Beliefs, judgments,ideologies direct those decisions. Direct the report. So what does that mean . Does that mean its hopeless, that everythings opinion . In feature stories the choice of a protagonist and antagonist, we call this ammo when were running our word world journalisminstitute. Even simple stories out protagonist, antagonist, mission obstacles and the basic structure is someone does something because , but and then youhave the tension that comes in. Reporters decide who the someone is, whether something is and write these reports and i stress that because this leads to sometimes people throwing uptheir hands. Conventional objectivity doesnt work its all subjective this brings us to point number seven and the worlds mission statement. We tried to provide biblically objective journalism that informs, educates andinspires. Its so different from the conventional notion of objectivity that some people have a hard timegetting their arms around so ill try to explain. For 23 years now, ive owned and mostly worked in a house on a hillside in texas except in texas its called edwards melton,its a hill. The house sways slightly when heavy wins it and that initially made me nervous. Youve got the top floor and you feel some movement but the builders of the house live next door so i can ask them about the construction and he showed me it was pretty solid. He knew how the house was made because he had made. Journalists conventionally throughout the 20th century still these days sometimes describe objectivity as getting opinions ab and c and quoting them equally but say my neighbor down the street says my house will fall down in the wind gets to 10 Miles Per Hour and maybe a neighbor across the street says its native, its made of kryptonite and it would reject an attack even my superman and the other side says my house is made of cheese, it will fall apart in a hurricane but dont worry because i can eat my way out of it. If i quote all the opinions equally will i havean objective story . Even if they are all experts and not slightly nutty and im speaking generically, not of my particular neighbors i still would not have an objectively accurate story because they dont know my house the way the builder knowsthat house. The balancing of subjectivities does not give us a balanced answer. What does . God is the builder of the house we all live in. He gave us the bible which explains how the house was made andwhat its made of. I believe the only god knows the true objective nature of things and i had to come to learn it through some hard things that were useful. I believe that his book the bible is the only completely objective and accurate view of the world which means the only true objectivity is biblical objectivity. You might expect others to believe that . I guess not unless god impresses it upon them as he did upon me as many years ago and happily he does that for millions of people. Why he doesnt do it for everyone i dont know. If any of you have seen the movie field of dreams, some people cannot see thebaseball players but they are still there so what do we do . How do we sort out whats real, whats not, whats true, whats not . This is our technique. Its a metaphor, white water rapids. Our Business House is in North Carolina so there are white water rapids 40 or so miles west of it and when we had our World Journalism Institute classes there we take our students out to it and go down the rapids with them, 25 students at a time in six rubber boats and when i and one of the rubber boats i was such a poor captain i was constantly running into bushes and trees and everyone and 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 make it as a reporter. White water rapids, thats some biblicalobjectivity. We have our reporters all over the country and the couple in africa and asia so we get together and Conference Calls every couple of weeks and we discussed stories and how to approach them, whos going to be our antagonist and protagonist and we use this rapids as a shorthand because people who know white water rapids talk about six kinds of rapids. Number one is gently down the stream, anyone cando it. Number six is going over a waterfall and unless you are a real expert youre probably going to die and they are best to avoid. Class one is where the bible takes an explicitposition so its easy to follow along. Adultery is wrong, telling a story about Sexual Practices would not make an adulterer hero and i want to emphasize taking a strong position where god takes one does not give us the ability to mischaracterize them. God does not require Public Relations help but nevertheless influence the way we told the story. Last two of the bible takesan implicit position. Parents are responsible for the godly education of their children so we do support biblebased schooling at home or at Public Schools parents think thats best for their situation we always acknowledge alternatives but we stillthink theres something the bible shows us theres something right and something wrong. Class iii, partisans on both sides can scoot picture versus the onlycareful study leads to biblical conclusions. One of the things we talk about showing concern for the unborn, uneducated, unemployed, the unchurched, the unfashionable but whats most important is not whether well we feel like we are helpingor hurting. All people are made in gods image with the capacity to be creative and productive to a greater or lesser extent. I think we find from