 Good morning and welcome to the New America Foundation. We're here for the third in our panel series on Presidents at War. This is a panel series for the Understanding Lincoln course, which is brought to you by the Gilder-Lamon Institute for American History and also Dickinson College, the House Divided Project at Dickinson College. So we are engaged in a discussion of Abraham Lincoln and his role and his legacy in American society. But we're also thinking about how the issues that he confronted as a commander-in-chief and as a president have evolved to the modern day and in modern history and where they might be headed in the future. So this panel is about the role of the press. This is the story of the wartime press and civil liberties during war. It's one of the most controversial aspects of Lincoln's legacy. It remains one of the most controversial subjects in American history. My name is Matthew Pinsker, and I am the instructor of the Understanding Lincoln course. And what I'd like to do now is introduce the panelists for this session. And then I'm going to turn it over to our moderator and let him ask a series of questions and a kind of informal discussion about these topics. So our moderator, to my far left, is Jeff McCoslin. He's a former US Army colonel who served in Operation Desert Storm, and he now holds the Minerva Chair at the Strategic Studies Institute at the US Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He got his PhD from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, and he previously worked on the National Security Council staff at the White House. He's the author of a number of essays and articles, and he's been a military analyst for several years for CBS News. To his right is one of our panelists, Kimberly Dozier. Kimberly is the author of the bestselling memoir, Breathing the Fire, and she served as a military affairs correspondent for both CBS News and the Associated Press, and she now writes for The Daily Beast. She's the winner of a Peabody Award and two Edward R. Morrow awards, and I'm happy to welcome her to Dickinson College. She's been recently named as the Omar Bradley Chair in Strategic Leadership, which is held by Dickinson Penn State University Law School and the US Army War College. To her right is Tom Schanker. He's the associate editor of the Washington Bureau for the New York Times and a former Pentagon correspondent for the Times. He's been covering the Pentagon since 2001, and he has formerly served as a foreign editor and correspondent for the Chicago Tribune. But I think more important for our discussion, Tom is the co-author with Eric Schmidt of Counterstrike, the untold story of America's secret campaign against al-Qaeda, an excellent book that I'd recommend to all of our course participants. And finally to my left is Linda Mason. Now, she is a former Senior Vice President of CBS News. Linda actually served 47 years with CBS News, ending her career in 2003 as the Senior Vice President for Standards and Specials. She was a pioneer in the industry. She was the first female producer on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, and she broke ground on a number of fronts as a leader in the news business and as a company executive during her career in journalism. So it's a great panel of journalists, and I think we will have a terrific discussion. I just want to remind everybody who's following this for our course or elsewhere that you're welcome to live tweet it at the hashtag linkin150 and we'll hope that we can open this discussion to a wider network of classes across the country, both at the K through 12 and at the undergraduate level. Before I give it to Jeff though, let me just thank New America Foundation again for being our host and hope that everybody who is here will enjoy our discussion. Jeff, thank you. Well, thanks very much, Matt, and it's really a pleasure for me to moderate this very, very distinguished panel. So let's begin by taking a question that was previously submitted by one of the participants, and that's from Chris Jax in Wichita, Kansas. And Chris has written in and said, you know, in Lincoln's public letter, such as a famous letter he wrote in 1862 to Horace Greeley, or another letter in 1864 to a journalist by the name of Albert Hodges, who was a editor in Kentucky. The president used the press to provide a level of transparency into the decisions and policies that his particular presidency was taking. As a role of the press, in serving as a link between the White House, you know, changed since the American Civil War. So Matt, let me start with you on this and give us the historical backdrop. I mean, what was the media like there during the onset of the Civil War? How did Lincoln view the media? Did he like reporters? Did he attempt at times to, if you will, influence how they covered his presidency, his administration and the conduct of the war? Right. Well, I mean, the biggest difference between then and now is that the media back then wasn't fair and balanced, like it is today. It was partisan. And Lincoln had lots of friends in the press because the Republican newspaper editors and writers, they were partisans for the Republican Party. And as a leader, he used partisan Republican newspapers, like the New York Tribune, the one that Chris Jax is referring to, or Unionist papers in Kentucky, like the one that Albert Hodges edited, to transmit his ideas to the public. He was kind of a pioneer in that among presidents. There were always presidents who had used newspapers as kind of official organs. They would designate one paper as a kind of mouthpiece for their administration. But Lincoln was a pioneer in not designating one mouthpiece, but using multiple mouthpieces for his administration. And in doing that, he created a competition among friendly journalists. And in that sense, he manipulated them for a very effective kind of outreach effort. These public letters that Chris asked about, the one to Greeley in the summer of 62, the one to Jax in the summer in the spring of 64, I'm sorry, the one to Hodges in the summer of 64, those letters were kind of unprecedented attempts by a president to reach the public using the media in a way that established Lincoln as a great communicator for his age. I'll start with you and bring us up to date. Have you seen evidence of modern presidents perhaps, most particularly President Bush and President Obama during this period of war, attempting, if you will, to manipulate the press in trying to get their policies out, particularly about the conduct of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And then I want to come to Tom and Kimberly for their reaction to that. Definitely. Both Bush and Obama wanted their story told. The press has a kind of dance we do with the administration. We want to do this, they want us to do that, and most times we're very careful not to buy their line, but to give their line consideration and see if there's truth. Margaret Sullivan, who is the ombudsman for the New York Times, wrote just last week, I think, about when the Iraq War was building, the Times was in the forefront of WMD, of weapons of mass destruction. And one of their star reporters, Judith Miller, had these great contacts. The great contact was a man named Ahmed Chalabi. He was a insurgent, he was very anti Saddam. He wanted to be and may be the next leader of Iraq. And he planted a couple of generals, or people who said they were generals, and they gave this false information. He gave the same information to the White House and to the Pentagon. So when Judith checked her sources, which you're supposed to do, they all had the same story. And so she thought she had it right, she didn't. There was a lot of criticism now about there weren't doubts raised, even though there were doubts raised. And Knight Ritter got a special commendation from the Neiman Foundation for raising these doubts. The problem is the Knight Ritter papers weren't the New York Times and the Washington Post, so they didn't spread opinion in a big way. And so the president was supported and we ended up there. I know that for me, when I saw Colin Powell talk about those bio weapon trucks, and he was so trustworthy and he wouldn't buy their line that I then believed it. So they were very skillful and CBS pointed out in 2006, which is long after the initial foray, that the information the CIA had, which dealt with a tip from the foreign minister of Iraq, somebody close to, there were no weapons of mass destruction. And the CIA was ignored on that bit of information because it didn't fit with the game plan of the Bush administration. It's very hard for the press to dig into that, but a way to do it, and Margaret is raising the question, is you have to listen to all the other renditions and let the public know that there is this debate going on. Tom and Kimberly, how about you? How do you see examples in your reporting of the administration trying to manipulate the press, particularly during recent conflict? Well, just to follow on what was just said, the Judy Norris situation is certainly a brought on medication at times. We did investigate it ourselves fully and instituted a number of reforms in the way we report and edit stories. There's another body of work at the same time though, that I think helps to balance that out and goes to your point, Jeff, which is that a year before the invasion of Iraq, my colleagues, Eric Schmidt and David Sanger and I began reporting a series of stories that was getting into the details of the initial war planning for the invasion. So even as President Bush was saying, we're not going to war, diplomacy's on the table, there's off ramps here and there, the readers of the times were well aware that their president was on the verge, if not already had made, the most grim decision a democracy can make, which is to go to war. And the Bush administration might have been successful in planting some of the WMD stuff, but they were unsuccessful in hiding from the American public the fact that they were on the verge and it all but decided to go to war. So I'm actually quite proud of the work that Eric and David and I did to inform our readers of this. So- What page did it appear? Page one. Really? The first story, the invasion was in March, our first story was in April a year before saying here are the outlines of the war plan that's already being prepared, the troops are in movement, it's already underway. So America, you better get ready. So what is this relationship like? Is it adversarial? I, we all have a favorite sort of a metaphor and my metaphor is that relationship between the government and the media is like a marriage. Now it's a dysfunctional marriage to be sure, but we stay together for the kids. Now what do I mean by that? The government really needs to try to get its message out to the American people. It can do it from the podium, it can do it officially and all of that, but it knows that the best way is by using the American news media to tell its story. We are obligated, you know, Kimberly and all of us in the business to inform the public about the most important and the grimace decisions the country makes, which are about going