as we encourage you to to fund share on social media about today's program to help us spread the word we are streaming it on twitter and youtube so you can find it on the heritage speed on both of those channels and platforms. to introduce our guest today, marvin lasky is a prolific writer and an accomplished editor. we're proud to welcome him back to the heritage foundation where he is a former visiting fellow and somebody who's a) of our organization area author of more than 25 books including his latest, reforming journalism which he will discuss with us today. martin's political journey is quite unique. as he became an atheist and a marxist in high school and went on to join the communist party in the early 1970s area it was, he was at the university of michigan where he and his phd and he had a spiritual awakening and was baptized into the presbyterian church in 1976. he later became the founder of redeemer presbyterian church in austin texas in 1992 area college, he taught journalism or 25 years at the university of texas at austin and became a reporter for the dale yale daily news and the boston globe. his first book garnered him significant attention and caught the eye of the bradley foundationsupported his visiting fellowship at the heritage foundation for two years . one of his most well-known works is the tragedy of american compassion which transformed him into a reader in the christian conservative political thought movement, newt gingrich, speaker of the house distributed to every republican member of the house at the time . it's also what inspired the phrase compassionate conservative and . martin was instrumental in the success of the world journalism institute which he he is the dean of and he's ceased to recruit and train christian journalists and inject them into the mainstream media and we certainly do need that. he's the editor-in-chiefof the world which is a news organization that reports from a christian worldview . all him on twitter at marvin olasky. his most recent book is titled "reforming journalism" and it's been described as a faith field filled history of journalism and includes tips on newswriting and advice on advocating conservative convictions in mediums dominated by the left . as somebody who went to journalism school myself and spent time as a reporter and editor in washington i've enjoyed reading it and i highly recommend it to you . we have copies for sale as you leave the auditorium in the lobby. now to tell us more about "reforming journalism" i'd like to welcome marvin olasky . [applause] >> thank you rob, thank you for coming today. it's great tobe back at heritage . we spent the most productive research year of my life here in 1989, 1990. this building was the base for my trips to the library of congress five blocks away and it was fun. literally blowing the dust off 19th-century records in the stacks of the library and my research turned into the tragedy of american compassion. people say it made a difference in the drive for welfare reform and i'd like to think that change several million people who from the welfare world into productive work. so i'm grateful to heritage for that contribution to fighting poverty in america area a friend of mine was the head of aei once said he got barack obama's job to drop when arthur told him on the conservative because i care about helping the poor and the great president king james could say the same. so i am grateful to heritage for that year here with the neff area's background that rob referred to. back in the 1970s i thought i was pretty smart and had high sat scores, a yale diploma, a work in big-time journalism. i was basically a left-wing protester invited into the halls of power and i was so smart that i didn't one of the stupidest things anyone could do, i joined the commonest party and then you really, really purely through god's grace i came out of it and in retrospect there was a official experience for me, not sure for others but for me it was because it made me realize really how stupid i am. and that's an important thing i think for all of us to come to mind area it helped me understand other people, also considered smart are also stupid. i started wondering about where i can go to find true wisdom . i became ethical of existential subjectivity and the lack of humility that typifies journalism and typifies me as well if i'm not careful. and that brings me to today's subject. in september steve bannon, the former truncated folk to a conservative group in st. louis and asked do you think it's been unpleasant nasty today, you haven't seen anything. the 20/20 campaign will go down as the most vitriolic and nastiest in american history . it's simple we win, we save the country. well, no, we do not. we do not win, we do not save thecountry if we win by escalating anger . whether on the left or the right who wins by that sword will eventually die by it. and just a little history since this is what was buddy, the united states has been exceptional. i know there's debate about that of all the revolutions i study the american revolution is the only one that did not become disastrous area revolutions in france, russia which i became familiar with in my communist days, china, cuba, they all started with ideals that quickly became idols and that could happen here. not, probably not in the next decade but could happen. i visited argentina last month with its inflation, that could happen here. we could become even like venezuela where class warfare has worked all classes and journalism based in betrayal is now part of the problem so if we keep escalating our cultural dk, our eventual debt driven national bankruptcy, we believe more people to go from fierce words to sticks and stones . the old objectivity never was all that good, it certainly doesn't worknow . are there alternatives? i'd like to lay out suggestions based in biblical teaching that might help us make journalism part of the solution rather than part of the problem and i do want to stress these suggestions grow out of my work at world. when i was at heritage i walked over to the station and met with joel bell who founded world in 1986, joined the board of directors in 1990 and started editing in 1992 and i did that because the board of directors knew they could kick me off the board and just be more active perhaps in other types of mischief but we have grown at a time when other journalists began to prize different earnings so these are not just theoretical constructs. we've road tested them over the years and we've learned they work so number one, do journalism at street level, not sweet level everyone has opinions . it's easy to set at our computers and in air-conditioned offices and pontificate. the world we have tried to emphasize is really tough, time-consuming street-level reporting. we like being flies on the wall, watching and listening area we don't want to make ourselves the center of attention and don't want to make ourselves the apparent font of wisdom. we'd like to go out and report and reporting has fallen into rare circumstances these days. there's so much opinion journalism there is very little reporting, people listening, watching, describing red as number one. number one, sprinkle salt, not sugar. some of you here