both biblical teaching and experience that encouraging people not to work our arm often harmful rather than helpful and we come at it that way. We will acknowledge thisis a hard thing. What we do when theres a person at Union Station asking for money to give, to not to give. This is hard and requires experience and students probably get it wrong a lot of times but westill say that biblical teaching thats useful on this and then we come to class for where theres no clear biblical path. We come into it with significant historical experience and an understanding of human nature. We should not trust tyrants to honor our peace treaties. We see teaching from the bible about being suspicious in those circumstances. Its from communistexperience i learned that personally. Theres no clear historical or psychological trail but theres experience so lets just be wary. I could choose one particular example because we are sitting here just off capitol hill, we should not expect efficiency from big bureaucracies. Thats something i learned from history that somethings gained but somethings lost in that process and we should not be surprised when we have big plans and big projects and they turn out to be harmful rather than helpful and class vi, this is going over thewaterfall rapids, we are on our own. On specific Foreign Policy matters or trade agreements , classic rapids we balance different perspectives and art coverage might be similar to that of an ap story before the ap became politicized but a generation ago you would see that balancing of subjectivities and we will do that also. It will be different from that traditional approach. We try hard not to either overuse or underused scripture. When i first became a christian in 1976, one of the first things i saw going into church, 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 are on gods side, if you were for that you are on satans side or Something Like that and even that i think is pretty silly. There is no book of the panama can out in the bible and doesnt tell us what todo in some situations like that. We wont pretend to say we know what to do we may sometimes give our opinion but we say we dont know. Were not experts so weve been using it for 20 years and it helps us to avoid using the bible which was a tendency among theological conservatives or under using it which is a tendency among theological liberals so we tried to take strong stands where the bible is clear and we avoid doing that when the bible isnt and we have the opportunity to get things right by trying to practice biblical objectivity but christians are not immune to the temptations and pressures of journalists and that leads to my lastpoint number nine. As ji packer a great theologian summed up, god saves sinners and thats important. God is not saving good people or wonderfulpeople or holy people , god saves sinners. And writing is based on the fact that we are holy we are sinners, god is holy. Let the streets proclaim the sinfulness of man so biblical journalizing emphasizes gods holiness and simple us and we try to do this. Being very careful not to mischaracterize or abuse or think of our opponents as enemies because some of the people, this is the weaker of the prolife march, some of the strongest poled prolife people are people who are formally abortionists or proclaimers of abortion sogod saves sinners and we try to show this in our reporting in the world and we have a podcast. Of the world and everything in it that i recommend to you all if youre walking yourdog or doing stuff like that. We are starting some podcast series right now and since rob mentioned my writing on compassion and poverty, we have a series right now called effective compassion thats going on 12 episodes and i think episode for this week deals with changing washington so if you want to get a little bit of history, take a listen to that. Its about 20 or 25 minutes each episode and you put in effective compassion , putting the world and everything in it and you can listen to our podcast and our Religion Institute forcollege students and people up to age 30 or so , then the thing that i inordinately enjoyed, i enjoyed my teaching at the university of texas but when you see people for three hours a week for 15 weeks it doesnt have the intensity and you dont get to know the people in a classroom so weve done it 11 times now, we have a course that my wife and i teach in our living room in austin for 10 people each time and we have a very intensive week. Thursday friday saturday from 8 30 until late at night and then sunday people really do need a day of rest and then we go again on monday, tuesday and wednesday and its been the best teaching experience of my life because we get to know the people in our house and so forth and whole bunch become correspondence for world and some of them go and become reporters. Those are usually people in their 40s who have been very successful in their occupations but our board and either their board or they just want to serve god in a different way if any of you are interested in that you can look on our website at world journalisminstitute. Org. Or world ji. Org and with that i will ostentatiously show my civility by stopping and listening to your questions or comments sothank you very much. [applause] marvin, thank you so much. I encourage you to keep pick up a copy of the book in the lobby. I have a couple questions i wanted to ask you and i want to pick up whereyou left off at