a crisis of confidence inside the company. It appears they may have been inspired by fictional, basically a novel that was being published in a serialized form in a French newspaper and that the Mail may not have registered initially it was fiction in satire. Take that for what it's worth when you think about what you're trusting. There are also new kinds of players in the news business. You're seeing universities building out their own reporting efforts. Walter Robinson was the leader of what's called the spotlight investigative team at the Boston Globe. He now oversees journalists I believe at Northeastern University in Boston and oftentimes in helping to edit, curate their work, he shepherds their work on the front pages of his old newspaper, Boston Globe. It's a very interesting dynamic that you wouldn't have seen. Similarly New York University has attempted a sort of micro blogging effort on Greenwich Village and The New York Times has sort of had a dalliance with NYM trying to figure out is this news that we can put together and offer to our readers who might be interested in that neighborhood approach coverage of New York City that the Times itself may not have the horses for all of its wanted reporting newsroom to do on its own. There are not-for-profits like Voices of San Diego a few hours drive south of here and you're seeing these small not-for-profit newsrooms seeking to eat out financing through foundations through membership gifts, much like those given to public radio stations to find a way to be viable, a very lean newsroom, but providing some vital reporting that often major city newspapers can't provide themselves because San Diego Union Tribune which has also been cut back significantly I think public radio newsrooms including KPCC, KCRW and the Los Angeles area are becoming more muscular, trying to pick up a bit of the slack, they can't replace what news japers do, but they can complement it. I think that's important. And you're seeing some other approaches too. A friend of mine named Jim Bangkok created a collection of passionate blogs from different markets over the country. All the major markets from major sporting leagues and he's created sort of whole cloth a network of passionate, fan-driven websites about each major sporting team in the country. Now they're not run by the teams themselves although Major League Baseball has actually better sites than ever for each team and same with the other professional sports teams. I think the Kings hired a hockey rider who had written for the Los Angeles Times and the Los Angeles Daily News because those newspapers were diminishing what they did in terms of coverage of professional hockey. You're seeing different players have to fill the gap for information and readers are going to have to figure out can I trust it if the guy is employed by the team? Is he giving me ways to evaluate what he's saying? And yet I think it's an addition given the financial troubles what we used to rely on for that kind of coverage to have them at all. Just yesterday as a small example I got sent a Twitter direct message to be precise from Gary Schwitzer he's a former network correspondent he's been a professor of journalism at the University of Minnesota and he sort of back checks coverage of medical developments and healthcare issues. He sent me a link to a daily mail story from last Friday I think it was as the 19th and the headline was raise a glass to the red wine pill every thing from obesity to cancer again I just underscored the daily mail he also sent a link to a blog that basically very carefully and methodically shattered that plan what interested me was that was a blog written by somebody who had been a professional medical writer but the blog was operated by the National Health Services that is the British public health system and they were providing information that people could use in a clear way. You can find things on the FDA and you can find things on the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services here as well but you're seeing new players provided at times helpful, mediated information that might possibly at one point have come from professional news organizations before and you can find those in a variety of ways if you come across it there were old values in journalism that were always underscored you wanted to be authoritative you wanted to be competitive you think of big name brands you could trust in the old days, CBS, ABC, NBC New York Times, LA Times, Washington Post you know yet there have been so many lapses which I alluded to before I think that since Spiroag, before that since Joe McCarthy pick and date you can find it the conservative movement in this country has seen the mainstream press as a political player or even in the modern era when there's this aspiration anyway toward even handedness and objectivity I think that the left from my sense John Heter can speak to this as well has very much sort of taken on the same degree of disgust and of disagreement and of skepticism about whether or not the American press is a political player rather than an arbiter after the weapons of mass destruction coverage in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq there were other moments you could talk about certain moments in the sixties you could talk about the Iran Contra or the Reagan I really think that was a signal moment when a lot of liberals these guys are not applying due diligence for us they are not addressing opposing questions that need answering they are not scrutinizing the assertions and see if it holds up to the most rigorous critics conservatives however almost within a year or two of that felt affirmed in their views there was the 60 minutes to report on President Bush's military service record well I had mentioned Walter Robinson before from the Boston Globe he had punched holes in then governor's Bush's military service record back during the Vietnam era what the CBS report did was essentially use clearly disputable or probably fabricated documents to make their case and thereby eroded what credibility one could attach to their questioning of his military service record if you look at the New York Times I think under Bill Keller it has