may work in corporate public relations department, i did that for five years area some of you are in nonprofit offices or congressional suites. we've had experience there and i know that the job for people in that situationis to make your organization or your boss look good . i did some of that. i worked at dupont for five years. it was great educationally and financially but the task really was to hand out sugar. sweet statements that sometimes covered up the truth. at not good journalism. and sometimes people are forgetting the divide between good journalism and actually going out and trying to honestly report what's going on without doing it in a way that's designed to popularize, publicize particular groups or organizations or individuals. and sugar isn't very helpful either, just gives us sugar fixes and these sweet statements cover up the truth . it's not good journalism in the world that we try to solve. salt and faith, it's also a preservative and it's our goal and that makes us unpopular in certain quarters including times conservative because three, we try to avoid entangling the lines. we can be not sugar because we don't have trackbacks of other organizations. even when a scratch hours. world, yes. i am i hope a christian first, a conservative second but i am a conservative. world largely can be the same way but it's not part of the conservative movement. we are not part of the evangelical movement either. we can and do besides other groups. more than 23 years ago, the world was a member of the evangelical pressassociation , we learned that epa code of ethics prohibiting criticism of other apa members. that made a neutral protection society sometimes organizations, our organizations sometimes are. we resign from the epa, we tried to avoid entanglement ever since so independent is important. number four, we'd like to publish sensational facts, but he tried to use understatedpros . much of journalism has become like movie franchises area scream one, scream two, scream three. people get paid clicks create click base. that's not healthy for consumers or producers we do have lots of sensational news in a world we tried to tell not screen it and that's also a different from a lot of journalism these days. number five, try to remember the theologicalreason for not screaming . the sky is not falling. because god holds up the sky. we had a flood a long time ago. i promise not to send another one. this year, the 75th year since we invented nuclear bombs and use two of them on japan. it is absolutely miraculous that during decades of cold war we did not have a nuclear war area there are times we came close. i'm not aware of any time in human history that a massively effective new weapon hasn't been used for such a long time area and that's amazing. it's not natural, it's almost supernatural and when i think of this i really am filled with thanksgiving and you should be too. god is so grateful we can't get our arms around him and he's clearly had his arms around us. 500 years ago john calvin about how we got to be on god works so that we may be restored by his goodness. the rotten stuff that goes on, bill amazingly we haven't had the disaster that i think anyone would have predicted we would have had by now. i look at predictions back in the first decade of the century and people have carpeting that there would be nuclear bombs smuggle in people even getting off, better than 50 percent that we would have a nuclear incident in this country sometime in the next five or 10 years that hasn't happened and i guess keep praying have happen area they keep working to keeping us from killing each other. my apologies for preaching, did i hear and amen anyone mark 's six, now that i've moved into theology let me waiting for some deeper waters. you may know the truth about bob dylan, you're going to have to serve somebody . release direct all reporting and writing. sometimes a very implicit way, sometimes explicitly not even the simplest story is without some degree of positional censoring. when firefighters fight fire, we cheer for the firefighters, not fire . when we have discoveries that people fight cancer, we are glad of those not sharing these days a lot of people think that stuff that used to be popular is actually social cancer of some kind of where not cheering for the social camp. all reporting in some ways directly reported. and in the 20th century, some journalists push back against what used to be called objectivity. and some still argue that an objective reporting recorder can function like a camera with people increasingly understood we certainly did, people in journalism did what camera shows depends onwhere we pointed . what kind of lens until we have, so on to update the metaphor, youare more than your smartphone . your smartphone reports, depends on where you're standing and when you turn it off, you decide what sounds to keep or show or play back area when we are covering stories, reporters decide what's most important and what to ignore. beliefs, judgments, ideologies direct those decisions. so what does that mean? does that mean it was everybody's opinion, not exactly. and feature stories, the choice of the protagonist and antagonist, they call this camel when we're running out of journalism institute area these stories have protagonists, antagonists, mission obstacles but the basic structure is someone does something because, but and then you have the tension that comes in and reporters decide who that someone is, what the bug representative worldviews are important and again i stress that because it leads to almost sometimes people pulling up their hands we don't happen rational objectivity doesn't work then it also . point number seven. mission statement, we try to provide biblically objective journalism informs, educate and inspire. the biblical objectivity. so different from the conventional notion of objectivity that some people have a hard time getting their arms around it and i'll try to explain . 420 three years now, i've owned and mostly lived in a full house on a hillside in texas. accepting texas it's called edwards mountain. the hill. the house sways slightly when heavy winds hit and then initially made me nervous, you have the top floor and you feel some movement, but the build of the house moved next door so i could actually ask them about the construction and he showed me it was solid and had some solid down here . he knew how the house was made to riyadh because he had made it area journalists conventionally throughout the 20th century and still these days sometimes described objectivity is getting opinions 80 and see and quoting them equally . but say my neighbor down the street says my house will fall down if the wind gets to 10 miles per hour and maybe a neighbor across the street says well, it's made of kryptonite and it would reject an attack even by superman. and it may be a third neighbor on the other side says my house is made of cheese, it will fall apart in an hurricane but don't worry because i can eat my way out of it . if i put all their opinions equally , will have an objective story -mark know. even if they were all experts and not slightly nutty, and i'm speaking generically, not of my particular neighbors, i would not have an objectively