the end. Specifically when it comes to the next generation of journalists. You obviously have devoted your self to this particular and never, to make sure that they are better prepared. We also live in a time where trust in institutions has reached historic lows and journalism is no exception so a twopart question, do you see that changing . Do you see that faith or trust in journalism going back to the level and has been in the past and what is your message either with her there in their mid40s or coming out of college , to do a better job in their own careers . You asked will this ever change, ever is a very long time. Will it change in any relatively short period of time like the nextseveral decades . I amhopeful. I am hopeful because we had other situations where journalists, trust in journalists was almost nonexistent in journalism popped back. Just to give you one example and ill bring a couple books on early journalism history, journalists back in the 1600s and 1700s were really hacked 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 them to be truthful, it was Public Relations pure and simple and in the 1730s in new york there was a fellow named john peter zander who decided to tell the truth and he was a dutch reformedchurch was there , on sunday he heard about telling the truth and he didnt want to Say Something different the next day so he started telling the truth and the governor from new york who among other things stole sheep from various settlers, he told the truth about this guy and of course he went to jail because he was breaking the law at that point, custom and law was the journalists job was to make the king or governor look good. Youngers with it and spent eight months or so in prison then there was a trial and at the trial his lawyer a fellow named Andrew Hamilton from philadelphia proclaimed that the jury should become what later in other trials became a runaway jury. Regardless what the law said hamilton talked about how elijah in the bible spoke truth to power in ahab and other people did the same and john peters unger was doing the same to this vile governmentand should not be in prison. The jury became a real jury. They took their own liberty in their hands by saying not guilty and then when asked by the chief justice who was presiding how can we say that, they kept saying not guilty because if they gave a reason they would be in directopposition to the law. That changed , that started to change journalistic practice. After that there were no journalists sued for libel by the royal governor. 40 years later you have an American Revolution led by a failed ruler, a very good journalist named samuel adams and he had total trust by the people in boston, some more than others because they saw him not as the hack but someone who told the truth. There was an enormous change at that point and journalism was in high repute from the colonial period forthe next few decades , started to change back a little bit and popped back in the early 1900s when there were muckrakers who mocked rick but nevertheless were looked on as honest people and often they work so you see this roller coaster but if there are more journalists to become known for telling the truth and sprinkling salt rather than sugar that could happen. Lets see whats onyour mind, i have otherquestions id like to ask. Lets start in the back. I am joe start from the fund for america studies and i run our Journalism Program there and i wanted to get your opinion on what you think of undergraduate Journalism Schools and what advice you would give to students who want to study journalism and also im curious about secular publications out there, are there any you admire or you think are doing adecent job now . Let me deal with that last question first. We have at world lots of fans and sometimes they will invite me or come up and say to me i love world, i love your podcast, its the only thing i read or listen to. And my response to that isa little bit of horror. I mean, im glad they liked it but i suggest no, im glad you read it but you should read some other things to and i used to say you should read the New York Times or washington post. I dont do that anymore because its become so propagandistic. It was put in a mild way,now its just filled with fluff. A liberal publication i recommend is the atlantic. Because its coming from so many different worldviews and they are good writers,theyre good reporters. And ive met some of them and their good people even though we disagree on this so thats my usual thing we sayread world but read the atlantic also. Thats also what you can read on the website and so forth and as far as Journalism Schools i started teaching journalism at the university of texas in 1983 and even though they knew, i was explicit about this, im coming from a christian perspective, they thought that was okay because they actually, i had been a reporter and i spoke their language and could understand and i was on the side of journalism with reporters. I wasnt calling them enemies even when we disagree. What happened and at that point the university of texas journalism school, the professors were mainly old reporters. Texas liberal reporters which made them trusting and cranky but i enjoy them and they tolerated me. That changed over the yearsso that when i left there in 2008 , and relinquished my tenure which amazed and horrified some people but it was a good decision over the past dozen years, teaching at the World