to war. So we are in this stance, but we are not, you know, partisan the way they were in Lincoln time and we try to be fair and balanced in the real way, not the Fox News way, where we actually grind the information we get against other sources to get to the truth. One of the most frustrating things though can be when you can't get a response back from the White House on a story. And I'll have, you know, five or six sources, highly placed, but not in the administration, who are explaining to me, here's what's going on, but I need the White House's input. Increasingly, the Obama White House has become so brittle and so controlling of the message that people are afraid to respond to me. And sometimes the most I can get back is a boilerplate one paragraph that doesn't tell their side of the story or how they came to decide on this policy. And I end up, you know, getting very frustrated because I realize by their choice, I've only told one side of the story. Now, I just wanted to say when the Iraq War started, I was a Middle East correspondent based in Israel. So I didn't get to see the run-up in Washington DC in the decision-making process, but I was seeing the run-up on the Iraq side and you could see from the way the inspectors were getting turned away from the sites that they were trying to visit, the nuclear inspectors and the tension in the Iraqi government that they were bracing for this confrontation, but they were also sort of paralyzed because one of the things that didn't come out in many places is that the Iraqi government had made a conscious decision to try to make countries in the area think they had a WMD program. I spoke to special operators and intelligence officers who raided sites that looked from above like a covert nuclear facility and they'd lift up what they thought were air vents and the air vents went to nowhere. It was literally a Potemkin nuclear facility. So that fed some of the confusion. But the other thing that I found as the invasion happened and in those first few months as we saw Iraqi officers getting fired turned away, they rioted literally in the streets and they told us in interviews, if you don't give us back our jobs, we're going to start an insurgency and fight you and kill your troops. So we saw this play out and then we saw US military commanders react to this and call it what it was early on an insurgency and that's where I saw the White House influence. I put one, every time we put a US commander on air saying what he truly thought was going on in front of him, I would get emails later from those commanders or their staff saying, oh my gosh, you don't know how much trouble you just got him in with Rumsfeld with the secretary of defense at the time, Donald Rumsfeld that whenever one of these guys said truly what they thought was happening, that they saw an insurgency unfolding, that fought the story that the White House wanted out there which is this war was won, there was no insurgency and so I found, people would stop answering my phones after I put a story out like that and so that is how I saw the president and those who work for him try to influence my reporting in the field. So Jeff, let me just underscore two things that Tom and Kimberly just said from the Lincoln perspective, right? So Tom calls the relationship of marriage a dysfunctional one today. This is how different the marriage was back then. The chairman of Lincoln's re-election campaign was the editor of the New York Times. So there was no distance at all between the paper and the White House. And as far as what Kimberly was saying about the chilling effect the administration has on its military commanders in the field, in some ways it was the opposite problem in the Civil War, most commanders in the field didn't want reporters bothering them, some used them for promotion, but for example William Sherman was notorious for arresting reporters who were following him and criticizing him and he was outraged when the Lincoln administration countermanded his arrests and released the reporters to follow him. He couldn't believe the administration would want embedded journalists as we call them today, sort of hanging around his headquarters, reporting sometimes negative information about him but the Lincoln administration wanted an open communication with the public in a way that some of the generals resisted. So just to put that into context. You know, and I want to ask Peggy Tom and Kimberly Digger who were covering that closely as journalists at the time, as I recall back to the point Kimberly made about calling it what it is, I believe the first time the word insurgent was actually publicly used by a very senior officer was General John Abizay and I think it was March of 2004. It was almost like 10 months to a year it was quite some time before they could actually use that word. Your recollection on that? I thought it was J.D. Thurman who actually said it earlier than that out in a press conference out in Fallujah or Ramadi and got smacked. Yeah, but I mean, when John said it, that kind of broke the ice because he was sent. What happened? Yeah, he was at the Pentagon standing at the podium. So the Pentagon press corps was hammering him and Abizay, who's a great intellectual and sort of understands that part of the world very well, he took a very diplomatic answer. He didn't sort of say, oh my gosh, we're failing. But he said, yes, doctrinally speaking, I think you could say that what we're facing is a guerrilla war. But let me press you on a follow-up on that real quickly. Do you think, and again, I straddle this world as you've been a military officer and retired and now as an analyst, no, not a, I don't consider myself a reporter like you guys. It seemed to me to some degree for the current conflict, unlike what Matt was just describing in the Civil War, this put a real damper for a long period of time. It seemed to me the standard military reaction, particularly in this conflict, was don't talk to the press. Nothing can good, nothing ever good can happen of talking to the press. At best it'll be neutral. Now I'm just curious if you think, based on how that all began with this particular anecdote that Kimberly rightfully brings up, is that really the case and is that still persists, do you think, in dealing with the media or with the military or is that now evolving to a certain degree? Well, I watched the evolution on the ground. In the beginning, in 2003 in Iraq, the press conferences with a senior military commander, Mark Kimmet who came and briefed every day or every other day and the large press corps that was there at the time, it was sort of like bulls circling each other because you had these, a lot of young East Coast guys who'd never been around the military before in the ranks of the press corps and my dad's a World War II Marine but I hadn't been covering the military at the time, I covered the Middle East and then you had this very stiff and formal general and there were sparring matches back and forth. Then I watched this evolution as the reporters started doing embeds, getting to know the people, the lingo, the ranks, how a Humvee door opens, the proper procedures and they started becoming part of the club. I saw this trend forming on the ground where people would become a little rah-rah, a little, you know, reporters would become case officers, I just come from covering intelligence, one of the things the CIA does, they case officer someone, a case officer wins someone over to their side so I saw the troops sort of winning the press over but also the press was winning the troops over, winning their trust because they would see things like, I mean you probably remember from the Pentagon side of things, the fight over up armored vehicles. The vehicles didn't have armor and US military vehicles didn't have armor and the insurgents were starting to use roadside bombs that were devastating. So I was watching troops try to weld on their own armor onto trucks so between that and other reporters pushing on this issue, they eventually got up armored vehicles and I'm sure you saw the debate play out from the Pentagon side and I saw troops were won over by that and so this warmth built. Then from my perspective, two things happened. For me, it was choosing not to report a story when I saw a senior officer using racial epithets that I caught on camera against a Muslim suspect he'd arrested. What I didn't understand at the time, I knew that none of his other guys were using that kind of language but I thought, well this guy, he's just a bad apple and I didn't know enough about hierarchy and chain of command and command climate to know that that guy's words needed to be put on camera because that would have alerted his command to what was going on but I also didn't realize that there was this larger debate going on within the US military. Do we treat the Iraqis as the enemy or do we choose the path of counterinsurgency where you win the people over, you provide them services, you build up their government and you divide the enemy from the people? So for me, when I realized later what I should have done that has been one of my lessons in reporting from then on but the other thing that happened for the press was the Michael Hastings Runaway General article that ended General Stanley McChrystal's career. So that sort of ended the warmth right there. It's interesting, I didn't spend much time but the headquarters and Baghdad, all the months I spent in country were embedded at the small unit level and I think that what that did for the American public, since the 70s when the draft ended, we really have gone to this 1% and 99%. 