accurate story because they don't know my house the way our gardener knows the house so a balance subjectivity does not give us an objective answer. what does? god is the builder ofthe house we all live in. he gave us the bible which explains how the house was made and what it's made of . i believe that only god knows the true objective nature of things and i didn't always believe this, i had to learn it through hard things that were hard but useful. i believe that his book the bible is the only objective and accurate view of the world. which means the only true objectivity is biblical objectivity. do i expect others to believe that? probably not unless god impresses that in the way he impresses it on me all these years ago. and happily does that for millions of people. why he doesn't do it for everyone i don't know, that's the way it is. if any of you have seen the way of the wonderful dream, some people cannot see the baseball players but they are still there. so what do we do, how we sort out what's real and what's not, what's true and what's not rent this is actually here, as a metaphor for white water rapids. how business offices in national north carolina, so good white water rapids about 40 or so miles west of it. when we have our world journalism institute classes there we sometimes take our students out to it. and we go down the is within about 25 students at a time in six rubber boats and when i and one of the rubber boats because i was the only one there i was a poor captain and i was running under bushes and under trees and so forth and everyone ended up in the water at some point and one potential reporter ended up in the middle saying let me out which we eventually did and she did not really make it as a reporter. white water rapids, practicing good subjectivity and we use it. we have a reporter all over the country and a couple in africa and asia and so we get together and every couple of weeks, as were discussing stories and how to them, who's going tobe our protagonist, antagonists and so forth, we use this rapids as a shorthand . because people who know white water rapids talk about six times rapids area number one is sort ofgently down the stream , anyone can do it yet i am capable of doing a number three. number six is going over wonderful and a lesser real expertyou're going to die . >> last one, class one is where the bible takes an explicit position easy to follow along riyadh for example adultery is wrong. so in a story but say about sexual practices we would not make an adulterer of your area and again i want to emphasize that taking strong position where god takes one does not give us the way to misquote our opponents or mischaracterize them or ridicule them, god is the god of truth and he does not require public relations help but nevertheless here's a clear position and that will influence the way we tell the story. last two, the bible takes an implicit implicit position. parents are responsible without godly education of their children we support bible days cooling at home and private schools are in public schools if the parents think that's best for their situation that we don't think those school could pretend god doesn't exist. that's not neutral, pretending god doesn't exist. so one class to, we will take a position but it's, we may not be as wrongly, we will acknowledge as we always do alternatives but we will still say there's something that the bible tells us is right and something wrong in this. partisans on both sides" scripture verses is totally careful study through the bible leads to conclusions. for example, one of the things we tried to avoid, we talk about showing concern for the young unborn, uneducated, unemployed, the unchurched,the unfashionable . but what's most important is not whether we feel righteous it's theweather we are helping or hurting . all people are made in god's image with the capacity to be creative and productive, to a greater or lesser extent. i think we find from biblical teaching and experience that encouraging people not to work are often harmful rather than helpful. and we will come at it that way and we would acknowledge this as this is a hard thing. what we do when there's a person union station asking for money to give to not to give, this is hard and it requires experience in a sermon and we probably still get it wrong a lot of times we would still say there's biblical teaching here that's useful . and then we come to class iv. where there's no clear biblical path, we can bring to bear significant historical experience and a biblical understanding of human nature and for example we should not trust tyrants to honor a peace treaty. we see teaching from the bible about being suspicious in those circumstances and history shows that as well and from my own communist party experiencei've learned that personally . class v, there is no clear historical or psychological trail, but there's some experience that we must be wary. i can choose one particular example because we aresitting here just off capitol hill . we should not expect efficiency from big bureaucracies. there's something we heard learn from human nature that something is gained but something is lost in that process and we should not be surprised when we have big plans and big projects and they actually turn out to be hostile rather than helpful in the classics, this is likely going over wonderful rapids, we are on our own . for example a specific foreign policy matters with foreign tradeagreements , class vi rapids we balance different perspectives and our coverage might be similar to that of an ap story before the ap game politicized but a generation ago we would see that balancing of activities in an associated press story and it wouldn't be different from the traditional approach but we try hard not to either overuse or underuse scripture. i tell you, when i first became a christian in 1976, one of the first things i saw, i went into the church and there was a group that was raiding members of congress on their votes and whether they were good people based on the bible or evil people. one of the questions was should the us relinquish control of the panama canal ? and if you were against that, you were on god's side, if you were for that you were on satan's side or something like that and evennow i can see this is silly .there is no book of the panama canal in the bible and it doesn't tell us what to do in some situations like that but a sermon is necessary and we won't pretend to say that we know what to do. we may sometimes give our opinion but we say we don't know. we're not experts so classification in this way is useful, we've been using it for 20 years and it helps us avoid overusing the bible which is a tendency among some theological conservatives or under using it which is a tendency among some theological liberals so we try to take on stance with the bible, we avoid doing so when the bible isn't an we have the opportunity to get things right by trying to practice biblical objectivity christians are not immune to the temptations and pressures that affect a journalist and that leads to my last point number nine, as ji packer, a great theologian summed up, god saves sinners and that's important . god is not saving good people or wonderful