Journalism Institute is much better but by the time i left the professors were marxist either hard or soft marxists who had no journalism experience what had phds in Mass Communications and they lead in theory in a twisted way but they didnt do journalism. There were still a couple who had been reporters and believed in writing and reporting and getting out and not sucking on toms and creating propagandistic pieces but mostly it was just pretty bad so it was no fun anymore. I dont know intimately any other secular Journalism Program. I wouldnt be surprised if similar things have happened elsewhere so what i recommend for journalism education, these are christian places i know which is not everyones cup of tea but Patrick Henry in virginia an hour west of here has some Good Journalism teaching. I have one student who is dissertation i supervised, less sellers, the college in iowa has been teaching for by our former Washington Bureau chief who as journalists tend to do you get tired after a while and you go teach and i could recommend a couple others but those are the 2 i likedbest. But its hard for students. So here and ill come over this way. Reverend michael unger, i represent ministry of the state, a nondenialministry in dc so two questions , e youve all levin came up with a book talking about institutions and how theyve moved to platforms and the negative impact that has had in peoples perceptions of the benefits of an institution being formative and now preformative. So id love to hear your thoughts on that. But then when you mention the fact that you came to christianity through communism , 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 in a christian publication . Its interesting, i read hydes book which he wrote when i was a christian andim not familiar with his later experiences. If you write something about this . When i believe was scheduledto be published , he declined allowing it to be republished because he said i no longer adhere to that because he wrote in dedication and leadership, he felt like christianity was a way to effect the change he wantedin the world and just didnt see it coming. Thats sad to hear. And we do have lots of biblical admonition do not become weary in doinggood and so forth. But sometimes when i tell my reporters we have again, we are conservative but we differ from certain movements in some ways. We tend to be proimmigration and prorefugee and one of our brilliant young reporters has been covering this a lot and i think she gets weary and just got to keep at it. I could go on a lot about the platform question and its really hard by the way these days in publishing books. I see publishers including christian publishers not so much the quality of the book but the quality ofthe platform you have. And thats a mess in some ways but things take along time. Ill tell you, i flew in last night and just as coming from reagan airport, you all have the experience area you come in and you see the sky lit up , the same thing all the time, the big things. The lincoln memorial, jeffersonmemorial, washington monument, the capital and so forth but people change. Last night , i grew up in boston at fenway park and spent so much time there that these days when i go back there i feel as if im walking along through the tunnels and so forth and i feel like going around the corner imgoing to see myself when i was 10 years old. Just that familiar but that weirdat the same time. The first time i ever spent any more than just a day here was in 1970 when i was 20 years old and this is a big, big antivietnam war demonstration and the most memorable thing there was that we had a demonstration one day and on monday we were supposed to go and lobby are members of congress so my roommate and i at the end of the day hadnt had much success. We went over to the house of the office of the speaker at the house at that time, John Mccormick and lo and behold this was about 5 15, 5 30 and the secretary let us in to see him and we had an enjoyable half hour. He just enjoyed these kids coming in trying to give him some wisdom at the end of that experience he took us into the House Chamber and said and there were four of us there and said heres my chair that i said in. Im going to go now and have dinner with my wife which i never miss dinner with my wife but take thischair and you can spin around a little bit and enjoy that and we all did. We thought of ourselves as revolutionaries but we were little kids there in the chair and we all get tired of things, we may not have as long of an Attention Span as needed. I wrote a book on the history of abortion in 1992 and im updating that now so ive just been reading about some of the people in the Prolife Movement for 40 years and on friday at the march my wife and i will be walking with a couple of people who are there all the timeand do something for our podcast. It takes incredible patience and resolve and in or missed frustration sticking at it year after year. Its thegrace of god to be able to do that. Back when i went, i could go on this way. Im just impressed as a journalist, i tend to have a mediumsized Attention Span which means i dont want to spend my whole life on one issue but im impressed with people in the Prolife Movement, im impressed with bob rector here was on the welfare stuff for decades. Thats really incredible perseverance and i think it requires that type of patients as opposed to the idea of were going to find a platform and sell