99% of the American public doesn't really know how the military works and for the first time the embedded media stories not only talked about the mission and the campaign plan and the war but it really brought home the individual men and women carrying out the mission. I had a conversation yesterday with a Vietnam veteran at a similar panel and he asked why is the American military today held in higher esteem than in Vietnam because there were reporters then as well. Yes but they didn't really tell soldier stories for the wars in Vietnam and especially as the very quick invasion will be greeted by liberators as promised by Bush and Cheney became no kidding the longest war in American history. I think those stories brought home the sacrifice of the individual military personnel regardless of your political view of the war. I mean whether you're for the war or against it these men and women were carrying out the lawful orders of the commander and chief and I think sort of showing their lives over this 11 years for Iraq, 13 for Afghanistan was very important. I've toured some of the Civil War battlefields and I didn't realize I'm sure you was a historian know that the Civil War II what was launched thinking it would be over 90 days or something. I mean there was absolutely no thought whatsoever that that war would drag on and on and on just like the invasion of Iraq people thought troops would be home by September. Right. Now you know there's always been embedded journalists in American wars. The Civil War was notable for it and I think what Kimberly is describing that natural sort of affinity that develops when journalists are covering soldiers is apparent in any war. Even the Vietnam War sometimes I think there's a myth about the coverage of the Vietnam War that overstates the friction that developed. I think a lot of that is retrospective but in the Civil War at least I can speak to that directly. There's this unbelievable story of an embedded journalist that people in our course know well. Sam Wilkerson was the New York Times reporter who was covering the Army of the Potomac and he went with the Army to the battle at Gettysburg and was there at headquarters covering this story but his son was in the Army of the Potomac. He was a young artillery officer, 19 years old and he was killed on the first day and his father found his body on July 4th, 1863 after the battle and wrote the lead for the New York Times about the battle with an opening paragraph that described his son's dead body and how he had died in a needless way because of poor command decisions on the first day from the Union officers. It was furious, graphic, dramatic depiction. It created a sensation but at the end of the piece Sam Wilkerson writes that it was worth it. You know the loss of his son, the loss of all these lives was worth it he says because these men will have created a second birth of freedom in America. Now the Wilkessons were friends of the Lincolns. Abraham Lincoln knew this family well. That phrase is second birth of freedom in America. It echoes in Lincoln's Gettysburg address when he talks about a new birth of freedom. Now I'd be shocked if anybody in this room or anybody on this panel had ever heard of Sam Wilkerson and yet this is the legacy that has given us all of these embedded journalists through to today and I just think we need a deeper appreciation of that relationship and I'm curious as to whether the panelists think it's changing at all. It seems to me like there's more continuity than change. What I was trying to describe was the maturation of a journalist covering the military. When you come to the subject initially and you're learning about it and then you become part of the club because you know how some of the things work and then you realize oh wait a minute my job here is to be as hard on them as they are on themselves. My job is not to be a cheerleader. I am making them better by that first paragraph describing that journalist son's death and that is something that I see young journalists going through the same arc as there's a generation of journalists who cover the Iraq war and most of them have either moved on to other things or moved on to different jobs. I only see like a small group of people who keep going back usually TV people who keep going back to the same war zones over and over and over. In print there seems to be much more of a circulation back to DC gives you different perspectives but then I see frequently the people covering wars are young freelancers who are going over there to get their start and so it's those that I see go through this arc again and Tom you can chime in if you've seen the same thing. But also you know and I think Linda might speak to this too you know there's this, there are always exceptions like there are always articles and reporters who are critical. You get occasional episodes like General McChrystal and his aides speaking to the Rolling Stone reporter but by and large I don't see an arc in most reporters coverage of wars. I see generally supportive coverage in the way that Wilkerson's coverage was generally supportive there's problems, there's drama but at the end you know these sacrifices are not in vain. I mean now maybe I'm misreading it as a history professor but I don't see a lot of criticism of troops on the ground in a consistent way. From reporters in the field. You know I was serving my military career at the beginning of Vietnam, I didn't serve in Vietnam and then through the Gulf War and now into the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. I remember very vividly quite candidly that you know having garbage thrown at me and being spit on by the American people back in the 1960s and early 1970s and I often tell young soldiers you know as you base in the adulation of the American public don't ever assume for a minute this is your life long guarantee. This can ebb and flow it certainly has in past but I think one thing we've managed to do is talk about criticize the war and not criticize the warrior necessarily. One of the other differences I think may have affected I've been curious to the final think so. The coverage of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan which kind of brought it home is this is the first war since World War II in which we activated the National Guard and rotated National Guard units through and this really brings it back home to the hometown of America. Not unlike Matt perhaps in the Civil War where all the regiments came from particular areas and so it resonates back in the hometown newspaper. I mean it wasn't lost on the state of Louisiana for example that when Hurricane Katrina strikes in Orleans the Louisiana National Guard is in Baghdad which makes this a very that story which had nothing to do with the war in Iraq somewhat more poignant because those who were supposed to come to our assistance are actually serving the nation abroad. Just one foot note in the first Iraq War remember when we went to Kuwait to get the Iraqis out of Kuwait the Pentagon was very strict about not having any embeds. They had their pools and they managed it and you know you come here and we'll tell you what's going on. There were some reporters who were called unilaterals who didn't listen and went and the troops allowed them to embed. I mean there's an American tradition of freedom of the press that just made me feel so good that this tradition lives and even though the Pentagon didn't want it the American troops allowed it and so there was reporting even when it wasn't welcomed. But Linda for example CBS News and Walter Cronkite are iconic for breaking with the Johnson administration after the Ted Offensive. That was a turning point in a lot of our history classes and how we look at the press treatment of the war but wouldn't you characterize CBS News coverage of the war in Vietnam as generally supportive in the way that I just described or do you see it differently? Well Jack Lawrence was famous for Charlie Company and he humanized the soldiers in Charlie Company in that way. What the national networks did was in reporting the deaths and the constant reporting and don't forget 55,000 Americans died there was not a draft, there wasn't a draft, there was a draft excuse me and so people from every segment of society were affected and this constant hammering is what people say ended the war in Vietnam finally. And so it was the press. I've got to push back on this idea that the press is the majority supportive of wars anywhere in the war in Afghanistan, the Washington Post, Rajiv Chandrasekaran really hammered some of the government agencies and the military for their rebuilding projects in the South that have ended up going nowhere and been huge wastes of money. I did the same thing in Iraq. In a recent trip to Afghanistan, I did a story that I understand made General Joseph Dunnford very angry about how the CIA and the military were in a spat over the CIA's decision to withdraw some of its counterterrorism pursuit teams. These are local Afghans who were fighting against Al-Qaeda and the Taliban and the CIA and the military couldn't coordinate their withdrawals and the CIA was like, fine, we're gonna close our bases and fire these people and you figure out how to cover the border with Pakistan. So that certainly wasn't very well received there. Back here, I heard from several officials who said, thank you for writing that because we need to hold them to account. Sure. Let me press on that, can't believe into the panel as a whole, but before I did I've got to come back on this question about the embeds during the Gulf War. I was a commander of the Gulf War, I was asked to take an embed and I recall turning that down, I feel bad about that now. You're the only insherman of the Gulf War. Yeah, but the crazy thing about it was the requirements that I was told I had to fulfill to have this one journalist with me made it just too own. I had to give him his own, or the own private vehicle that her own guard force and said, I'm kind of busy right now. I learned later when I began working with the press that he or she would have been happy just to hop in the back of my Humvee so the requirements were more with the military putting requirements on me than the press. I was unfortunate. I do happen to know that the first, picking up on Linda's comment, but it's a funny story, the first Marine, or the first reporter to get into Kuwait City actually got in, he embedded himself automatically, you're right, with a bunch of Marines, but he actually bribed them by allowing them to use the first rudimentary sat phone that he had to call their girlfriends back in Virginia. So that's why they took him along. But I want to press back on this whole idea of how the press handles these difficult stories and then I'm going to start with you and then I'm going to cut them to Tom and Kimberly. Let's talk about when the press knows something and when it releases it because there are questions of national security or wherever you ever put soldiers in harm's way. It's a great story. The most celebrated story, which is right in our wheelhouse, we're talking about here, of course it's Abu Ghraib. CBS knew about Abu Ghraib some time prior to actually releasing the story. Several of the other newsmen I'm sure knew about, I knew about Abu Ghraib before it was released. How does that the corporate level? Then we'll come to Kim and Tom. How do you balance out that? We know something but we're not going to put it out because there's this question of national security. This is a question of you can't win. CBS had the story of Abu Ghraib, had the pictures, had it very well documented. Dan rather got a call from the secretary of the army saying you can't run that story. It's going to endanger American lives. I think you better, for some members the audience weren't actually born when that happened. Oh, Abu Ghraib was a terrible story. It was a prison in Iraq that the Americans were running where there was all kind of torture going on and pictures were taken and these pictures were horrific. Actually showing the torture and American soldiers smiling or giving the victory signal. I mean it was just really horrible. So the military said that American lives would be in danger so we held it a week. Meanwhile we're asking for a spokesman from the Pentagon. Another appeal came the second week so we held it. The third week we decided we're going to go with it and by the way the military came forth with a spokesman from central casting. He was fantastic which makes the story very powerful. How they were investigating themselves and how they didn't realize it first, et cetera, et cetera. So we did come out with it and we were the first. Seymour Hirsch had it