people or evil people, god saves sinners. and really all worlds reporting and writing is based on the understanding that god is holy, we are sinners, christsacrifice bridges the gap . the heavens declare the glory of god but the street flipping his sinfulness of man. so biblical journalism exercises god's holiness against him and we try to do this again, being very careful not to mischaracterize or abuse or think of our opponents as corrupt because some of the people, this is the weaker of the pro-life mart here, people who are formally abortionist for proclaimers of abortion . so god saves sinners and we tried to show this in our reporting and in the world and we havea podcast , the world and everything in it, i would recommend it to you all and if you're walking your dog or doing stuff like that . you have actually, we are starting some podcast series right now and since rob mentioned my writing on compassion, we have a series right now call the effective compassionate, it's going on 12 episodes and i think episode for this we deal with the changes in washington back in the 90s and so forth so a little bit of history, take a listen to that. about 20 or 25 minutes each effort, i think we just put in effective compassion, putting the world and everything in it and you can listen to our podcast and we also have just a world journalist institute for college students and people in up to age 30 or so. we have that in the summer and then the thing that i enormously enjoy, i enjoyed my teaching at the university of texas for those years but when you see people for three hours a week for 15 weeks, it doesn't have the intensity and you don't know the people in a classroom so we have to, we found 11 times now, we had our midcareer horse my wife and i teach in our living room. in boston for up to, 2010 people each time. we have a very intensive week . thursday, friday, saturday 8:30 in the morning until late at night and then sunday, people do the days rest and we go again on monday,tuesday and wednesday . and it's been really the best teaching experience of my life because we get to know the people in our house so forth then whole bunch of them become correspondence for the world and some of them go on to become reporters. these are usually people in their 40s who are very successful in their occupations but our board at that point and what to do either their board or a just want to save got in a different way if any of you are interested you can look on our website world journalism institute .org, w ji or world ji.org. and with that i will now ostentatiously show my humility by stopping and listening to yourquestions or comments . sothank you all very much . >>. >> thank you so much. again, i encourage you to pick up a copy of the book. in the lobby. we're going to take questions. i have a couple i want to ask you and i want to pick up right where you left off here at the end is ugly when it comes to the next generation of journalists you obviously have devoted yourself to this particular and never to make sure that there better prepared and they entered the world. we live in a time when it seems trust in institution has reached significant lows and journalism is no exception so two-part question, using the ever-changing -mark you see that faith or trust in journalism ever increasing back to the level it may have been in the past and what is your message as you send people out into the world , whether they're in their mid-40s or whether they're coming out of college. to do a better job in their own careers? >> you ask will this ever change, ever is a very long time. will it change in any relatively short period of time like the next several decades denmark i'mhopeful . i don't expect it but i'm hopeful because we've had other situations where journalists, trust in journalists was nonexistent in journalism and it popped back. to give you one example, i'll bring a couple books on early journalism history. journalists back in the 1600s and 1700s were really ask, completely. they were basically, their job description was basically to do public relations for the king or the world governor in the colonies. no one expected they would actually read anything truthful. it was public relations pure and simple and in the 1730s in new york there was a fellow named john peters anger who decided to tell the truth and the original dust reformed churches there, he sunday, he learned about telling the truth but he didn't want to do something different the next day so he started telling the truth about william coffey, governor from new york who among other things so land from the indians, still sheep from various settlers. and he told the truth about this guy and of course we are still throwing them into jail because he was breaking the law at that point area will custom and law at that point was the journalists job was to make the king or government look good, not tell the truth. he spent about eight months or so in prison. then there was a trial and trial his lawyer, fellow named andrew hamilton from philadelphia proclaimed that the jury should become what later in legal parlance became a runaway jury regardless of what the law said , hamilton talk about how elijah and the bible truth to power and ahab and other people did the samejohn peters angle was doing the same to this vile governor . >> and thus should not be in prison.the jury became a runaway jury. they took their own liberty in their hands by saying not guilty, not guilty and when asked by the chief justice, the justice presiding how can you say that, they kept saying not guilty, not guilty because if they gave a reason they would be in direct opposition to the law.that changed, that started to change journalistic practice, after that there were no journalists for libel by the world governor were others in that way. 40 years later you had an american revolution led by a journalist, it failed journalist named samuel adams and he had total trust by people in boston because they saw him not as a hack but someone who told the truth. there was an enormous change at that point and the journal of was in high repute from the colonials for the next few decades. it started to change back a little bit in the 1850s, back in the 19 , early 1900s when there were muckrakers who wrecked mock but nonetheless were looked upon as honest people and generally they were using this roller coaster of on-time so i can't predict when this will but if there are more journalists who are telling the truth rather than sprinkling salt rather than sugar, i think that could happen. >> let's see what'son your mind, i have other questions . we will start in the back with joe. please introduce yourself and any organization you work with. >> i am joe starts with the fund for american studies. i want our journalism program there and marvin, i wanted to get your opinion on what you think ofundergraduate journalism school . and what advice you give to students who want to study journalism and also i'm curious, secular publications out there, are there any you admire or you think are doing a different job? >> let me deal with that last question for you we have a world, we have lots of fans and sometimes like me or come up and say to me oh, i love world. i love your podcast. if the only