 I don't know about you, but I'm just really depressed now for watching that. Good morning and thank you so much, everyone at ITBS and the US Institute for Peace. It is my pleasure and my absolute honor to be here with you this morning. With this clip, we just saw how Ellsberg turned to one of a limited number of media outlets, The New York Times, to first release the Pentagon Papers. Likewise, trusting its reporting and analysis, the public relied on The Times and a handful of others for the rest of the story. How times have changed. Yet while the professional media is retrenching, new media has exploded. Under the technological and economic pressures generated by cable and the internet, a typical viewer now confronts hundreds, even thousands of potential sources for news. And the stiff competition for audiences means the newspaper business is shrinking, foreign news bureaus are closing and reporting budgets are being cut. So how do we fix this? How can we see this unusually dynamic, some say transformational moment in the media landscape to make the new global news business a potent force for conflict management in the world? And is this antithetical to the idea that journalism must be objective and neutral? We've got the perfect mix of panelists, so let's jump right in and meet them. Frank, since that says no, made his reputation as an Emmy Award-winning journalist, commentator and documentary filmmaker during a 21-year career at CNN. Currently, he's the director of the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University, where he teaches documentary filmmaking and journalism ethics. After her time with CNN, Rebecca McKinnon founded Global Voices, a network now comprising 300 citizen journalists and bloggers stretching across over 100 nations. At present, she's on sabbatical from the University of Hong Kong, where she teaches online journalism and conducts research on the internet, China and censorship. As a journalist, Dan Frumpkin's career parallels the rise of new media, beginning as a reporter for the Winston-Salem Journal, he shifted to online journalism in the late 1990s. Most recently, he was the editor of WashingtonPost.com before joining the Huffington Post as a senior Washington correspondent. Marvin Cowell is one of those people that need no introduction, a career spanning 30 years of award-winning reporting for CBS and NBC News, most prominently as the host of NBC's Meet the Press. In 2006, he received the National Press Club's Fourth Estate Award for his contributions to the news profession. Riz Khan is a recognized face worldwide following extensive careers with the BBC, CNN and now Al Jazeera English. He hosts Riz Khan, a show broadcast live on Al Jazeera English, in which viewers from around the world question world leaders, newsmakers and celebrities directly. Please join me in welcoming our panel. Wherever you want. Well, we're basically going to have a conversation, so everyone feel free to interrupt if you feel compelled to speak. And we are also going to be relying on questions from our audience as well as our online audience, so we'll also be watching out for those. I guess I wanna start with, let's ask you Frank, listening to Sheldon's presentation and watching the Pentagon Papers. You know, for my own personal experience, I remember reporting the Iraq War at the height of the war, and I don't mean 2003, I mean 2006 when ethnic cleansing was taking its toll and lots of media were pulling out because of the security costs, it was so dangerous to be there. And the question was, why are you still there? And for me, it was very simple. If we're not there, then people rely on messages from the military, which had its own message to sell, or the insurgents, which also have their own way of putting out their messages. Is that still the job that we have to do today, or what do you basically say to your students these days? Good luck. No, I think that your question, the clip and Sheldon's comments suggest the layers of engagement that we as journalists, as communicators, as these practitioners of these new technologies have. At the first level, we have to just convey information. We have to take people to see and learn with their own eyes and ears. There has to be that level of detachment which doesn't always exist. So at the most basic level, they know. They know what's happening, the good, the bad, and it will be the ugly that comes first in a situation like that. News is not, as we know, and we've said a thousand times about the planes that land. News is about the planes that crash. And that first bias, that bias, some see it as a bias toward negativity, but it's also a bias towards what's unusual is what will always come first. But the question then becomes, and this is where it gets exceptionally challenging in the middle of an example like yours, is can you step out of your own experience as a journalist, traditional or non-traditional, to take people in some unexpected place? We saw very little of that, for example, in this country as we marched up to the Iraq war where people, reporters or others, were prepared to challenge the government's version of events because it was then somehow deemed inappropriate or unpatriotic. It would have been inconceivable risk for, I think, an Al Jazeera journalist to stand up, and we've got any number of examples of this in any media, to stand up and say, the Arab public or the Iraqi street has brought this on itself. So you go against the narrative, you go against the fundamental narrative, especially when you're marching up toward conflict and war with great difficulty. And that's what Ellsberg's story, I think, illustrates so brilliantly, what it takes in the midst of a war or in the midst of a conflict to stand up and say, hey, it's completely different than you see. And going against that national tide of nationalism and conflict where people may see it as existential. And we'll argue that compellingly. I think, Riz, I think one of the criticisms of particularly Al Jazeera, Arabic, is, and I know from watching it myself, it can be quite emotional. And not as sort of, I guess, objective and impartial as Al Jazeera English is, for example. How do you balance that? And what's your position on that? First, I can't speak for Al Jazeera Arabic. I personally don't speak Arabic, so I can't even watch it with a true degree of judgment. I'm just glad that people don't run for the doors when I say I'm from Al Jazeera, which is a changing mood here nowadays. It's interesting because there's a tendency to judge channels, judge programming without really knowing much about it. One of the guys from the Arabic channel who helped set up the Washington Bureau said to the Western media one time, he said, look, the difference is you show the missiles being fired, we also show them landing. And I think that was a shock for a lot of people that there