for the New Yorker, thank you, for the New Yorker and came out afterwards but we were the first to do it. Now we listened to the government because we don't want to endanger American lives, we're Americans also. But as it looked like it became a stalling tactic, we went with it. Okay, you say, well what happens? We now show this, is there a payoff in freedom of the press when you expose something like this? Yes, there was. Investigations of this type and torture stopped. The American public was so appalled that this had to end. And I think that's a great effect. And I also think that we were right to hold it. We don't know all the ins and outs that the government does. Even though the government plays games, when we saw that they were stalling, we went. But we gave them the first chance and I still believe that was the right thing to do. I think as your audience would probably be shocked at the amount of classified information that comes to a Pentagon reporter in the course of his average reporting. One, it shows the grotesque overclassification of material. And two, the fact that there are people who are interested in the American public knowing what's going on. But I can assure all of you that the New York Times, before we publish anything based on classified or sensitive information, we go to the relevant government agency or department and give them a fair say about why we shouldn't publish at a certain time or why certain information should be held out to prevent ongoing operations. And we don't want to write a story that puts Americans' lives at risk, but we do believe that an informed republic makes our country stronger and things like Abu Ghraib are important to talk about. The New York Times, of course, was party to publishing the WikiLeaks document. This was a vast trove of diplomatic cables that were downloaded by a soldier in Iraq and given to WikiLeaks and then went to several organizations. The Times was very careful and cautious in how it managed that. Again, we had conversations with all the relevant agencies. And I sort of think the takeaway is the American public learned how its government was operating and what it felt about certain allies. And we asked then Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who was a former CIA director, what he thought about the WikiLeaks stories. And he said, well, of course, as an intelligence professional, I'm very upset whenever this happens, but I can tell you that I don't see any specific damage to our national security programs because of the way the information was handled. I've just come from four years at the AP as an intelligence writer and like being a Pentagon correspondent, especially when you cover intel, almost everything, every story, involves classified material. So you have to develop a relationship, more the agencies that you're covering really have to develop a relationship with you where you're gonna trust them when they ask you to hold something. And again, just as Linda was saying with the apple grave story, as a reporter, you have to develop a finely tuned sensibility as to, are they getting me, they're asking me to hold this because of the embarrassment it would cause to the officials involved, or would this actually cost lives? Would it cost lives? That is a reason that you hold something back. And I was personally part of stories where I argued to hold back a location in one case of where a US citizen who was suspected of plotting and carrying out terrorist attacks that had killed US troops where this guy was hiding and we were as a nation thinking about hitting him with a drone strike. So I reached out to various different agencies. The other interesting thing is some of them make different arguments and have different opinions about it. But the majority of the agencies involved said you can't publish where this guy is. We don't want to tip him off. So that he flees and we lose our chance to get someone who's costing American lives almost every day. So we did withhold the location. Other media outlets later chose to publish the location. But the AP stood firm and said, no, we think our original decision was sound. The reasons were sound, according to AP's own internal standards. And we haven't published it to this day. To my knowledge, I haven't looked at every story on the wire for the past several months since I left. So you know, this is another example of contrast to the past that's kind of instructive. So in the Civil War, they had lots of embedded journalists and lots of friendly relationships, but they also had a hostile press. They had a democratic press in the North. They had an anti-administration press in the South. And the administrations, both North and South, suppressed it occasionally. I mean, over 300 newspapers in the North were put out of business, at least temporarily, shut down. And in some cases, editors were imprisoned during the course of the war for violating national security interests. They didn't use that phrase then, but they, the Lincoln administration, sometimes without Lincoln's real approval, you know, sort of commanders in the field taking action aggressively against reporters, in a way that suggests they just had a much lower threshold for allowing reporters to make decisions about the balance, the trade-offs between national security and accountability. Back then, they had a concept called seditious libel, which we've abandoned. But the idea was that if you reported false information that hurt the operations of the government, you could be, you know, imprisoned for it. And that was a tradition that, you know, dates all the way back to British law and had evolved in the American system and is finally abandoned here in the 1950s during the McCarthy era. You know, but in that era, it was totally legal to suppress criticism of the government if it was false. And of course, you know how subjective that could be, but that was what they did. Let me press this issue of civil liberties and freedom of the press. We have a question, actually, from one of our viewers, Jamie Sharp from Jamestown, New York, has asked about this whole question of leaks in recent presidential administrations and compromising security. And one of our press panelists, Tom mentioned wicked leaks. That was one great example. Of course, the most recent example now, of course, has been Edward Snowden and all the documents that Snowden has released. And where does the press on that particular case see their responsibility in either, you know, interviewing Snowden, making him more famous than some people think he might need to be, publishing some of the documents that he has now leaked? How does that fit in this question of responsibility to, on the one hand, report the news, while on the other hand, not compromising national security along the way? Tom, your organization got some of the, some of the Snowden documents, so. Well, I mean, again, we make a judgment based not on whether it's a sexy leak, isn't that fun, but on whether the content is something that's valuable for the American people to know about. I think, you know, the Snowden situation raises so many questions about the national security agency's own internal security for what it does. But it also shows that the power of new media, because Glenn Greenwald, who was the lead reporter in that, is not even fully affiliated with another news outlet. A lot of it was published in The Guardian America, but Glenn now has a website where he's continuing to publish. So this has really brought about kind of a revolution in the reach of independent journalism. I mean, for a long time I thought that bloggers were not necessarily new media, but just a throwback to sort of 18th century pamphleteers. Right, that anybody with a hand crank could stand on a corner in Hyde Park and shout. And a lot of bloggers were just, you know, teenagers in their boxer shorts at their mom's kitchen table writing these things. And it was only, you know, the New York Times and AP and CBS who had this really powerful global reach. But with the advancement of the internet and sort of global networking individuals with, you know, great sources and great reporting, like Glenn Greenwald, can have the same impact as a major news organization. An interesting thing that Greenwald said in one of his interviews was that Edward Snowden knew that some of the documents, possibly a million documents that he has handed over, would be damaging to US national security, but left it to the journalists to use their own discretion as to what should be published and what shouldn't. And what was frustrating for the AP, we were doing what I call like derivative reporting. Initially, the Guardian, the Washington Post, Bart Gelman there came out with their own individual stories, but they would also publish the source documents that they based their stories on. So I didn't, so while we had to say the Washington Post or the Guardian first reported, we could then draw our own conclusions and do our own reporting on documents. As time has gone on, the National Security Agency and the White House have managed to convince both the Washington Post and I believe the New York Times and the Guardian and Greenwald himself and Laura Poitras who's been working with him on this to publish fewer source documents or to block things out on them. So now as a reporter covering somebody else's report on a document I can't see or can only see part of, I'm in this uncomfortable position of taking another news agency's word for it or trying to find an independent source in the intelligence community to literally fill in those blanks for me. So it got to be a very frustrating story to cover because I wasn't looking at the original and able to use my own journalistic experience to judge for myself. I wanna ask one more question to Kimberly, but before I do that, man, I'm gonna come over to you in just a second for any questions from our video stream audience. Okay, but I do wanna interject something here because I do feel like from the historian's perspective there's something big going on here that Tom kind of alluded to that I want teachers to think about which is there are these transformational shifts in the history of American media. So you have a partisan press in the 19th century. You have an independent press emerging in the 20th century. But now in the 21st century, Tom and Kimberly and their answers are both calling figures like Glenn Greenwald journalists, but there are some who would question whether there's any line between journalists and bloggers or whether in this world of new media there is any real media. Like can anybody with a blog call himself a journalist and do these people hold themselves to the standards that the New York Times or CBS News did in the 20th century? And if they don't, then maybe the Obama administration is justified in sort of pursuing leakers in a more aggressive way because it'll be kind of the chaos of the 18th century that Tom kind of alluded to when he talks about those anonymous pamphleteers. Now sort of emboldened by the power of the internet. The answer is yes and no. The bloggers think they're journalists, but they're not. A journalist is a profession where