thing i read and the only thing i listen to and my response is with a little bit of horror. i mean, i'm glad they like it. but i suggest no, i'm glad you read it, but you should read some other things to my recommendation , i used to say you should read, you should read the new york times or washington post. i don't do that anymore because it's just become so opportunistic. it was put ina wild way, now it's over the top . the liberal publication i recommend is atlantic. because it's coming from a different worldview and political philosophy but they are good writers , good reporters . and you know, i know some of them and they are good people even though we disagree on this. so that's my usual thing to say is read world but read the metropolitan on their website. as far as journalism school i started teaching journalism at the university of texas in 1983 and even though, they knew. i was very explicit about this coming from a christian perspective. they thought that was okay. because they actually, i had been a reporter. i can speak their language andunderstand and i was on the side of journalism and reporters . i wasn't calling them enemies . that way everyone would disagree. and at that point the university of texas journalism school, the professors were mainly old reporters, old liberal reporters. texas liberal reporters which made them interesting and cranky but i enjoyed them and theytolerated me . that's change over the years so that when i left there in 2008, and you know, relinquished my tenure which amazed and horrified some but it was a good decision. over the past dozen years, teaching has done much better but by the time i left, a lot of the professors were marxists, either hard or soft marxists who had no journalism experience, had pacs in mass communications and a new theory and in my opinion kind of a twisted way but they didn't know journalism . there were still a couple who actually had been reporters and really believed in writing and reporting and getting out and not sucking our thumbs and turning out our great propagandistic pieces but mostly it was just pretty bad . so it was not fun anymore. i don't know if that's the way, i don't know intimately any other secular journalism journalism program, i wouldn't be surprised if things had happened elsewhere but i recommend forjournalism education , these are our christian places i know which is not everyone's cup of tea but patrick henry college in virginia about an hour west of here as good journalism teaching. i have one student whose dissertation i supervise. dorchester college in iowa has good journalism teaching by our washington bureau chief who has as journalists tend to get to do get tired after a while and you go teach and i could recommend a couple others, but those are the two ilike best . but it's hard for students. >> so here and we will come over to the side. >> reverend michael anger, i represent ministry of state, pca done on the national ministry in dc. i have two questions interconnected . levin came up with a book talking about institutions and how they've moved to platforms and the negative impact that has had on people's perceptions of the benefits of an institution being formative now. i love to. but then when you mention the fact that you came to christianity throughcommunism , i was thinking about how douglas hyde, eventually left christianity because he became disillusioned with its ability to affect the change that he wanted and how do you fight against that at a christian publication? >> it's interesting, i read hyde's book which he wrote when he was a question andi'm not familiar with his later experience but it seems to me did he write something about this ? >> the book i believe came out to be i believe it was scheduled to be republished and he declined, allowing it to be republished because he said i no longer adhere to that because if you wrote in dedication and leadership, he felt like christianity was a way to affect the change that he wanted in the world and just didn't see it coming. >> that's sad to hear. and we do have lots of biblical admonition to not become weary in doing good sometimes when i tell my reporters we have again, we are conservative, but we differ from conservatives in some ways. we tend to be pro-immigration and pro-refugee and one of our brilliant young reporter who's been covering this a lot, i think she gets weary and you've just got to keep at it. i could go on a lot about the platform question and it's really hard by the way these days and publishing books, you see publishers including christianpublishers, it's not so much the quality of the book but the quality of the platform you have or perhaps the quantity . and that's a mess in some ways. but no, things take a long. i'll tell you. i flew in last night and this is coming from reagan airport and you all have this experience, you come in and you see the place lit up and it's the same stuff there all the times, the lincoln memorial, jefferson memorial, washington monument, capital and so forth but people change and so last night, the , i basically grew up in boston, basically grew up in emerypark and spent so much time there that these days when i go back there , i feel as i'm walking along let's say through the tunnels andso forth, i feel like i'm going to go in the tort corner and see myself when i was 10 years old . it's a weird sort of sensation when i was 15 years old, just it's got weird at the sametime. washington here , the first time i spend any more than just a day here was in 1970 when i was 20 years old and this was a big, big anti-vietnam war demonstration and the most memorable thing there was that we had a demonstration one day and on monday we were all supposed to go and lobby our membership and so forth so my roommate and i at the end of the day had not had much success. we just went over to the house of the speaker, the office of the speaker at the house john mccormick massachusetts and lo and behold, this was about five: 15, 5:30, a secondary medicine to see him so we had a very enjoyable half hour, he just enjoyed these kids coming and i can just try to have been some rest but at the end of that experience, he took us into the house chamber and said, there were four of us there and said here's my chair and i sitting. i have to go now and i'm going to have dinner with my life as i never miss dinner with my wife which i don't know if that was true but his chair and you can spin around in a bit and we all did you so we were, we thought of ourselves as revolutionaries we were little kids there on a chair and hopefully i think we all tend to be, we get tired of things, we may have as long of an attention span as we need it , i wrote a book on the history of abortion back in 1992 and i'm updating that now so i've just been reading about some of the people doing the pro-life movement for 40 years and on friday at the march wife and i will actually be walking with a couple of people there all the time and dosomething for our podcast . that takes incredible patience and resolve and in almost station sticking it out year after year it is a grace of god to be even do that. back when i, i could go on this way. my, i'm just impressed. as a journalist, i tend to have a medium-sized attention span