fairly pretty well given the financial distresses and given a lot of the a lot of the challenges facing it a lot of what we know about what kinds of domestic surveillance inspired that occurred a lot of the what many people would consider to be torture that occurred of detainees have been revealed by the New York Times among other news outlets however you know people think about the New York Times and a lot of them look at the Duke lacrosse case which was not the incidental story for the times but really almost a crusade in its coverage and it was very clear over time that its reporting had dovetailed too neatly with the now discrediting prosecutor who sought to put those college students in jail for clearly very discredited allegations later on my own network NPR took a hit when it recorded that Congresswoman Gabby Giffords had been killed we had been the first to say that she had been critically wounded and shot we did not use our own and we were right to do so we did not use our own safe cards and our own rules in reporting that she was dead and it was both terribly traumatic for the family for people who cared about you know doing her job but also a terrible failure in our part and so that's you know that's the way in which we take hits we took hits after the long-awaited termination of the firing and you know there are some people who say also that Fox News took a hit for making that a new crusade that seemed to be opportunistic and hyperbolic in its tirades against our network so the new values seem to be more about transparency and about collaboration if you think about transparency you know it can be transparency as in when NPR got something wrong we acknowledged it we apologized and the next day we came back and said here's how we did what we did wrong and we made sure to apologize not only online but in exactly the same time of day that we made the first time around as well as live the day that it occurred transparency also translates more interestingly to what's called a familiar term for many I'm sure the link economy on the web the reporters in linear in the last week have been doing great work for Sky News, for NPR, for the New York Times, for the Times of London, for the BBC and so on but there's a stellar example of this link economy and it's done by my friend and colleague at NPR, Andy Carvin he's the social media editor for NPR he sent out over this past weekend I believe in a 24-hour period it could be getting that wrong more than 1200 tweets that is 1200 little instant messages or less in which he was linking to reports about what was happening Libya almost live time, most with links they were curated, he tended to take them from sources he knew who were or knew their organizations they were attached to, he raised questions about sourcing of assertions as in how do we know that both sons of Momar Gaddafi have been arrested turns out one of them cramped through the streets in Tripoli the yesterday, maybe not so much in custody he sounded skepticism but he was an incredible source of aggregation about this, so much so that online you'd see this parade of people from other news organizations saying follow Andy Carvin on this he's really good that was an interesting example of the link economy, similarly today the earthquakes that hit I'm here visiting home on the west coast meanwhile an earthquake hits my company's headquarters in Washington in my apartment on the Upper West Side of New York the earthquake was centered I think about 75 miles northwest of Richmond, Virginia the fact of it was conveyed through Twitter before the aftershocks were felt in New York City so people in New York City were aware of the earthquake and then felt it that's pretty cool it took about 40 minutes for a lot of news organizations to be able to convey that on the air my own apparently they stayed on the air as the building was shaken and it was made with all the solidity of a re-box shoebox so they were a little concerned but they stayed on the air for talk of the nation and they provided updates meanwhile, if we think back for giving me Olivia CNN got into the game a little late all this tweeting was happening Sky News did extraordinary reportage there BBC did very good reporting NPR had reports on the air MSNBC wasn't even on the air it was simply airing these reruns of Dateline, NBC and all these true crime programs as a way of, you know, that's a financially viable model for them because they don't have to pay journalists actually to do much work on the weekends so that's a question who do you trust, where do you go it's also clear that transparency translates for a lot of people in and out of journalism into clarity for where are you coming from so if you think about the British system there's kind of an inversion of the American journalistic system so the newspapers are highly opinionated, boisterous brash, brawling we'll talk a little bit more about that brawling in a few minutes and Sky News the Rupert Murdoch news corp owns Sky News and the BBC much more calm down the middle, bare-minded all voices respectful plays a different style than our series these programs do here but it's a much more temperate approach if you were to compare BBC and Sky News to say Fox News MSNBC I went and did a story about that I guess I went in December the story aired in January of this year because I wanted to explore this kind of mirror image inversion of how our system works I spoke with among other people Nick Boles, he's a conservative MP very thoughtful and funny guy and he said he was talking about different examples so the Guardian is a place that's more clearly on the left the telegraph is clearly a conservative newspaper he said if a Guardian journalist were to interview me I would definitely assume they would be trying to penetrate into areas of weakness of what the government is doing or particular policies they're very worried about whereas with the telegraph they'd probably be more likely to be looking for ways in which the government was betraying the conservative cause he doesn't expect any of them to give him a free ride he expects all of them to slap him around but they do it from very different perspectives because they've got a different