we learn to weigh the facts, where we learn to verify the facts. Verification is often the most difficult part of reporting. I know that a lot of teachers are involved in this panel. Some colleges are now giving courses in news literacy, teaching students how to watch the news and the questions to ask. And I think given the proliferation of all this new social media called news, it's the responsibility to teach students questions to ask. When you hear this, what does it mean? So that they become critical listeners and are able to know that it's pamphleteering or that it's journalistic and come to their own conclusions, but not just believe what they read. And I have kids older who, their news source is the headlines service of CNN. They watch on the computer. Would you call Glenn Greenwald a journalist? Oh, yeah, he started at the Guardian. But would you, would you call him? He's quasi, he's out for headlines. It's such a challenging point. I know Kim wants to comment too, but I sort of have to jump in here. We talk about this all the time in the newsroom. And I guess where I come down personally is that I'm an absolutist when it comes to the First Amendment. So that anybody who wants to express their views in old Gutenberg ink on dead tree paper or on the web are subject to those protections, but you're so right in talking about sort of professional standards. And I just hope that the blogosphere, like the pamphleteers, are simply at the start of an arc of maturing toward a level where they do have the standards and the accountability of a New York Times. I mean, one of my great sort of, you know, journalistic mentors is Peter Parker as in Spider-Man, who was a news photographer who said, with great power comes great responsibility. And that's what the new bloggers have to understand. I was just gonna say, in defense of my colleagues, Glenn Greenwald and Spencer Ackerman, who was working with him at the time on the stories, were at the Guardian, working with editors. We as journalists looking at the same source material might not have agreed with headlines they chose or which parts of the documents they emphasized, but to me that meets the standards of being a professional journalist. Did he start as a lawyer and an advocate before he went into this, what some people in Britain call advocacy journalism? I guess there's a brand of that here too. Well, yes, but I came, just because I came from a different brand of journalism where I am taught to keep my opinion out of my reporting doesn't invalidate his. And it doesn't invalidate Fox, it doesn't invalidate MSNBC, who've chosen to do, as those original reporters in Lincoln's time did, choose a side, make it clear what their side was, and make that part of their reporting. Most of them weren't professionals in the Civil War, but my question for you is, is there any blogger out there that you would refuse to characterize as a journalist? This is for you. I mean, under your standards, is there anybody out there who's blogging about news that you would say that's not a journalist? Gosh, I guess I don't waste time reading the people that, or I know the people that I follow and trust, but I always, in terms of news literacy, I look at the byline, I look at that person's experience, I look at the institution that they're writing under or for, and how many layers that person's information had to go through. Did they go through a process where they weighed, am I putting all sides of the story in here? But my point, Kimberly, as a historian was, the move from the 19th century to the 20th century to the independent journalist was all about professionalization and creating standards. That's what Linda represents, right? From the 20th century, that move towards standards and practices. And now, if you open up the idea of the profession to anybody who blogs, then perhaps you lose some of those gains. There's a challenge there, a trade-off, that happens with this new media age. That's a serious threat to the industry, I think. Well, okay, I'm curious, because Tom, in your editing role, and Linda, you just left CBS, so both of you were looking at the growth and explosion of new media and figuring out how to compete with it and in it. My impression, my non-scientific impression was that there was an explosion of non-professional blogs for a while, but that the public seems to be coming back to. They're getting their AP or CNN app or their New York Times Now app that they have, they might subscribe to something that you might say, is it journalism? Is it not like the Breitbart site? But that increasingly, they're going to people that they have learned to trust as opposed to just a random person spouting their own version of reporting. I agree with you, Kimberly. And I think that is the whole basis of journalism. If you want to have viewers, if you want to have readers, you've got to be telling them what's really happening. And if you're wrong a lot of the time, I think people will start ignoring you. So I think that's very important. On this news of literacy, it also strikes me to talk to a bunch of teachers. One thing that I've always worried about, and Linda and I actually talked about this the other day, is that too oftentimes people go to blogs or people go to websites, not because they're looking for diverse opinions. They're going to blogs and websites, even though there's a proliferation of those things that reinforce their preconceived notions. So I think it worries me at times that we have a proliferation of information. It doesn't mean we have a proliferation that have more well-versed human beings. I mean, that's one of the reasons that I love old-fashioned newspapers, and I still get them in print. And while the web is the future, but what's wonderful about when you turn the page of a broadsheet newspaper is the opportunity for a surprise, coming across an article that you never thought you would want to read, and that becomes the best thing you read all day. So teachers who are listening, this is not just about increasing our readership, but even with your hometown paper, I would urge you to have your students at least once a week read an old-fashioned newspaper, cover to cover, because they'll be surprised at what they see that's there, because the phenomenon that Jeff's talking about troubles me greatly. When people set up news aggregators only for things they know they already want to know about, that is the opposite of democracy. That is a narrowing of you. It becomes the daily me rather than you being part of this vast republic. They can read it on their iPad, they can flip the page, that's okay. It's so much easier to ignore a headline that when I'm being sort of focused with my iPad in the morning, I'm national security, national security, oh, that political story, yeah, I should read that one too. And I see interesting headlines, I'm like, I really want to read that later, and I never get back to it. Whereas when I sit down with this Sunday New York Times, and there's that big glossy color photo on the New York Times magazine, it's like, oh, I got to read that, and then it's tactile, it's delicious, you can't stop learning the pages. Absolutely correct. I want to get back to this issue of protection for men, then I'm going to go to our online questions. And Kim, I'm going to come to you and correct you about this, we talk about the person now, we talk about protection for journalists. I'm just wondering in the contemporary environment, is there an area now of concern? For example, recently Supreme Court rejected an appeal by James Rison about protecting sources over some things he'd written about the Iran and the nuclear program. And there are those who argue that the Obama administration, and certainly it's true for the Bush administration as well, went after journalists in a couple of cases, went after their sources. I know you personally were involved in that. Is there a concern, as this war, the recent one we've been involved in has gone on, that some of those protections afforded by that First Amendment in terms of the freedom of the press are being eroded? Well, just to catch everyone up, I'm going to have to give the history here because James Rison works for the New York Times and so Tom can't talk about it. But he wrote a book about how the CIA had planned to spread some false information inside Iran to damage their nuclear program. So a leak investigation was launched and he has been investigated and prosecuted and this case has worked its way up through the courts. And investigators want him to identify his source and he has refused and said he'll go to jail before identifying a source. Meanwhile, they've also investigated the CIA officer that they believe was his source. And so these two cases are kind of running in parallel and it's got a chilling effect for everybody else in the business. In my own personal situation, I was a minor part of a story that uncovered a second Yemen underwear bomb plot. My former colleague, Matapuzzo, who's gone to the New York Times and Adam Goldman who's now at the Washington Post and Eileen Sullivan, we all had, they had uncovered the plot and then Eileen and I provided them other background for their story. So our names were the tagline at the end. And then one or other colleague who had simply gotten Diane Feinstein to give him an on-record statement in the hallway. And the Department of Justice sees our phone records for a certain period of time. Every phone record that they, every phone that they could identify is connected to us. And apparently targeted some people on those lists, sat down with them, asked if they'd ever spoken to us. Well, the AP published a story about the investigation into us and they listed our names. Because of that, that had an incredibly chilling effect around DC. Nobody wanted to talk to any of us for months. People were afraid. They thought our phones were tapped. You know, people in this community in Washington, DC, it was sort of guilt by association and they didn't want to be seen with us or have a phone call record back and forth to us. I ended up learning all of the different ways that I didn't know before to protect my sources. Now I had always been careful about talking about sensitive things in person. But now I was trying to sort of make my digital footprint as confusing as possible for anyone in future trying to track down my sources, doing things like find burn phones. But don't reveal sources and methods now. Some of our students might use this for the wrong purpose. Yeah, burn phones, I'm gonna list some things that are commonly known as used in the criminal underworld to cover your sources. And one of the things is you just communicate with people in a number of different ways. And the fact that I had to learn how to do that to protect my sources, and I thought what I was doing was protected by the Constitution. So I went through a long period of disillusionment with my government. Now, Attorney General Eric Holder has since said that they won't take broad sweeping measures like that. Again, he said that he was not informed at the time about what was being done to us, but I'm sorry, I'm not giving up my burn phone. Well, I