which means i don't want to spend my whole life on one issue but i'm impressed with people in the pro-life movement who have done that, i'm impressed with bob rector here was done welfare stuff for decades . that's really incredible perseverance i think area requires that type of as a close to the idea of going to find a platform and sell some books and go on with my life. i admire the people who've been doing this andit's through the grace of god . >> second row first. >> michael gleason with the charlemagne institute and former world correspondent . three years ago, you develop several periodicals for younger leaders, could you explain the rationalebehind ? >> periodicals. >> oh. actually, that preceded world . starting in about 1980 by told bell because, how many of you and when you're in elementary school for a publication called the weekly reader? bunch of people. you'll wanted to set up something that was a christian alternative to the weekly reader. i grew up in the weekly reader but he was hoping for something more and that's what he set out to serve that purpose. and it's still going over the years and we will start doing some videos i think this fall for using christian school classrooms so it's still there. when world started out it was losing money like crazy and the kids were making money so that worked out now with the other world are way around. the world is not making money like crazy but we do have one or two dollars at the end of the year read we tried to agree so anyway, that's part of the enterprise, to try to help kids develop a news having area. >> with over to that side next area. >> greg piper with college, i interviewed years ago at a college journalist. i want to ask you about business model because it seems like a lot of the problems in journalism is simply the way that you make money on it . it does not produce journalism, what you see as a path forward and one or something people think as much about. >> journalism in the united states as many hadmany different models. originally he would see newspapers in the 1700s , it would be funded by a board of , they can call them subscribers at the time but patrons and so forth, then it became an advertising base small and you'd be able to sell those at we're returning right now to the early model of donors, funders, nonprofit organizations, very often. and you know, the publications that don't have, that don't even, you can have one big sugar daddy or several small ones and you're in trouble and they sugar daddy has its own sense of problems. with these basals and the washington post, that's trouble read much better to have a widely diversified of donors and that's basically what the world is doing now, we have more money coming in from donations and transcripts instructions or advertising. and that's what i'm recommending to people. there are two people who have graduated from our world journalism institute for now , who have set up their own locations , one in a small city in california in one trying to make it in the big city in austin writing alternative and i believe they are either in or will be moving towards a nonprofit model with donors. and if you have lots of donors and you are free from having to be entangled in the lyons of having to follow one particular person or small group of people read so that our goal, to have diversified getting that means you have to show people in the community and is worth doing, worth supporting and we now hear in our world and everything in it, you'll hear this listener supported, world radio and in a way npr is our model. npr is mostly listener supported, some government money still and they do such a first-class job , what they do from the worldview, we try the world and everything in it, if you listen to it it npr life as opposed to sort of a.m. or kind of christian radio as such. >> if i could ask a follow-up and then we will go down here. certainly the daily signal has a similar model as well as the heritage foundation, we support a lot of those to you have that financial independence but also reporting on postop issues that my question for you is you have been editor-in-chief long enough to see the changes in distribution of the content, social media obviously plays a much bigger role today. how have you been able to adapt and as you said in your talk wrote world and this time when it seems that many legacy news organizations are struggling ? >> question and i'm not very good at it. i'm thinking of when i came to washington as a young guy now, i'm an old guy now and i am behind occur . i was yesterday, i was talking with one of our world journalist ministry people and saying i look at facebook and we really need to refresh that. it's a little old, the stuff we have their area and we have people with these college students and then you see on facebook he said no, we still have our facebook thing, that's not what we do and then he gave me the names of a couple other things. some things i have heard of like instagram and therewas one i hadn't heard of . so what we do is we have young people who know stuff. i still like email which is the way god made it as opposed to something else. i'm just an old email: at this point. there was another part of yours. >> i just wondered. [inaudible] >> biblically as a christian, how have you viewed and covered the impeachment of william jefferson clinton and now the impeachment of donald john from? >> that's a really interesting question and a question of enormous interest to about 2000 of our readers in 2016 at me complaining letters. we said in 2016, that we consider both our current president and hillary clinton unfit to be president. and in saying that about donald trump, we had basically been saying that he just had not shown the character that we hope the president would show. in his previous, also he the upper and careful control of his emotions which also is useful to have in any leader. the other thing about him, and actually has conservative has been. i really didn't either though basically we said there are both unfit. we had one cover with hillary clinton with the grim reaper wearing a button i'm with her area and then we had another cover, concerning trump and we had a smaller inset picture of the cover we had done 20 years before on bill clinton and basically, we had thought that clinton should resign. we work all on impeaching him as such because depending on the definition of impeachment, but we hope he would do an honorable thing and resign from office. and we figured that since we did that with a democrat, we should try to apply the same standard to donald trump. and he did not show the character either. that was then and as you can imagine, i got about 2000 angry letters from our subscribers and we lost some subscriptions, we lost advertising but this is something that everyone on our staff, well, i mean, we all discussed this a lot, agreed with it and we have a wonderful publisher who knew the cost and said yes, go for it and we did. i still feel that at a micro level, donald trump is unfit to be president, just in terms of not so much current character questions but just the way he reacts to things and from our people who know some things know about just his decision-making process. but that's in a micro