could be another point of view. I always ask, what's the media trying to achieve? And the thing is that I was trained at the BBC and it's sort of been beaten into me. And I feel, to some degree, a dying breed now. We were taught as broadcast journalists, we weren't there to editorialize or even really to comment. We were there to just broadcast the facts and the information and by doing it in a fair and balanced manner and making sure we checked our sources and validated the information, that we were actually doing something that people could then use and make their judgments on. The thing is that the media's changed very much now and it's become very much, even the broadcast media has become very much a commentating vehicle. And that bothers me a lot. It sort of goes against the grain of my training. But as I say, I'm a dying breed and the pressure's on, you know, when we have a guest on, if they're a high-powered guest with, you know, we hear words in the newsroom, like we need to hammer them. Well, what does that mean? You know, we need to hammer them. I'm not there to hammer anyone, I'm there to actually get some facts and figures out. So I feel it's a difficult position now for journalists if they want to stay very much middle of the road. It's interesting is when I arrived, I arrived late last night from a trip across the other side of the country and I arrived and I had two books on my desk, which I unpacked. Letters to my torturer and the most dangerous place, Pakistan's Lawless Frontier. MTRs I know, he's a good journalist, he's very much a respected person who contributes to our channel to CNN. The thing is, when I looked at these, I thought, well, what's the, you know, people walking past the book shop, what are they seeing? They're seeing brown men with beards, swallowy-looking people waving guns and chanting. Here at the dark face of, again, a person looks like very much, you know, oppressed and so on. The thing about it is, this sets a tone. I think, you know, the whole point of this gathering this morning was to look at media as a way to try to promote a different point of view, to maybe look at something positively. And so I find myself wondering, you know, when we have things like this, and their intention is probably very good, but what are we doing? What is the media trying to achieve? And from print to broadcast and so on. So I think people, going back to your question, I know I've gone on a bit here. But going back to your question, channels function differently in terms of the way they deliver stuff. I mean, traveling around Europe, I watch an Austrian television channel. I remember watching the downfall of the Ceausescu regime in Austria. And it was interesting watching how stoic and serious the presenters were, like this. I couldn't understand properly what was being said, but it was very flat. Go to Italy, and it's like, it could be the smallest thing, but they're waving their arms and screaming and shouting. So the difference is, when you watch Al Jazeera Arabic, you're watching a culture as well as the content. So this idea of it being emotional, these guys are shouting and screaming at each other, hurling abuse, and then off camera, it's Habibi Habibi. And they see each other the next day and they go back through it again. It becomes a show. So when you ask about balance, the emotion is different from the balance. Right, right. I guess that question I can ask Dan is, well, if we're blurring the line between fact and commentary, how can people find the truth? And that's a very small, light question. Yeah, really, thank you, thank you. You know, I think that there's a, I'm a huge fan of traditional journalism, and I think that it's extraordinarily important for us to continue doing that sort of work. I also think it's potentially mistake for us to get too misty-eyed about journalist's objectivity and the great role that that traditional media has played in the past. I mean, nobody has done a better job of propagandizing and rallying countries for a war than the so-called traditional media. And I think Riz's point about that traditional media tends to cover the missiles launching and not the missiles landing, I think is a very, very good one. I think, although I'm very concerned about the decline of traditional journalism, and whenever a foreign bureau closes, I think it's a little tragedy. On the other hand, I'm a trendist internet optimist. I really believe that when it comes to either the media or conflict resolution, and certainly the media and conflict resolution, more voices is better. There will be dislocation, there will be extremism, but more voices is better. And right now, for instance, when it comes to international news, I mean, there is more information out there available to more people in more different ways and in ways where they can contribute and they can participate than ever before. So, you know, and I just can't help but think that in some places we don't have enough, if not opinion, at least an analysis, honest analysis of what's going on. I mean, I firmly believe, for instance, that if the blogosphere and the Twitter sphere and what have you had been around just a few years earlier, I think we might not have gone to war in Iraq. I think during the run-up to war in Iraq, you know, the MSM coverage was terrible and if there had been a blogosphere, we would have been able to serve as a megaphone for what little excellent journalism there was. I mean, there were some tremendous stories written by Knight Ritter, now McClatchy, and a few other journalists. And I think the blogosphere could have really given them attention, the blogosphere could have given attention to the voices of protest from the streets and from the Senate floor that weren't heard. So, I think we need, I'm just feeling like the more voices of the better. Just a brief introduction by the way, traditional media, in Britain there's a separation between the broadcast and the print media. The print media can editorialize, can comment, and people know when they pick up a paper where it's coming from, but the broadcast media was different, so in traditional media, when you say traditional media, in Britain there was distinct roles, yeah. I wanted to ask a question of Marvin Cowell about the traditional media and given everything that Dan has just said about if we'd had the blogosphere to help us prevent the war compared to what we just saw in that clip. And also, is it really, I keep coming back to this, is it really our job to promote anything, whether it's peace or war? That's a marvelous question. Thank you very much. Is it our job to promote peace or war? My answer to that is no. I have a great problem with definitions. It is the easiest thing, it is my heart that speaks when I say I wish that the media writ large, could do big things to produce more peaceful solutions to problems all over the