mean, both of you, I guess all three of you would characterize yourselves as First Amendment absolutists, maybe, but do you think there's ever a legitimate government interest in prosecuting leaks? Never, under any circumstances. I mean, especially in this new media age where a stoted figure could dump to a blogger. You know, I mean, to say any and ever, I'm sorry, that's just not, I mean, as a... Can you name any example of a leak that you think was dangerous and criminal? But also, who do you mean, prosecuting us or prosecuting the leakers? Well, you know, either. Well, the leakers certainly gonna be prosecuted nothing else administratively, and working the clinic on the White House. Leaking classified documents gets you in a lot of trouble. But I would imagine if you're a First Amendment absolutist like Kimberly or Tom, then you know, you would give those people whistleblower protection and you don't think they should be prosecuted. But Tom, do you think there's anything out there that... I mean, even the Abu Ghraib case, and we wrestled with that. And I've talked to senior commanders. You cannot look, I mean, Abu Ghraib was a blot on the reputation of this great nation. It was an embarrassment. It showed us at our worst. It outraged the Muslim world as it understandably should have. But I have yet to find a senior general officer who can point to a specific instance when anger at Abu Ghraib put at risk an American soldier. And that was the argument that they were making. Didn't happen. Well, but in the broadsweeper thing, I mean, I think you're absolutely true, Tom, in terms of the individual. But in the broadsweeper thing, this isn't possible to get a true cause and effect. Did people donate more money to al-Qaeda, probably? Did people join al-Qaeda, probably? Was Abu Ghraib wrong? Absolutely. Absolutely correct, absolutely correct. But I mean, those things happen, but the direct cause and effect, I think you're absolutely right. But Tom, do you think Chelsea Manning should not be in prison? Do you think Edward Snowden, if he comes back, shouldn't face a prosecution? I mean, I think Chelsea Manning is in prison and accepting the fate based on those decisions. I think there's so much... But you just think that's wrong. For WikiLeaks. Yeah. I think there's so much about the Snowden case that we don't know yet about him. I mean, his case, and again, we don't know, Snowden says that he tried to work through his chain of command to bring to their attention these security flaws. The government says that's not true. He says it is. We just don't know yet. But likewise, we have not seen from either WikiLeaks, stated by Bob Gates, or yet from Snowden, the kind of risk to American security that would cause the kind of outrage to infringe the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment of our Constitution. And there's a difference here as well, man. I mean, it's confused. People are prosecuted under the law and people are prosecuted under the UCMJ, Uniform Code of Military Justice. I mean, Manning has been prosecuted under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. And what he has been prosecuted for is violating the terms of his security clearance, which you sign that you will not release classified documents, and he violated that. There's a very interesting case that's coming up now, frankly, is gonna be, apparently, the Department of Defense has decided to go after this seal who wrote the book about the raid on Osama bin Laden, because, again, he had signed a whole series of non-disclosure statements based on the sensitivity as a person in uniform to release certain things. So there is a distinct difference between prosecuting civilians, prosecuting those in uniform, and taking administrative action, even against, I would say, a government civilian, and maybe not prosecuting them, but if they're passing out classified documents, which obviously is contrary to what they should be doing in performance of their job. Just to jump in about the seal book, I mean, that's being negotiated between the seal's lawyer and the Pentagon, and the, yeah, the seal always said that the money was going to go to charities anyway. The impression I get is that the Pentagon wants to make sure that they make an example out of this so nobody else comes out of the woodwork and writes another book. Eventually, I suspect it's gonna get settled. And the last point to be made here, because these are tough questions, why we're wrestling with them, the government only goes after those leakers that it doesn't want leaked. The government leaks classified material on purpose by design all the time. So it's a hypocritical stance. But is it classified if the president who has declassification authority says, yes, brief them on this? Then it's not, so they choose to declassify it and then share it. So again, the comparison to Lincoln is instructive because Lincoln took a hard line with rhetoric. He was quoted, he wrote a number of public letters and he was quoted as saying things like, how can I shoot a simple-minded deserter boy, a soldier who deserts, and not touch a wily agitator, right? Referring to people like Copperhead Democrat Clement Volandigum, a critic of the administration who tried to stop the draft who got arrested by a military officer. But even though Lincoln said all this in public and tried to defend it in private behind the scenes, he tried to get Volandigum released. And when this general Ambrose Burnside then suspended the Chicago Times, the Democratic newspaper, Lincoln countermanded it, you know, he took a tough line, but in practice he used a lot of discretion. When Volandigum was banished during the Civil War, this Democratic opponent of the administration was a former congressman, right? Running for governor of Ohio, they banish him to the Confederacy. He slips back into the country during the election of 1864 and the military supported its report to the president and they asked him what they should do about it and he suggests that they should just ignore him. And so I think what we do in practice is we expect our government to have these tough rules but not to enforce them. And when they do enforce them as the Obama administration has been doing lately, people are enraged. And it's a very tenuous situation. Just one thing to add about that. I spoke to former Bush lawyers who said one of the things that's possibly unfair to the Obama administration is that, you know, they're quote unquote prosecuting more leaks than ever before and to imply that the Bush administration didn't want to. These lawyers told me that they wanted to prosecute as many leaks then but technology hadn't moved on to the point where it is now, where it is so easy to track people's electronic footprint. So there are simply more tools available to the lawyers of the DOJ to go after everyone and anyone. Yeah, if you've got a question from our streaming audience, you can take that now and then I want to give an opportunity to our audience here in the studio. I do have an interesting question from a course participant on a different topic who just chatted it in. His name is Paul Frankman. He's a social studies teacher from Ohio and he wants to know what's the current status of the military press. He is thinking about World War II more than the Civil War but it makes a lot of sense. You know, in the 20th century, the official military press, Stars and Stripes, the public communication effort in the Cold War, all of that was very important. He wants to know if any of it exists now and if it's relevant at all and how important it is and so perhaps, you know, Tom might take the lead on that but anyone could comment on it and Jeff, you might have some insight as well. The private sector has provided a whole new array of privately owned military focused journals. So at the same time, the Pentagon's own internal official media really only serves internal DoD. Stars and Stripes is a bit of a hybrid. It has some government money, some advertising. It's supposed to be editorially independent which causes a lot of problems because they do some very important, hard hitting stuff. At the same time, Stars and Stripes in an era of the internet is sort of a failing business model and they are wrestling with, you know, as the troops come home from Iraq or Afghanistan, they're back in garrison or they have hometown papers, does Stars and Stripes really matter anymore? So that kind of media is going through the same struggle and evolution that the rest of us are going through. You know, to pick up on that, you know, Stars and Stripes was very important. I remember when I was an officer, of course, this was the era when we were a deployed army. We had, for example, when I was a young officer, nearly 300,000 American soldiers in Europe. We have only a tiny fraction of that. And the daily newspaper was Stars and Stripes. So as Tom Coley points out, not only are the soldiers coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan, we've seen over the last couple of decades US military pulling his footprint all the way back from overseas. So the business model dies because the readership is now reading the local newspaper at Fort Hood and not reading the Stars and Stripes. Or military.com. Or military.exactly, military.com. All of the services also had their own press. You know, there's the Army Times, the Navy Times. And I think people confused. The Stars and Stripes. I was just going to say that you're exactly right. Those are private. Though people often confuse those as well as the Stars and Stripes, as Tom pointed out, as being pulling mouthpieces when they're not. They're private. And there's been numerous times when what's been put out in the Army Times has really aggravated, I can tell you, the senior leadership of the United States Army. And I dare say probably the same thing held for the Navy and the Air Force. I know of several instances when I was in Europe for many, many years where Stars and Stripes, as Tom said, would publish from very hard-pitting things that were not necessarily popular with the commanders abroad. Particularly stories by soldiers or letters of the editor by soldiers. But at times, those got things changed. Now on top of that, for deployed Army, of course, a lot of the important things were really AFN TV and AFN radio. Were very key and essential. I remember when we first arrived in Iraq the first time, the only thing we had was Radio Baghdad, the voice of peace in English, which was interesting to listen to. But over time now you have the AFN radio networks and TV networks, which are run by the Pentagon. But the individual soldier deployed in those places are very important just to get the news and sports and those kind of things that the average person listens to radio or watches TV wants to see. Any other questions from the streaming map before I turn to the audience? Let's go to the audience. Let's go to the audience. The only thing I would ask you to do is please stand up so I can hear you pretty well and also identify who you are and what organization you come from. We'll start with this lady right here in the second row. Hi, Leandra Bernstein, Ria Novosti. I have this