level. and i tend to in my mind and i haven't written about this but i'm still making it through here is where i'm going. there's these things where microeconomics are not recognized which is a useful distinction and in talking about something like evolution, people make a distinction between microevolution andmacro evolution and that's a useful distinction . in my view from running micro unfit, but macro, again, there are some differences that we have within speaking for others world as well as myself but overall is doing a pretty decent job in a very tough environment. so this leads me in a certain difficulty. what we're doing is we're not making any cosmic announcements, where going by issue by issue reporting it and that we probably do about 50-50 in trump, where not part of the cheerleading, were also not part of the rampant vicious attacking those on. it was a very hard job, he's the president of all of us and we respected as president . and insofar as the presidents chief job these days and in some ways to be nominator in chief , he has the job. not only on the supreme court but throughout the judicial system so he's achieved a lot. some of the regulations that he's gotten our very . but yes, we just want to continue reporting on actions , not just words. praising, a lot of the good actions he had and whether i will make any general statement of what'sgoing on but sure , it's a tough situation. i never was and i still am not part of the never trumpers because never is a long time and the people who think, the people who there's one christian leader who has referred to donald trump as the greatest christian president ever, i disagree with that and i also disagree with people who say he's the worst president ever, we've had a lot of far worse ones and i kind of enjoy in a way one of the things you have here in washington as you have a funding circus and i enjoy these days trumps tweeting. so i'm not giving you a good answer, i see i'm staggering aroundhere but you asked the question and i'm curious . >> i was a never trumper who agrees with much of what he's done but i also believe he really isn't morally or temperamentally fit for the presidency . >> the problem is basically, we just felt that at world, we felt an hour other people, editorial people have felt that as a magazine we need to be evenhanded basically. so we didn't tell people who to vote for and i certainly did not tell anyone who voted for trump, i did not say you are wrong to do that. i think it's a mistake to the calling him the greatest christian president but it was a very hard decision. maybe not as hard a decision this time since the democratic party has been so far to the left but depending who they nominate it's likely that they will nominate a people who is macro unfit to be presidentand perhaps micro as well . the problem really is the supreme court and the supreme court has taken so much power into itself that the nominating chief position is a really crucial position. i suspect some are trouble and life is full of trouble. and it's part of realizing that this is a world that is a wonderful place and we have to walk our way through it. >> we will take one final question and barbara is going to say. >> my name is maggie, i work at heritage so with social media, it seems like everybody has become a journalist . you see that as a good or a threat to traditional journalism? >> that's a good question, be careful what you wish for or pray for area i grew up in a time when there was very very little competition with journalism, we had monopoly newspapers, you have the three networks but they were all pretty much the same and they were soft liberalism and so forth, not over but certainly it was there . so i initially was very glad area i still am glad that people are country getting to diverse city. it's good that some of those who through the world journalism institute launched not just a reporter but an entrepreneur, reporter and editor and that's terrific. never before and we had that opportunity at american journalist. the problem comes as there really is so much fake news out there. and at least in the old days with the swan patient liberalism, at least there was some check on just putting out stuff that was absolutely, totally factually untrue and that check no longer existsbecause so many people are no longer reporters . i guess people who take other stuff and retweet it and so forth, all sorts of lies just get passed around like crazy so they lost, something gained. overall, i still like it. but there are problems and problems among reporters and that's why we really try to stress that you know, and this is why i can enjoy reading the atlantic. >> .. >> you're limited advice on journalism, really awful book and your remarks today, we appreciate it, we appreciate your leadership of the world, and we thank you. we hope you'll come back to the heritage foundation in the future. please join me in thank marvin. [applause] again, if you'd like to purchase a copy of the book, they're available right outside, and marvin will stay up here on the stage -- >> [inaudible] >> there you go. [laughter] >> beginning in just a minute on booktv, programs from our archives of books that have been adapted into movies. and later, journalist andrea bernstein chronicles the trump and kushner families' rise to prominence. followed by the recent rancho mirage writers festival in california. check your program guide for more information. with the academy awards taking place this weekend, we want to rook back at some of the authors we've covered on booktv who have had their books adapted into film. first up is just mercy by brian stephenson. his book tells the story of walter mcmillan who was accused of murdering an 18-year-old girl. the film stars actor michael b. jordan and jamie foxx. brian stevenson spoke with us about his book at the 2014 miami book fair. here's a look. >> host: who's walter mcmillan? >> guest: he was an african-american man living in monroeville, alabama, and there was this murder, a serious murder in monroeville downtown. a young white woman was murdered. police couldn't shove the crime x. after seven months, they were putting a great deal of pressure, they were talking about impeaching the sheriff, and gun sales had risenning dramatically. and they decided to arrest someone even if they weren't guilty, and walter mcmillan became that man. he wasn't the kind of person you would suspect of committing this brutal murder, but he was having an interracial affair with a young white woman which we think brought him to the attention of law enforcement. and so he was arrested and actually put on death row for 15 months before the trial. the only case i've ever worked on where the client is actually put on depth row before being -- death row before being convicted of a crime. when i met him, i just was shocked by that fact. and then i talked to his family. i was shocked by the fact that at the time of the crime he was 11 miles away with about 20 people from his church and family raising money for the church. and so all of these people knew he was innocent, and they'd come up to me and say, mr. stevenson, it would have been so much better if he'd been out in the woods hunting by himself, because at least then we