world. I wish as a result of the work of the media, more kids were not hungry and more kids could read. I wish that were the case. I wish that in the world of the blogosphere, there would be more knowledge, right? More knowledge than there is today in the blogosphere. My problem has to do with definition. I am not sure as a product of the past. I am not sure what media is. I haven't been sure since the first time it was used to describe me, which was in October of 1969 by the Vice President of the United States, Spiro Agnew, who said that these people from the Northeast part of the United States, part of the media, they're this strange foreign group. And what were they doing here? And he was the first one to suggest that journalism was part of this broader world of the media. Today, truthfully, I don't know what the media is. The media could be what it is that a private organization puts out and says is information. I also would like to believe that there is a distinct value and understanding of what journalism is. And that journalism may be a part of the media, but it is not a substitute for the media. It's not the same thing. So my plea at this point is that as we rush forward and believe that the new world of new technology is gonna bring us peace and freedom and prosperity, that we understand what it is that we're talking about and that we do not dismiss too casually the value of a reporter knowing a language, going to a country, covering a war, understanding what it's all about, rather than just picking stuff up from the APY or from Reuters and just giving their opinion. That to me is a greater danger than anything that we face today. Thank you, thank you. Thank you. Rebecca, how do you manage all of your citizen journalists and what do you tell them, especially the ones who are in conflict zones? We don't manage them. Okay. Global Voices Online started really as just a platform to aggregate and curate voices from around the world that in 2004, my co-founder Ethan Zuckerman and I were seeing that there was this proliferation of people blogging around the world and that people in the English-speaking world weren't really noticing a lot of these people. And people had all kinds of different motivations. One example is a guy in Bahrain named Mahmoud who started blogging in English because he was sick and tired of the mainstream media portraying all Muslims as crazy people. And his point was there's this kind of more silent majority of people who want to just go about their lives as everyone else and he felt that that was not the image. The Muslim society that he lived day by day was not the Muslim society. He felt the international media was portraying. So he started speaking and there were people writing online for any number of reasons and we just started curating this and inviting people from various regions to curate the conversation coming from their regions. And really the project as it has evolved, we've now got an advocacy arm that we've got bloggers who are translating content back and forth between over a dozen different languages and that everything that our project does was initiated by the people involved. Now there are a set of common values. We sort of have a global voices manifesto which is that everybody has the right to speak and be heard. We have a moderation system that doesn't allow hate speech but what is hate speech and what is not, often that gets worked out in our internal discussion lists but it's not a central editorial team who says you will do this and you will not do that. It's the community that really debates what the boundaries should be. But I'd like to make a number of points just in response to some of the things that have been said. One has to do with the purpose of media and I would really like to echo Marvin's point about is the purpose of media or journalism or whatever you want to call it, anything in particular. And global voices, we actually are not registered in the United States or registered in the Netherlands as a non-profit and one of the reasons is that our community we're very concerned that we would be perceived as being used by the US government even if we weren't. And so there's a tremendous, tremendously strong feeling amongst our community that we need to have an independent voice and also a very strong feeling that voices that advocate violence even though they might make you uncomfortable, sometimes they need to be translated and explained and that there needs to be, that you need to have a discussion around them rather than say we're only going to link for instance to Iranian bloggers that promote a certain point of view and not Iranian bloggers that promote another point of view because there are times when you just need to have that information out there and discussed. And so that if we had a very specific agenda, there's concern that that could lead in directions that might actually stifle discussion. I guess the other issue too relates to how do you even define peace and how do you define hate and the whole problem with setting standards for media globally is very difficult. And sometimes, I mean I worked in China for a long time and the Chinese government actually uses this line that it's the role of journalist who promotes stability and peace as an excuse to censor voices that might express sympathy with Tibetan independence or autonomy for instance and surrounding the riots in Tibet and the riots in Xinjiang which is in China's far northwest, actually suppression of independent opinions that might be advocating solutions that are different than what the Chinese government advocated was justified in the name of peace. So we have to be very, very careful about where we take this and that different kind of authorities define this very differently. And I guess one other point is as well, despite having created or helped to foster and now no longer being able to control or trying to control an international bloggers community, I'm actually not a cyber utopian. I don't think that just because we have the internet that there's going to be more world peace, that people are going to be more enlightened or that there's necessarily going to be more democracy. But we've seen a shift that we need to deal with. We're not going to be going back to the pre-internet age. And as actually one of our board members Rosenthal Alves who's at the Night Center for the Americas in Texas likes to put it, the media environment today, so in the past it was a desert. And so we built institutions and ways of managing scarcity and a whole economy around information, a whole sort of a set of politics, political discourse that was all around information scarcity. Then came the rain. We're now in a rainforest. There's a whole new set of complex organisms, all kinds of things that we've never seen, never heard of. Some are poisonous, some are predatory, some are medicinal, some