some books and go on with my life. I admire the people who stick to doing this and its the grace of god. Hi, Michael Leeson with the Charlemagne Institute and former world correspondent. Several years ago you developed several periodicals for younger readers, could you explain the rationale behind that . Actually, that preceded world. That started in 1980. How many of you when you are in elementaryschools saw a publication called the weekly reader . Bunch of people. Joe wanted to set up something that was a christian alternative to the weekly reader. I grew up on the weekly reader not that it was evil but he was hoping for something more and thats what he set up to serve that purpose and its still going and we will start doing some videos i think this fall for use in Christian School classrooms so still there. When world started out, it was losing money like crazy and the kids papers were making money and now its somewhatthe other way around. World is not making money like crazy that we do have one or twodollars left at the end of the year. We tried to put them together and get them to breathe but thats part of the enterprise , to try to help kids develop a news habit. Greg piper with politics, i interviewed you 20 years ago i a journalist. I wanted to ask you about business balls seemed like a lot of the problems in journalism is the way that you make money on it. It does not reduce Good Journalism, what is the path forward thatpeople dont think as much about . Journalism in the us has had many different models. Originally use a newspaper they they would be funded by, they didnt call them subscribers, they called them patrons and then it began an advertising based model, youve got to have circulation to sell people those ads but we were turning out to the early model of donors, funders, nonprofit organizations very often and the publications that dont have, that dont even have one big sugar daddy or a lot of small ones are in trouble and the big sugar daddy has its own set of problems. Just bezos of the washington post, thats trouble but thats what world is doing is having lots of different donors, we have more money from advertising or subscriptions and thats what im recommending people. There are 2 people who graduated from our World Journalism Institute who have set up their own applications. One in a small city in california and one trying to make it in a big city in austin providing an alternative and i believe they are either in or would be moving to a nonprofit model with donors and if you have lots of donors and you are free from having to do and follow one person or small group of people, thats our goal to have diversified getting but you have to show people in the community its worth supporting and now here youll hear listener supported or world radio and in a way npr is our model except npr is mostly listener supported and some government money still and they do such a firstclass job of what they do from their worldview that we try, if you listen to it its npr as opposed to christian radio as such. Id like to ask you to follow up on that, the daily signal has a similar model, its always the foundation that allows us to have that Financial Independence but also the reporting on those issues but my question for you is you have been editor in chief long enough to see the changes in terms of distribution of thecontent. Social media plays a much bigger role and significant role today. How have you been able to adapt as you said in your talk grow world in this time seems many legacy news organizations are struggling . The question and im not very good at it. Im thinking of when i came to washington as a young guy, im an old guy now and im just behind the curve. Yesterday i was talking with one of our World Journalism Institute people and saying i looked at facebook and we need to refresh that, its a little older stuff we have here we have people applying and he said no, we still have our facebook thing but thats not most of whatwe do and he gave me the names of a couple other things. Somethings i have heard of like instagram and things and one i hadnt heard of but what we do is we have young people who know stuff. I still tend to like email which is the way god made it as opposed to something else. Im an old email folkie at this point. [inaudible] biblically and as a christian how have you viewed and covered the impeachment of William Jefferson clinton and now the impeachment of donald john trump. Thats an interesting question on the question of enormous interest to our readers. We said in 2016 that we considered both our president and Hillary Clinton unfit to be president. And in saying that about donald trump we were basically saying he had not shown the character that we hoped a president would show. Also he did not seem to be a person in careful control of his emotions which also is useful to havein any leader. And the other thing at that point, im surprised that trump has been as conservative as he has been. I didnt expect that either so we said they are bothunfit. We had one cover with Hillary Clinton with the grim reaper wearing a button im with her 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 from office. We were all hit on impeaching him because depending on what the definition of impeachment but we hope he would do the honorable thing and resign from office and we figured since we did that with a democrat, we should try the same standard for 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 