problem in talking about the American press where sometimes the term freedom of the press is treated like a punchline to a joke. So when I talk to certain people about freedom of the press in the United States, they laugh. And just in dealing with the crisis now in Ukraine, the lines that have gone out about Russia, it seems as though in foreign coverage, US coverage of foreign crises, we take a perspective and turn it into fact. So the common line on, say, Vladimir Putin is that he is an authoritarian tyrant. You're gonna, you're going to be hard-pressed to find a media outlet that does not. Could we get to a question? I just want to understand how you treat that, the difference between an American perspective, which may not actually be in the American interest, and taking other nations' perspective into consideration when you're reporting. Okay, and then we'll take that on in terms of, or do we adopt too much of an American perspective? Are we too ethnocentric in our reporting, take the issues that say, oh, the Ukraine, for example, and the recent crisis? Well, one thing, just having come from the Associated Press, they labor over every word in every story to make sure that there aren't value judgments either personal or national value judgments going into the pieces, because they're reaching up to two billion people all over the planet, and so you have to make sure that they're reflecting the facts, not your point of view. So we'll have long debates over words like dictator, or authoritarian, and I've gotten memos where they've said, we have now decided that we can no longer refer to ex-leader in this way. You must use the neutral term this, and that came from either a reader or an editor somewhere in the process going, hey, I've noticed that this phrase is cropped up in our reporting, and it shouldn't be there. So I mean, that kind of process is going on all the time, even though you may not be aware of it. And the New York Times is a very clear institutional system in place to deal with this. We are fortunate enough because of our size and our reach. We have a Moscow Bureau. So Vladimir Putin has a way of getting his exact words portrayed to the American people in that we cover his speeches in press conferences live on the ground. Vladimir Putin speaks to the readers of the New York Times and therefore to the American public. We have people both in Eastern Ukraine and Western Ukraine on the ground at great personal risk and at great expense talking to people there, their voices in real time. And yes, we do cover the government view back here. So I think any of those individual threads may be unsatisfactory, but I think if you weave together all of the threads of the New York Times coverage of Putin and the Ukraine crisis, you get a very rich tapestry. Still a little bit. Thanks. My name is Justin Lynch. I'm with New America. This is a great panel, and I apologize, but I have two questions. The first one is there's been a criticism of the Obama administration that the most secretive administration in a while. But Jay Carney, he's responded that if you look at the front page of the New York Times, there are tons of stories that they don't want on the front page. So how would you respond to that? And the second? We like that. But I mean, do you think his response is fair? And the second is that as we move towards a model where we have more stringers and more freelancers, how can we keep the objectivity and those filters that you were talking about in the reporting? I'll take the second. Look, every president feels that he and someday she is the one that the New York Times and AP and CBS pick on the most. They should simply pick up the phone and call the previous occupant of the White House. We are an equal opportunity critic. We go after all administrations with the same vigor and enterprise on behalf of keeping all of you educated about what the government is doing in your name with your tax dollars representing you. The one kind of cultural difference that I've noticed, and I need to be careful because it's not perfect, Republican administrations seem to view this. Yes, they get angry. They don't like the stories. But they sort of seem to view it as the natural order of things. Sheepdog and wolf, right? They don't hate each other. The sheepdog is protecting the sheep and the wolf is hungry. It's not that they don't like it. It's just the way they're designed. Democrats seem to have drunk their own Kool-Aid that the media is liberal, which we're not. And they somehow get angry that they feel we've betrayed them by writing tough stories. I just don't get that. You don't think a second. No, it comes in as well, this whole idea of how we change with stringers. Well, I started as a stringer slash freelancer for the first six or seven years of my career. So what I can tell you is there's generally none of the organizations I worked for had a way of indoctrinating me into their system, except for Voice of America. So I learned a lot of my early reporting sort of ethics, values, how to weigh sources from that bureau chief. But all of my work passed through editors. It passed through CBS radio editors, Washington Post editors, Baltimore Sun, San Francisco Chronicle. I would work for anyone if they paid me. And that's how I learned. And I see the same process happening with NAP. They've got in Afghanistan and in Islamabad, you've got this amazing and brave local staff, because they are representing what is perceived as an American organization, even though it's international, and they're going out into dangerous areas. And it's the editors, it's the internationally trained editors on the ground there who are working with them to train them. And it's also the folks back in Cairo and New York and DC getting their material. And over time, the advantage is the Kabul Bureau of AP, last I checked, it was just the local staff. We didn't have it staffed with an internationally trained person, because you've got pros there now who know what they're doing. The advantage to that for you as a reader, viewer, is that you are hearing from someone who didn't parachute from the outside and is explaining a culture to you that they have just learned. You're getting that local knowledge. So that can be a real force multiplier for a newsroom. And when I first came up in the business, that didn't seem to happen so much. I want to come back on it. And, Linda, for you as well, because how is the media then changing? I mean, you watched it across your career. And Tom, as well, with The New York Times, seems to me at least that back in the day, we had bureaus for CBS, The New York Times, various places around the world. Kimberly was in Jerusalem, for example. It seems to me those are now shrinking and becoming fewer in number. We're now depending more and more on the string or the person who's actually there, bring them in and get rid of them, the story moves on. We touched on this as well in terms of the impact of the internet and the blog. How do you think of the media as changing with some of these aspects, particularly as we think about covering, sadly, future wars? Well, to give you an example, when I started on the Cronkite News, we told Vietnam was the big story every day. And we would tell you today's story, and we would show you footage from two or three days ago. It had to be developed. It had to be satelliteed into the United States. And then we got videotape. And videotape, you didn't have to develop. So there was a delay, but not as much of a delay. And then in the first Gulf War, I was the executive producer of the weekend news in Sunday morning. And we'd had an 11 o'clock newscast. And I remember sitting in the control room because we had a transmitter on a flatbed truck. And sitting in the control room while they found the footprint of the satellite. And suddenly you saw American troops walking in Kuwait. And we'd come a long way, baby. And now, of course, with the Arab Spring, it's instantaneous. The question is, how do you know what you see as right? And NBC had a problem a few weeks ago I read about. I'm not citing them in particular. We were all vulnerable to these things. Robert Angle, who's a great reporter, their Middle Eastern reporter, used footage. And he said he couldn't date it. Well, it turns out it was footage that was from a year ago. And it's covering footage. We call it B-roll. It's just the routine footage that we have. How do you know? One of the dangers that we have is that we have all this footage. How do you know what you're seeing is true. You can make footage be anything you want. And again, the Times told about the footage from Africa, those kids that were taken by that group. How did you know this footage was real? And the reporter was very careful to say, we haven't verified it yet. We're working on it. And how do you verify footage? Well, there are companies now that can look at digital footage and tell whether it's been doctored in any way. You get sources. And you triple check. So what you put out is true. I mean, it's a lot more work. But it takes time. And it takes time. I have to play professor again. So that's a perfect example of how technology had the same impact in the Civil War. They didn't have satellites. And they didn't have cell phone cameras. But they had the telegraph. And the telegraph sent instant communication in a way that they were unused to and created all kinds of problems with how to vet things and how to understand. And they used to have this standard tag line that would run under a lot of stories, especially from the battlefront, which said important if true, which seems to me to be a motto of journalists in any era. Important if true. Tom, they come to you because I want you to know I'm a life law subscriber at New York Times. Like Kimberly, I enjoy nothing more than a big cup of coffee in the Sunday in New York Times. One of my favorite things. I reserve my Sundays for that. But yours is the most traditional of all, in some ways, news media. I mean, going back to the pamphleteers as you rightly pointed out, or the early press in the colonial era. How does the Times, which is perhaps the pre-eminent American newspaper, dealing with this changing and involving instantaneous news, bureaus abroad, how is the Times dealing with that change, particularly as we talk about covering conflict? Well, sure. Before this meeting, I asked if we had any audio-visual tools. And all I have is my tie, which is dinosaur skeletons. It's a Father's Day present from my sons. That's how they view me. But I like to wear it because it's also the business model for print media. It's a constant reminder that we're all just waiting to become prehistoric. So the challenge facing the New York Times and all of what I say with pride is the mainstream media is finding a business model that allows us to continue doing the kind of sweeping, broadly based, reporting full of integrity and checks and counterchecks, but still make money at it. The print edition is a wonderful thing. It's not dead yet. But we are looking at new platforms. And our goal is to get New York Times quality reporting to an ever-growing number of consumers through platforms that they are