are just silly. You know, it's a completely new environment. And so figuring out how to build a civilization within this environment of excess and overabundance and just organic growth exponentially is a completely different thing. And it requires thinking about institutions differently, thinking about political discourse differently, perhaps even thinking about sovereignty and legitimacy differently. I mean it really, the equation has changed tremendously. But just, you know, I think there's a lot of, you know, there are all the slides and I'll stop in a moment. There are all the slides of the hate speech that the internet enables. Certainly that's the case. And you know, in this new environment, if we don't build a civilization and if citizens don't take it upon themselves and in global voices it's kind of one community of people who are just taking the initiative to engage because they're concerned about where different things are headed. If we don't encourage to take matters into their own hands and to speak out and to try and form new kinds of communities of discourse, find ways to speak whether it's popular or unpopular, we will have a Hobbesian state of nature in which life is nasty, perdition short. I mean, that's a possible outcome. And so, yeah, we're only at the very beginning of figuring out where to go. Frank. Yeah, I could just jump in on a few things. First of all, I'd like to thank the Chinese for at least being explicit about what they do. I recall a trip that I was on not long ago and I went to the Shanghai Media Group, which is a large media group in Shanghai and they were showing us their incredible new facilities. Amazing studio, amazing technology, amazing new staff and then we went down the amazing hallway where they had amazing brass plaques on each door, each door, both in Chinese characters and in English, which was a really arresting moment when we got to censorship room number one and censorship room number two. So at least we knew what we were dealing with. But knowing what we're dealing with, I think is part of the challenge now just as everybody has said because the world has changed so much. So while we are sitting here and Newsweek is looking for its new owners because its readership has plummeted and it's advertising and I just flipped through the other day and if you look at the advertising and the latest issue of Newsweek, unless you're of a certain age and like what the pharmaceuticals are offering or of a certain age and have anything left to invest or like cigars, there are no ads in that magazine that apply to you and that's one of the reasons it's on the block. As we sit here and CNN is dealing with numbers that have gone down 40% and rebounded a little bit, I use my media with my smartphone to send a text to Steve Grove who is the head of News and Politics for YouTube to ask him how many views there are a day on YouTube. Over a billion video views a day, he messages back in real time, a billion a day. The problem is what they're looking at on YouTube is Charlie bit my finger. For those of you who've seen Charlie bit my finger has been viewed by more than 170 million times. What is it? Oh, it's a wonderful video. It's a wonderful video. How many of you have seen Charlie bit my finger? Look at that. Now if we can have you all watching peace, we can get someplace. So Charlie bit my finger is this little kid with his little brother on his lap. He's about four years old or so. His brother puts his finger in his mouth, he bites down. The little kid's face, Charlie bit my finger. And 170 million people watch it, our views, I don't know. So what are we dealing with here? We're dealing with a fundamentally different world. It's not gathering to see Walter Cronkite anymore at 630. And your global voices or the project I'm working on called Planet Forward which is done out of the university where we are also working with user-generated content is this richly uneven, unpredictable place where the rules are entirely different, not recognized, not followed. And the things that draw the eyeballs tend to be the sensational, the weird, the funny, the outrageous, and they will tend to be just as you tend to have people who show up at a town hall meeting in New England or at a city council meeting someplace, the people who are the angriest and the loudest who get the most attention. That's human nature. So when Sheldon and Richard and everybody else say how do we encourage peace through media, let us recognize first that we're up against both human nature and up against the media plural that we're talking about here as these rules are changing fundamentally. Start with that to find the challenge and then maybe we can fill in the blanks. Actually one of the prime issues we have is that the internet is still primarily an English language medium. And that means that the information that's on the internet is primarily from an English language perspective, which means, say, Western dominated. And that makes a big difference. I think once countries like China, India, Pakistan, the Middle East start to get their sort of grips on it, things might change. Because right now the biggest problem, and I think the first step in the media changing things, is to try to stop and think twice about the stereotyping that occurs. You know, it's kind of funny. I have a British passport. I was born in Yemen. I have a Pakistani last name. And I travel to some interesting far-flung places. So you can imagine the latex gloves come out every time I arrive at the airport. You really like the TSA, don't you? Actually, I don't have that much of a problem, except that my four-year-old daughter was put on a watch list. And she terrorizes my home, but she hasn't done anything to affect national security yet. So the stereotyping, they see the name Khan. First thing is, OK, one side, I get not just four Ss. I get so many Ss. I say I must be ugly, too, because you're pulling me aside so many times. But actually, one of the key things is the media tends to stereotype. And like I pointed out with these books, I mean, the book covers, there's a tendency to go down this easy path, especially in the day of talking heads TV and radio and analysis and commentating and so on. There's a tendency, a guy gets on a plane, attempts something like explosives, and suddenly you're analyzing it from every single perspective. And it's everyone's opinion. It's not really necessarily that factual. It's just purely opinion. And it's become a media circus. They say an expert is someone who has made all the mistakes possible in a very narrow field. We have a lot of those. They say a consultant is someone you give your watch to so they can tell you the time. This is what we've gone down that path. And on that note, we're going to take some questions from the audience. I ask that when you do, please stand up, identify yourself, and where