instructions, we lost some advertising but this is something everyone in our staff well, 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 bepresident , 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 decisionmaking process. But thats at a micro level and i tend to in my minds eye, i havent written about this but im still thinking its true but heres where im going. Theres microeconomics and macroeconomics which is a useful distinction and in talking about Something Like evolution people make a distinction between microevolution andmacro evolution and thats a useful distinction. Trump remains micro unfit but macro, again, there are some differences we have with him and im speaking i think for others as well as myself but overall hes doing a pretty decent job in a very tough environment so this leaves me in a certain of difficulty. What were doing is were not making any cosmic pronouncements, were going issue by issue and where probably going to go about 5050 on trump. Were not part of the cheerleading, were also not part of the rampant and vicious attacking that goes on. He has a very hard job, you the president of all of usand we respect him. Insofar as the president keeps his job these days, in some ways these nominator and chief, youve done a good job of that, not only on the Supreme Court but through the judicial system so hes achieved a lot. Some of the regulations is gotten rid of our one that deserved to be buried. So we just want to continue reporting actions primarily, not just words. Praising all the good actions hes had an whether we will make any general statements, im not sure but its a tough situation. I am certainly, i never was and i am still not part of the never traversed because just like never is a long time. So and the people who get, who think that, the people who theres one christian leader who referred to donald trump as the greatest christian president ever, i disagree with that and i also disagreewith people who say is the worst president ever. We had a lot of far worse ones and i kind of enjoy in a way, one of the things you have in washington is a service which is funding journalism and i kind ofenjoy trumps tweeting. So i am not giving you a good answer, you can see im staggering around here and what would you say since you asked the question . I was a never trump are who now thinks i agree with much of what hes done but i also believe he really isnt morally ortemperamentally for the presidency. Basically, we just felt at world, i felt and other editorial people felt that as a magazine, we need to be evenhanded basically. So we didnt 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 its a mistake to be calling him the greatest christian president but the it was a very hard decision for people to make. Maybe not as hard as this time since the Democratic Party has moved so far to the left but depending who they nominate i think its likely they will nominate a person who is macro unfit to be president and perhaps micro as well. The problem at the Supreme Court is theyve taken so much power into itself that the nominator in chief position is a crucial position so anyway, im troubled by this. I suspect some of you are troubled as well. Life is full of trouble and its part of realizing that this is a world that is a wonderful place but its full of sin and we have to try to walkour way through without harming. We will take one final question and marvin is going to stay and books and afterwards virginia will comment. My name is maggie, i work at heritage so with social media, twitter, it seems like everybody has become a journalist. You see that asa boon or a threat to traditional journalism . Thats a good question in the sense of be careful what you wish for or pray for. I grew up at a time in which there was little , edition in journalism, cities had one newspaper 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 and i still am glad to see theres much greater diversity. Its wonderful that someone goes through the World Journalism Institute and he wants not just to be a reporter but an entrepreneur and thats terrific. We had that opportunity at american journalism and the problem comes as there really is so much fake news out there. And at least in the old days with the swan fish liberalism , at least there was some check on just putting up stuff that was absolutely factually untrue and that check no longer exists because so many people are no longer reporters but just people who take other stuff and retweet it and so forth. All sorts of lies just get passed around like crazy so something lost and something gained but overall i still like it but there are problems. And problems among reporters and thats why we tried to stress that weather, and this is why i can enjoy reading the atlantic, because its a different worldview that i see them as reporters and trying to tell the truth and not just be propagandists. Thanks for sharing with us your wisdom and advice on journalism. Really thoughtful book and your remarks today, we appreciate it. We appreciate your leadership of world and we thank you. We hope you will come back to the Heritage Foundation in the future. Please join me in thanking marvin olasky. If youd like to purchase a copy of the book they are available outside and marvin will stay up here on the stage for signing them. [inaudible] watching book tv on cspan2 with top nonfiction books and authors every weekend. Tv television for serious