more comfortable with. So the internet is important. Your phone is important. Everything. And so we're coming up with all these new apps and programs and subscription services to get Times quality work in ways other than ink on dead tree. Now I'm at The Daily Beast, which is TheDailyBeast.com. It only exists online. There is a phone app, but not yet an iPad app. But it relies on amazing pictures. The top five stories on the site will come up on your phone, and they will automatically flash through them so that you get a couple seconds looking at each one. So it's like, oh, I've got to see what that is. You almost have to catch it. So it's designed to be those headlines that are provocative to get you to read that article. And the photograph that's provocative. The other thing that The Daily Beast encourages its contributors to do is to go out on television and radio to talk about their stories to drive people to the site. And that becomes the business model to get the name out, especially since The Daily Beast is so new. It was started by Tina Brown to be sort of a news version of Vanity Fair in her early iteration. And it's, you know, the past couple years, it merged with Newsweek. Then they parted because Newsweek was losing a lot of money. And so the model is still fighting to become profitable. But that's the strength of The New York Times is they still have their old readership that likes to hold a newspaper, but they're also getting the young crowd in with these new apps. I'm curious as to, so Linda, what's going to happen to the 6.30 PM network newscasts? Because nobody I know watches them. People of a certain generation watch them, and will continue to watch them. But we also have a website, and we're exploring ways of doing constant news digitally. We're caught in this bind as well. And I'm sure that people ask what the future's going to be. And anybody who can tell you doesn't know what they're talking about. But it's evolving into something where five years from now we'll have a new system of getting the news. It's already, when I started, Walter Cronk, I got 35% of the audience. There were three networks. Now all three networks get about 20 or 20, all three get 20% of the audience. I mean, it's already so fragmented. And it will continue to fragment more, but there'll probably always be a place for that. The mornings have become much more important. Why? Because that's where they make money. And if you can up the ratings in the morning, CBS revamped its morning broadcast. And it's now hard news primarily. And it's done very well. But the time of day will change, and the emphasis will change. But I think there'll always be a, for people who want it, maybe not at 6.30, maybe at 7. And it'll be even in a smaller audience, because you'll be watching, tuning in as you want to catch up on the news. It's worth just for teachers and students putting that business model problem into historical perspective real quick. So in the 19th century, the parties paid for newspapers. When a newspaper editor needed money, Lincoln gave them a job. So the editor of the Philadelphia newspaper that supported the administration was also the secretary of the Senate. And that was the relationship. In the 20th century or beginning in the late 19th century, independent commercial newspapers relied on advertising. And that's what Tom and Kimberly and Linda are talking about. The advertising revenues are drying up as the audience is shrinking. And that's why we're facing this crisis in media in the 21st century. We don't know what's going to replace it. But I think as a historian you know that change is inevitable. And these things always evolve in ways that create new opportunities at the same time that they eliminate old ways. Let me wrap it up. We've got only a few minutes left. Let me wrap up with the following question. That is, you know, we certainly venerate Abraham Lincoln as one of our greatest presidents. The military venerates certain iconic figures from the past, whether it's Washington or whether it's Grant or Lee or MacArthur or Eisenhower or Patton. I'm just curious from the panelists perspective, what journalists passed or present from their profession? Do they venerate and why do they venerate him? You know, I noticed when I went to work for CBS News, for example, in the CBS radio newsroom in New York was one of the original studios where Walter Cronkite would broadcast from. And on the wall over one of the control panels is a small cutout of the wall because the wall's had some soundproofing put in it. And in that small cutout, which is only maybe a foot square, is a picture of the map of Vietnam because that was a map that set behind Walter Cronkite for all those years as he reported the evening news and we talked about the number of killed in Vietnam, what was going on in Vietnam. So that sort of iconic piece of map is still there to remind journalists, in essence, what they think in a way what this is all about. So I'm gonna start with Linda and go down. What journalists passed or present do you sort of venerate from your profession and why do you venerate them? Edward Armoral, which is kind of why I got interested in television news. Walter, of course, Walter who came back and told what he saw in Vietnam and changed the tide of the war. Linda, can you explain for a 14-year-old or 15-year-old student why Edward Armoral is so important, so venerated in journalism? And the same for Cronkite because neither one of those names are familiar. Yeah, that's scary, isn't it? Murrow was the first great journalist of broadcasting. And he went where he saw a story and he reported it and he didn't favor anybody. And this was a time before there was much regulation and he said what he thought. There's a danger to that because he was extremely powerful. Now supposing he thought something and talked about it and we didn't agree with it. So I always saw that danger as well. Walter Cronkite was probably the most neutral person on air that has been. And people identified with him in those days is Uncle Walter and people turned on the CBS Evening News to be reassured every night. So when he went to Vietnam after Tet and he saw what was really going on there and he came back and said we ought to get out of Vietnam. We're losing a lot of lives and it isn't worth it. When President Johnson saw that, he said if I've lost Walter Cronkite, I've lost the country and he was that powerful. Again, a scary thing that he was that powerful but getting out of the war seemed to be a good thing so it was a good power. So those are my two. Jeff, you have to indulge me one quick follow-up on behalf of all the teachers in the course since you knew him so well. Can you tell us one personal detail or anecdote about Walter Cronkite that can help some classroom teacher bring him to life for students? Well, I... Was he different behind the camera than he was on camera? He was very funny. He used to give a Christmas party and he had a player piano and he used to sing with the piano and sing songs. I was the first woman producer on the evening news and at this Christmas party, the first time I went, my name was Linda, he said, well, hello, Mary, how are you? And I didn't dare correct him. And then we were out in California. We were interviewing both candidates for the Democratic primary. In those days it was Humphrey and McGovern and in between we had a dinner break and so I was charged with taking Walter to dinner and I knew he loved Trader Vicks. So I called Trader Vicks and I made the reservation in my name and so we arrived and we're standing in line and thank God the major D came out and saw Walter Cronkite and brought him into the restaurant. Otherwise we'd still be standing there. He never said anything. So he was a real journalist. He had a sense for news. He was really great. Any reporter who wants to cover American military forces deployed in combat has to read Ernie Pyle, the great World War II correspondent who died in his coverage. His essays are full of hometown voices and great color and great sort of understanding of the common soldier's life. But I think there's just as much great conflict coverage today. I have three times colleagues, John Burns, Chris Chivers and Dexter Filkins. Dex is now with The New Yorker who at great personal risk and elevated the craft because not only did they accept the risks and have a great reporter's eye, but they're also beautiful riders. They take you to places where you've never been and instead of shouting, a lot of war correspondents shout, these guys know how to draw you in with the whisper. Anthony Shadid too. Anthony Shadid. Before I turn to Kimberly, I have to comment. I had the great pleasure of visiting Ernie Pyle's grave and it's interesting to know that Ernie Pyle, that famous war correspondent, is buried in a place called the Punch Bowl on the Isle of Oahu in Hawaii and he's surrounded by thousands of dead American soldiers from that conflict. The other book that I would recommend myself in thinking about Ernie Pyle's, it reminded me, would be the book Up Front by Bill Molden. Now Bill Molden was a cartoonist, not really, some might say a journalist, but his cartoons told stories that far outweighed perhaps the amount of ink that went into a cartoon. Like I can even remember as a youngster reading Bill Molden's book Up Front and got really that sense of what it was like to be an individual soldier, but Kimberly. Real fast, just have to explain to you Anthony Shadid was New York Times and before that Washington Post correspondent who used his Arab heritage and knowledge of the language to show Americans and beyond a picture of Iraq and the Middle East that had so many more layers than I could ever access or most journalists could ever access and really made those people human for all of us. But the two examples, AP's E.D. Letter who sort of barged her way into the Vietnam War even though her editor said no, no, women don't cover things like that. And she's a survivor, she's covering the UN now. So I respect her bravery and her longevity and my personal example, CNN's Christiane Amanpour watching her in war zones, watching her ask tough questions and then watching her survive and transform her career using all of her past war experience now to put leaders on the spot and ask them tough questions. It's the kind of journalists I've always wanted to be. Well, this has been an enormous, great pleasure and these journals are some of my personal favorites. So I've got to acknowledge and thank them for taking time out this morning for this particular presentation. And Matt, I'll pass it back to you to wrap up this wonderful panel. Thank you, it was wonderful. It was a learning experience for me. I want to thank everybody for participating and Jeff for moderating. Those of you who are watching this who want to follow up as teachers or students on what the panelists talked about, we've created a Storify essays about these panels that are available online at our website, storify.com slash h divided. That's the house divided project at Dickinson College. So thank you for watching and I hope you'll extend that conversation online at our Storify site. Thank you.