you're from. We've got one at the back there. Hi, my name is Andy Grable. I'm from Decatur, Georgia. And my question is in reference to what I think was a watershed moment in the history of media last year during the Iranian elections where on Huffington Post and to a lesser degree, some other media outlets, we're seeing what appears to be really up to the minute postings and things that are coming through as they are taking place there. And this is coming from a society that does not have freedom of the press. And I'm wondering if you believe that this is something that we may see occurring more in societies where there is not this freedom. And also, how media can present this and also provide some thoughtful analysis for people that don't have context or a frame of reference for these events as they're unfolding. Yeah, that's a good question. I would like to take a crack at that. I think it's an excellent question, a very important one. And I think you're absolutely right that the next time we see last June in Iran, again, somewhere, it's going to be covered in roughly the same way. There are a couple of reasons for that. There were not in Iran journalists who were based there in order to cover that particular kind of an event, in order to cover anything. There were one or two mainstream journalists from the US there. There were not many. And so what we saw were the people holding up this kind of a device, the iPhone or iPad, taking a picture and then presenting it to the world. The tendency was to believe that that picture conveyed total reality. It sure conveyed part of the reality. But because we didn't have the other part, we didn't have the eyes to watch what was going on, the ears to hear what was going on, it was very difficult to put the picture into some kind of proper context. So it was exciting, but it might have been misleading in terms of creating an image larger, an image of rebellion larger than, in fact, was the case. So my sense is that a camera can create the environment or the reality of what it's pointed at. But somebody has to point the camera in the right direction. The camera itself is just an instrument. There has to be a brain behind it saying, what I'm pointing at is the story. It's really important. We don't know that. The camera, the iPad, iPhone, whatever these things are called. They were conveying what that person felt was centrally important to the story. But that person was not a journalist. And forgive me for going back to this central point. Under the banner of media, everyone has a voice. That voice may know what he or she is talking about, and may not, and we get an awful lot of opinion. I think you're absolutely right on that point. So we have to be careful about what we hear, what we see, and always, always for our common benefit, ask the question, who's directing the lens? Where is it all emerging? There has to be a head behind it. Without a brain, it's nothing. It's what Morrow in 1957 or eight called Only Wires and Lights in a Box. There's information in this perspective. That's really what it is. Let me jump in as the HuffPost guy. Yes, I agree, it was a very exciting moment. And actually, I arrived at HuffPost shortly after it happened, so I could take no credit whatsoever. But I think it was an extraordinary moment, and I think the information that we were able to gather through people media turned out to be of great value. And if I had to choose between what was created there and one mainstream journalists whose movements were limited, whose access was controlled by the government, whose perspectives were very old school, I would probably pick the Twitter version, thank you. What do you mean by old school? But I don't have to, but I don't have to make that choice, okay? I don't have to, I can get both. What I mean is looking at it from a perspective of, you know, of say, of the U.S. Oh, I don't know, that's what I'm asking you. What is old school? I mean, what are you trying to say that Cronk I didn't know what he was doing? That represented old school. What I'm saying is that what the HuffPost aggregation of these voices did was captured at the real drama and the real tragedy of what was going on in the streets. But I think the question is, how do you present context with that? You can, I mean, how do you present an explanation or perspective or even just some context of a spotlight? Okay, this is what's happening here alongside an unfolding 24-7 internet. I mean, what's the duration that Rebecca can talk about? Well, I mean, actually the other part of the gentleman's question, as I understood it, will just, you know, will this continue to be replicated, you know, to a larger and larger extent? And I think obviously the most ideal situation is you have the professional journalists and you have the citizen media. And you've got people who happen to be in places where the journalists aren't. And then, you know, you can get this synergy going and I think the best journalism these days happens when that synergy is at its fullest. But I wanna respond to something else about this Iran point, which is that there have been efforts actually to replicate what happened last year in Iran in more recent months and they have failed. And why is that? Because these regimes learn quickly. And the Iranian regime has figured out how to prevent that kind of, you know, quote unquote, Twitter revolution, which wasn't a revolution from happening again, they've made it very clear that people who appeared online with their faces recognizable, the Iranian government used crowdsourcing techniques to get other Iranian citizens to identify these people so that they could be arrested. And it's become very clear that the cell phone system is monitored and so on. And so it looks like we're not gonna have around two of the same kind of citizen media flowering that we had last year. And so I mean, this is one of the concerns is that we cannot assume that just because we have the internet authoritarian media controls or authoritarian regimes are gonna crumble. And you know, I'm writing a whole book that kind of deals with the fact that China is really exhibit A and many other regimes are learning how you actually survive as an authoritarian regime in the internet age. And so we need to be careful about being too triumphal about this situation. I remember during the Iran election, social media fallout. I don't know if anyone was on Facebook at the time. I'm guessing there were 350 million people, but there was a request that people put on their status status update to update your information to put your location down this Tehran to completely confuse the Iranian government. And everyone was doing it and passing it along as well. And I remember that was a big part of it. Yeah, I mean, if you're looking for ways to encourage conflict resolution and so on on the internet and you're trying to