point of view that they're not exactly advocating but that they're coming from and that they're open about I also talk to people in the American Journalistic campaign I talk to a guy named Len Downey very distinguished former executive editor of the American Post and he's a guy so scriptulous about his beliefs and his vision of impartiality recognizing that as a human it's impossible to obtain perfectly that he didn't vote when he worked for the Washington Post he said that could possibly tend to compromise me even though it's a secret battle so not only did he not register for a party he didn't take part in his most fundamental right as a citizen that's a tough approach he didn't insist that his journalists follow his example so I said what do you think it would be if you were to take make it clear sort of identify where you were coming from as a news organization and make that clear and he said this is a direct vote I believe the Washington Post does make it clear where we're coming from where we're coming from in our news reporting it's no partisanship no ideology of any kind our reporting is not for itself it is not coming from a point of view I was relating to him in part at NYU Journalism professor named J. Rosen's belief that news organizations adopt this thing called the view from nowhere which is actually taken from the philosophical term that you guys are probably more familiar with than I am but the idea was that there's this desperate attempt to blur or erase any belief system whatsoever and it interferes with journalists to really interact honestly with readers, listeners and viewers so when I played that to him he said look you make it seem as though it would just involve admitting what we already are in fact it would involve changing what we are well on cable we have guys who are ish about what they are Fox News says look we're pretty conservative when you get to prime time in evening hours but there's a line between news and opinion, a clear line I think it's fair to say there's often not always but often straight news with a wink a clarity of story ideas that are selected because they might be more of interest to a conservative or hopefully conservative audience and at times just an edge to it that you wouldn't see in straight news organizations Shep Smith I think for example is one of their main news anchors I think he's very fair often passionate, takes up various causes and very passionate about New Orleans but I think pretty fair minded I think Brett Bayer, the political anchor is similarly inclined and yet about a third of his program is constructed about these panels he calls the panel of Fox News All Stars and they have a good conversation there and I've got to say it's a civil conversation and it's often an informed and smart conversation but there are always three people in that panel and almost invariably they are two conservatives whether clearly conservative journalists that's in opinion columnists or people who work for the conservative weekly standard or things like that or former Bush administration officials and then the last and third person is occasionally a democratic strategist or clear liberal or often a straight journalist from the Washington Post or Politico or some other news outlet and what that does is it puts the journalist in the position of being the liberal which that journalist may or may not actually think is the role that they are performing I think it's a splendid marketing move by Fox when I asked Brett about it he said I understand what you're saying we're just interested in an intelligent debate when you reach out to the rules all the time all of which is probably true but I think it loads the deck a little bit and I think it's interesting to see that in other programs on MSNBC I think it's fair to say they only found success when they allowed Keith Oldman to take the ball running in an anti-war direction, anti-George W. Bush direction and Ali Fine himself would be likely prospect of not certain of the Reverend Al Sharpton as possibly being one of their evening hosts and the main hosts I think that's a pretty interesting notion and they're a prodigy journalist watching to see what happens without I think transparency also translates into how we know what we would know and I think there's the question of the transcendent sharing with readers and listeners and viewers that element I remember there were a couple of projects the Wall Street Journal did when it was in its most sweeping narrative journalism phase and they told this incredible story I think it was Tony Horowitz I might be getting that wrong about injustice and working conditions and all this and in a box two-page story inside in a box inside instead of pluttering up their narrative with according to this guy and this report on this day talking to this person they had footnotes I hadn't seen that in a new story before they had footnotes and instead of coming across as stuffy and instead of coming across as being listening to someone as though we're doing an academic paper it came across as just sharing information making it very easy for people to read the story and yet see precisely where the sources were and I think in this day and age now that it's all not online we could also then link to the original sources on important things I think that's hugely important is the idea of transparency in the last week you've seen the New York Times do some reporting on Darrell I may be mispronouncing his name but Issa I said well it was both of them he's doing more reporting on this congressman from San Diego one of the wealthiest in all of Congress and it's been some very interesting allegations some media texture reports about how he has blended his personal business interests which are significant with some of his efforts as a lawmaker Mr. Take a bit Issa has challenged the veracity of those reports initially he asked for a correction starting from the fact that his office didn't overlook a golf course and getting more serious from there he then asked for a retraction saying the story didn't stand up and most recently he invoked Jason Blair the famous fabulous and plagiarist and saying well you know have we gotten over one of those situations