could entertain the possibility that he might be guilty. but because we were with him, with we feel like we've been convicted too. the third thing kind of got me really pulled into this case, i decided to take it, and as soon as i filed a notice of appearance to let the court know i was going to represent him, i got a call from the judge whose name was robert e. lee who told me he did not want me involved in this case. mr. mcmillan was convicted, he was sentenced to death. we got involved after he was sentenced to death, and the book is about our efforts to expose his wrongful conviction. and i talk a lot about the irony of this case because this community is the same community where harper lee grew up and wrote to kill a mockingbird. and that's a beautiful book with an incredible place in american literature. and the people there loved that story, but there was this kind of tragic irony that they were so enamored of that story and yet unwilling to recognize this wrongful conviction of an african-american man. >> host: mr. stevenson, he came to the attention of the police because he was having an affair with a white woman? why? why would the police know about that? >> guest: yeah. well, two things. the woman he was having an affair with was married, and her husband found out about it and initiated custody proceedings for their children where he tried to brand this woman as a bad mother because she would have an affair with an african-american man x. we have this history in this country of not dealing with our legacy of racial inequality and particularly in the south. a longstanding fear and presumption of dangerousness and guilt that gets assigned to men, particularly men of color who get involved with white women. we had decades of lynchings around that same issue and the death penalty until the 1970s was dominated by this fear that 87% of the people executed between 1930 and 1972 were african-american men convicted of raping white women, sometimes under very, very weak evidence and questionable cases. and so that narrative of black sexuality was part of the context that i think made it possible for these law enforcement officers to demonize mr. mcmillan. >> host: when you look at the 200 plus on death row in alabama, are you fighting to end the death penalty itself? is that one of your goals? >> guest: i think, for me, the death penalty a question, is an issue that has to be answered by asking the question -- not the question do people deserve to die for the crimes they commit. i think we have to ask do we deserve to kill. and in my view, the united states, we do not have have a criminal justice system sufficiently reliable, sufficiently fair to be carrying out the death penalty. so, yes, ill like to stop the death penalty in all cases. we have a criminal justice system that treats you better if you are rich. you make a lot of mistakes. mr. mcmillan is not the only innocent people who was convicted and sentenced to death. we've now had one innocent person exonerated for every ten people execute ld which is a shameful rate of error. we until ate that error in that context. i don't think we should be executing people in this country with the kind of system and unreliability and unfairness that we have. i'm also morally opposed to it, but for me, you don't have to be morally opposed to the death penalty to determine that it's not appropriate here. >> host: a quote from the book, who said that capital punishment means them without capital gets the punishment in. >> guest: yeah. steve wright, who actually is the director of a group called the southern center for human rights, and when i was a young law student, i wasn't sure i wanted to be a lawyer. i was a philosophy major in college, and it took me a while to recognize that nobody was going to pay me when i graduated. i was really struggling. i didn't know what to do. i went to law school because you don't really have to know anything to go to law school. [laughter] and i was uncertain until i met steve who was a really passionate lawyer, who was providing legal services to people on death row. and it was the beginning of an education that has changed my world view, my sense of what's important, my priorities as a lawyer. and, yes, he said them without the capital get the punishment because we do have a system where wealth matters more than culpability. and i think that's tragic, and we see it playing out in death penalty cases time and time again. >> host: how long has the equal justice initiative been around? >> guest: we started in 1989, and i'm proud to report we've now gotten 115 people off of death row after a being wrongly convicted or unfairly sentenced. but there's a lot more work to be done. we're working on children. i talk about in my book children prosecuted as adults. the u.s. is the only country in the world that condemns children to die in prison, some as young as 13 and 14 years of age. to that's a new big project that we're working on. and we also have conditions of consignment. you know, the prison population, 300,000 in the early 1970s, 2.3 million today. and because of that tremendous increase, we have horrific conditions of confinement in many, many states. the u.s. now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. we probably have a million people in jail that are not a threat to prick safety, they're -- public safety, they're there for drug dependence dependency or some some low-level, nonviolent crime. it's a horrific way to implement justice. >> host: tell us about a case that the equal justice initiative has -- [inaudible] walk us through that. i don't want to give away the ending. >> >> guest: sure. yeah, yeah, yeah. >> host: i'm not going to bring up with what, if anything, happened to mr. mcmillan. so walk us through a case. >> guest: actually just yesterday we got a ruling in a case of a man named anthony ray hinton who was convicted of two murders in birmingham in the 1980s, and he was innocent. but he couldn't get the legal help he needed. and the state said they found a gun in his mother's home that was matched to these two murders. and because he was poor, he needed a gun expert who could rebut that false evidence, but he couldn't get one. is so his lawyer found a guy who was a civil engineer who was blind in one eye, who had never looked at a gun before, who had never done that kind of testimony before and to be his expert. of course, he was convicted and sentenced to death. he's been on death row for 28 years. what we do is we challenge these convictionings. we challenge these sentences. we presented evidence from nationally-recognized experts that this gun us not a match. we put up new evidence that showed that mr. hinton was locked in a warehouse at the time of the crime 15 miles away. he checked in, there were security guards there, other people there, and we've been fighting to get his relesion, and we just -- release, and we're one step closer to getting him home, but it's a tremendous challenge. courts have really shifted so that they prefer finality over fairness x. what you see in a lot of these cases is the court saying, too late, we're not going to look at this evidence, we're not going to look at this ed of bias. we want to get to a final outcome, which is ec cushion. i think