regulate things, I think regulating is the wrong way. I think however, working to try to make sure that the internet is as free and accessible as possible is essential because I'm less concerned about extremism than I am about tyranny and about totalitarian regimes clamping down on this. And especially, you know, it's ironic, but you know, we here in the States are getting a little bit concerned about the fact that we don't have internet privacy because all these marketing groups are able to harvest information about us. It's not threatening to us, but in the hands of the totalitarian regime, it's terrifying. Just a quick thought, yeah. I mean, I'm really one for free information. I think it's really important that there is the internet unregulated, that there are people have a chance to post what they want. I think it comes down to education. I think people have to know from the start and be brought up with the understanding that what's out there isn't filtered, that it's something that they have to learn to access judiciously because the tendency is to look at something and assume it's real just because it's out there. Something that's printed is real. Something that's broadcast or something that's posted is fact. And there's a tendency, especially with the younger generation, just quickly look for things and assume that everything they find. I went to an interesting lecture by a fellow called Julian Cher who sort of teaches how to use the internet. And he took us to a site. He said, okay, what do you make of this site? And it was a site about Dr. Martin Luther King. And he said, now read through this. And it starts off looking very, very much like it's a tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King. But as you start to go through, it starts to question a few things and very cleverly weaves its way to a point where it makes questioning his values, questioning and so on. It was actually set up by a neo-Nazi fascist group. And it's very easy for someone to be roped into that and then think, oh, well, wait a minute, you know, it's out there, it's real. It's very easy to be misled without education. So I think education's the key. I wanna come back to something that Marvin said because I think this is really the key. And when we think about the role that media play in peace or in hate or in anything else, and I agree this term media is now so big, so broad that we're talking about everything from YouTube to the Wall Street Journal. And last time I checked, they were not owned by the same organization. Although give it a week or two and it will be. But the first thing I think we need, and this is an endangered species, is information. I mean, just straight information. When I'd first joined CNN, and I don't know if this was still in place, we were literally told, and we told our reporters, do not start your live shot with the words I think. Not because we don't think you think, although that was assumed sometimes perhaps, but because your opinion, this is not about your opinion or your observation. You're welcome to that, and you certainly can say what it's striking about, but put it in an analytical, not an opinionated perspective. Watch how far you go with the interpretive nature because the first thing we need to provide people with is a fact base, an information base. The old nightline when Ted Koppel was on there started with a setup piece to provide the audience with the contextual information, that word again, so they could then assess the debate. One of the reasons I think CNN's crossfire devolved and was killed, and I think should be brought back under the right circumstances, was because there was no context to start, it was just, it became just a shout fest between two people who were screaming their opinion in quick little sound bites. If that's what, excuse me, Al Jazeera, Global Voices, opposingviews.com, if that's all we can generate, people will be confused. They will not have that place to go and share the sense of, ah, this is legitimate. This is, it's not gonna be the science, but something that we can do. So how do we do that? How do we make a distinction for people to understand? This is journalism and this is media. First thing is transparency. I mean, you literally, this is, upon it forward, what are we doing? We have students, we have scientists, we have others who upload their videos and their thoughts and their blogs. We have people who are on stage. That's a tiny little operation, but one of the rules we've got is, this is from our team. These are the rules that we follow when we gather our information. This is a more traditional approach. This is the blogosphere. This is, here's what, here's the running room people have here. You at least convey absolutely clearly the rules by which each of these constituents play. So people at least know what the framework, what the context is. The giveaway is adjectives. The BBC, we weren't even allowed to use adjectives. I mean, I remember being in a training at the BBC Radio Newsroom and saw one of the writers take a script up to an editor and it said, and he read it out. He said, the long running bloody civil war in Sri Lanka. He said, how many wars do you know that are not bloody? They took it out? They took out the word bloody. And that's the thing, adjectives are often giveaway. I've got a question here from Egypt and perhaps Marvin can tackle it first. Why didn't more journalists challenge the US government in the lead up to the Iraq war? How much time do we have? Well, very quickly, the United States after line 11 was caught up in an avalanche of patriotism. The United States had been attacked first time since Pearl Harbor and we simply had to do something. And journalism, journalists are also patriotic. And so there was no great desire, strong urge to confront your government with what it is that you thought was a different line. And people pull back and there was no question about that. Dan Rather spoke about fear. He used that word in the newsrooms of many, many organizations in the US. But we have to point out that there were people like Pinkers at the Washington Post who were doing very important stories that ended up on page 17, not on page one. I think the person who asked the question is right. It was not the greatest day of American journalism, but that turned around very quickly when the reality began to turn. I don't think that journalists are great adventurers, but they do go along with reality. And when reality shifts, they will shift. There is no silver lining in this story, Marvin. I'm sorry. Actually, in this very room about a year and a half ago, the Neiman Foundation for Journalism awarded its first IF Stone Award to John Walcott, who was the Washington Bureau Chief for McClatchy newspapers. And we had a very exciting discussion here about what happened. And fear was absolutely the issue. Journalists were