the reporter involved this guy named Eric Leashblow he's a Pulitzer winner he was involved in some of the times his most delicate reporting on domestic surveillance and what Leashblow told Politico which was reporting on this flap was that look some of these things that are substantive that he's challenging were facts that I pulled from documentation provided by Mr. Issa to the IRS and to other federal agencies and attested to under penalty of law if they're misleading it now that to me is pretty convincing on the other hand it suggests to me that New York Times might have done well somehow to convey that to readers as a way of saying here's how we know what we're telling you political figures in both of the major political parties in the UK the Labour Party and the Conservative Party you've seen chuminess with the police force at Scotland Yard both high and low that is on the lower level there seems to have been substantiated allegations of giving money to police officers for clearly private information that is illegal to share and also chuminess with the top levels for example one of the assistant commissioners was given a five-figure contract immediately upon leaving Scotland Yard to become a columnist for the Times of London one Murdoch's more prestigious upscale newspapers Andrew Henry and he was astonished in being interrogated during testimony at Parliamentary Committee to be challenged on the question of well don't you have a tie to them is it possible that your decision not to be involved in promoting a wider investigation of the news of the news corps was in any way affected by your closest with them as reflected with your contract the moment you walked out the door he says that's outrageous how could you question that well we didn't know until this interval came up that there was a payments there then news corps newspapers in the UK particularly the news for World Tabloid and the Sun Tabloid appeared to have published to reward and punish political and business figures as well as to inform and entertain their readers now I think it's worth pointing out in a different culture in the United Kingdom there's an official secrets act which does not exist here in fact you know in a sense the Pentagon papers at the Supreme Court level made clear there would not be here there's libel law there that's exceptionally favorable to plaintiffs to people suing news organizations and in fact people often shot their cases around if they can figure out how to sue in the UK rather than the US against news organizations they'll do it they have a regulatory body for newspapers there it's a self regulatory body it's the news organizations themselves kind of do it but I can't see in this country there being a culture where we all say yeah you know well we're happy for there to be this other entity that can overlook our coverage and tell us how we did or not or whether we shouldn't do that in the future you know our feeling I can tell you having been in a lot of newsrooms is stay the hell away from our editing table and if you've done something illegal sue us for it you know that's the problem and they have a tradition there relatively newer one but a kind of prior restraint that is private citizens can seek for injunctions against news organizations from writing about legal troubles or other news developments affecting them you know you can we have to face the consequences reputational and legally for what we publish here but you can't put that as a publishing and that's kind of a nice thing actually in the US so that's a different culture but I think as a result there their feeling is there are what they call dark arts in the eternalism there that they are much happier to be involved with if it's slipping somebody money for information our tabloids here do it but our tabloids here aren't seen as part of our mainstream press they're seen as outside TNZ does that you know the National Inquirer the Boston Globe does not do that well there it's a little more ambiguous celebrities are free game the royal family is sort of a tax subsidized sport politicians are open for almost any claim with hypocrisy and there's no no privacy and I think as a result you've seen diminished credibility from all the revelations of recent months in news of the world in the press more broadly in the UK particularly in News Corp and how it handled things from their baseline reporters to their top editors to their top executives to the Murdochs themselves and you see time and time again assertion of innocence assertion of ignorance assertion of good will being knocked down overcome by the facts and yet I think it's really important that this only really became an outrage in England and I noticed this on July 6th when Prime Minister David Cameron gave remarks from the capital of Afghanistan when he's at press conference supposed to be addressing the question of the British military presence there Cameron Karzai is there waiting to talk at the podium too when he first had to address the question of this young girl who had been abducted and murdered whose voicemails had been hacked into by the reporters of this tabloid and he hadn't talked about his outrage that said to me this was a crisis for the British political system that he did that from Afghanistan and it was only an issue when the non-famous got involved when victims of violent crimes when war dead, when terror targets and when they're survivors of all these people were shown to have been the targets that readers asked whoa what happened here how do we know this but prior to that when you're scooping up information about Hugh Grant his various girlfriends or you know Prince Wills and what they're doing with Prince Harry readers didn't ask how did the paper know what it knew how can they be so omniscient why do we tolerate this degree of an invasion of privacy and I think this takes us back to our original questions do you care where you get the news do you care how they get the news and are you getting the information you need to be a full citizen of the country in which you live anyway those are my thoughts about trust and about the media and I appreciate you guys being here and I hope to take your questions if you have any