afraid to call it like they saw it. And that's part of because of the corporate structures in which they worked. It's because of the political pressures under which they operate. It's because of the fear of losing access, which they had. It's because of the entire access journalism equation that cripples so many of our finest, smartest, most curious, and wonderful journalists. It was an absolute and complete failure. And that's why I consider it got a bad name, by the way. That's why, because it was the darling of me. We need to do a yes-but here, however. The yes-but is journalists may have done that, but they were not alone. And the voices that, though there were some, but the voices that they would typically convey were largely silent. I recall at the Washington Bureau here having a very partisan, very outspoken Democrat in for a background briefing, who just flat out told us, as we approach the 2002 election, we are telling our members not to go after the president. This is not the time to raise these questions. So while there were voices of doubt, and while this was, by no means, journalism's finest hour, I think it's very important to keep in mind that part of our job, a big part of our job, is to reflect the larger debate and the other voices out there. And they were many of them silent. We knew better. And yes, the political institutions failed us, but there were voices. There were senators who got on the floor and made very moving speeches that were not covered at all. It was an absolute intellectual decision on the part of the general public. There were also voices from outside the United States of America who were raising serious questions and they were not reflected either. We have a question from Colin in Illinois. Can we begin to speak of objectivity in a conflict-ridden world? And Rebecca, perhaps you wanna take that? Yeah, it is. I'm sorry. Please. No, no, please. It's very difficult. And I think really in this new environment, I agree with Frank that transparency is an absolute paramount. Who is this person who's speaking? And it is very difficult, you know, particularly in conflicts where sort of everybody has a camera phone, everybody is sharing information around to work out what are the agendas and also to have people who are trying to sort out fact from fiction. But sometimes it's very difficult to define a fact. It's very, very, very difficult. So again, yeah, it may be impossible to have total objectivity that satisfies everyone. Yeah, I just add to that. The, I go back to an earlier point. I appeal to as many people as choose to listen that we have to go back to defining what it is that we mean. We use words too lazily, too sloppily, and there are large pronouncements being made by people with very little knowledge and they are accepted as if truth were just being uttered and it wasn't. It may be that there are people around who still remember old fashioned ideas and ideals about American journalism. It has to do with trying to find out, trying to get as close to the truth of a story as you can. In full recognition that you may fail, but at least make the effort in a fair way. And I think right now we get lost in the magic of the new technology into losing the very heartbeat of what it's all about, which is to provide information that is truthful and reliable to as many people as possible and not to simply go with the raised voice, the quaffed head or the deep voice. I mean, think about what is being said and raised questions, be skeptical, understand these things in a broader context. Sheldon was asking earlier on, is it possible to take the media today and use it as a force to go from hate to peace? And he suggested there might be the establishment of an international journalist council. Think about that. On the surface, excellent idea. How do you even establish the council? Who is going to be on it? Will, quote, the Middle East demand its representative and who will that be from what part of the Middle East? Will it be Western Europe? Is it the Frenchman or the Brit or the German? America will, of course, we're perfect. We can produce any number of people. The Japanese, Asia, think about these issues. The complexity of taking the idea of using the media for peace building is a wonderful thought. It is an enriching thought. It's something that we ought to try to do, but with an understanding that we may not succeed because of the inherent difficulty of just defining issues and personalities. I want to jump in just for a moment to see if I can find common ground with Marvin Kalb, the gentleman in my lap who I have admired all my life and whose the journalistic values you described are essential and I admire. Journalists were put on this earth to do a few things. One is to hold the powerful accountable. One is to tell stories. And another is to connect people to each other, to tell people about each other. And it's on that last count in particular, I think, that there is some cause for optimism, especially when you look at the internet. And also when you look at conflict resolution because it's no coincidence that most wars have started after a campaign of demonizing our opponents. So if you can put a human face on people, that advances peace. And I think that good journalism and certain aspects of the internet, including social networking, really do a great job of that. I think that if you see that our bombs are blowing up a house next door to somebody who's a Facebook friend who likes the same YouTube videos that you like, I think it makes it a lot harder to be pumped about violence, destruction. So I do think that there are some areas that are exciting and positive. We'll take some questions from the audience. Gentlemen, sir, in the middle. Here's about Iran. Just one second, sir. The comment is about Iran. We were talking about the images coming from Iran. Marvin was right if there was one image like that. But if you have 100 images coming, you can always make a story out of it by seeing repetition of the same thing or different thing. And my question is, being a journalist, how can I be impartial and also promote peace? I think Marvin can take that one. I think it's the issue of the morning. It's what we're trying to talk about. We're trying to find some way of coming up with a formula that will allow the crazy world of modern day media to actually be moved in the direction of a peacemaking organ. I myself think it's gonna be exceedingly difficult, if not impossible. Because I'm not sure that that's what journalism does for a living. However, it's a wonderful thought and to the degree that an editor back at home or the boss of a network can say to the people down below, hey, don't you think we ought to do a documentary on so-and-so? When Peter Jennings was around, because of his position and power, he was able to persuade the people at ABC to spend six hours in a year dealing with the environment. We all feel and know that's important, but it's very rarely, it's very rare that that much time is devoted to the subject. Peter was able to do it. So it can be done. And it has to do with a broad environment in the media at the very top that might somehow filter down to the editors and the producers who decide what goes on the air. Other than that, I'm not sure how it could happen. Can I chip in a little bit here? What's happened is it's like a pendulum in the idea of using media to build peace. I agree with what you said at the beginning, Marvin. It's not our job to build peace or to be the other end of the pendulum in terms of promoting war or condoning war. I understand the concept of using media for peace. And I think that comes from putting the pendulum back into the middle. I mean, to use the controversial phrase, I'm sort of old school in that respect too. I think my job is there to inform and allow people to have a voice so that the general public can make a decision based on a good range, a broad range of information that covers everything. When you said about the cameras, if they all came from the same side of the crowd, say two opposing groups are clashing in the streets. If all those pictures came from one side, then you're only gonna see, you're gonna see all those pictures. It'll look like fact, but you haven't seen the pictures from the other side. And it's always a matter of perspective. I always tell the story of an elderly lady who was attacked in Central Park by a dog. And a young man helped sort of fight off the dog, fend off the dog. And a newspaper reporter from one of the local papers came and he found this fellow. He said, listen, it make a great headline. I can see it now. Local boy saves senior citizen from dog attack in Central Park. He says, well, I actually, I'm not local. He says, don't worry, I see it now. American hero saves pensioner from dog attack. He says, well, actually, I'm not American. I'm actually from the Middle East. I'm just studying here. And the next day, the headline said, local dog attack by Arab terrorist. So it's very easy to put a spin, the perspective. Sheldon, you're gonna have to forgive me because I have a live show coming up in a few minutes. So I'm gonna have to skip, but I have to say, you know, the sound of journalism sometimes is questionable. I joke about a friend of mine who got so fed up with the way the industry was going that he decided that he was gonna quit and get another job. And he got it into his head to join the FBI. And so he went for an interview at the FBI and the guy said, well, he's a journalist. I better ask him a few questions. He liked the guy, but he said, I've got to ask him a few questions. So he said, what's two plus two? And the journalist said, four. He said, what's the square root of 100? The guy thought about it for a minute. He said, 10. He said, good. Who shot JFK? And the journalist was like, I don't know. He said, I'll tell you what, why don't you think about it tonight and we'll talk tomorrow. So I called him that night and I said, how did your interview at the FBI go? Did you get the job? He said, not only did I get the job, I'm already on a murder case. So I think we need a little more training in the industry. Would you please forgive me? I have to run because I have a live show. No arm waving or screaming or shouting. But thank you very much as well for having me on the panel. Thank you. I'm sorry, Rebecca, you wanted to say something. Just this whole issue about what can we as journalists do to kind of, perhaps maybe promote more fact-based discourse perhaps might be the best way to, as journalists, promote solutions of some kind. And it's very difficult and sometimes you're actually fighting your own bosses as a journalist, to be perfectly honest. I mean, yeah, imagine that. I mean, you know, I'd say a month before I left CNN, I was being told by my bosses, could you know, your expertise is getting in the way and could you please cover your stories more like a tourist because that's what our audience relates to. And so, you know, and I'm not the only person in the industry who's had this kind of experience. And you know, there was a point when I was in Northwest Frontier Province, Pakistan a month after 9-11 and being told not to cover so many stories about Afghan casualties of American bombings coming over who were, you know, then inflaming local sentiment because this was too upsetting to American viewers and we should do less of this. And so, there are times when you do find that in order to get facts across that you feel the public needs to know, you're fighting your bosses. I just want to answer your question directly and maybe it's a, I don't think it is your job to promote peace, as it's your editor's job and it's your job as a journalist to promote all the ideas comfortable and otherwise that constitute the story. That will promote peace, all right? I mean, the UN diplomat or Dick Solomon promote peace. You may decide to do a documentary on the peacemakers and then you reveal their lives. I think what we need to do is we need to think much more deeply and thoughtfully, which is going against unfortunately too many times our bosses, as to what constitutes great storytelling and the important information that people need to hear and to know. What about the story on the Palestinian scientist? Where was that documentary or that story? What about this, we live in way too narrow a frame and I think one of the most important things that mainstream journalists and non-traditional journalists can do is declare fully and flatly it is our job to take you places you have not been before intellectually, emotionally, geographically, ideologically and expose you to the sometimes uncomfortable and unconventional. I really think that will serve a very large purpose. Could we also stipulate though that it's also our job to tear down falsehoods and that leads to and that's perpetuate work. That's part of that. That's part of that. I think that's part of it. Fortunately, increasingly it's a large part. I think Marvin, you wanted one last comment. Well, no, I get back to the same thing and I'll bore myself soon. Please search for what it is that is truthful and think about these definitions again and again and again. Who's the journalist? Where does this information come from? How reliable is the picture? What are we looking at? There's so much chatter in the world today that we end up at the end of the day eating at smaller and smaller tables where our biases or our lifetime experiences are reconfirmed and we feel that is good journalism. Please, we should all just try to look beyond that. Thank you and thank you to all of our panel here today and thank you very much for your questions. I'm sorry to even get to do all of them, but thank you very much, guys. Thank you. You're my best viewer, guys.