Transcripts For CSPAN3 Key Capitol Hill Hearings 20160706

People dont listen in the same day that something is produced, like a lot of other mediums. But what has thrived in its place is so heartening to me. Its context. Its explanation. Its narrative. And a lot of it has gotten us far past the sort binaries of who is winning the horse race today, whose got the cycle down. Not to denigrate that because there is part that is really interesting to me. The Washington Post is doing with their series president ial, where they go through and talk about each and every one of the president s and their challenges and their story. Mike and the economist are doing a show called special relationship, which is really fantastic, which has a political reporter from the uk talking to one here in the u. S. And if anybody has traveled overseas recently and tried to have a political conversation with somebody who is not american, you will know exactly how interesting that can be. And the show really gets at that. And i would just say, coy talk about this for hours. But i would say in my mind, one of the best political exchanges that happened in this entire year happened on the podcast another round. You guys ever heard of the podcast another round . Its a chat show hosted by buzzfeed hosted by two women of color. And they got secretary Hillary Clinton to come and be on the show. It was the only podcast she participated in this election cycle. And they pushed her farther than anybody else i had seen in any other medium. They got her to talk about her husbands mandatory minimum sentencing law in a way that nobody else had even been able to come close, because they didnt couch it in politics. They bluntly asked her a question and they got to this incredibly real, heartening place. To me that was incredibly encouraging. Because these things are catching on like wildfire. The audience is younger, browner and really engaged. And what theyre choosing to engage with is conversation, not punditry. To me thats a great first start. I think pick up on that, i want to go to liz. In one of the early conversations, we had about what we wanted to talk about today. We talk about some of the opportunities that covering trump presents. And sort of how that is even with some of the really tough statements he has made about immigrants and other groups, that that presents an opportunity to discuss these issues too. So can you talk a little bit about how you have been getting into that . Yeah, i think its been a really hard election to cover, for all of the reasons that weve laid out. And try and keep myself motivated, maybe its just my Glass Half Full approach they have to the world. But try and see him not and him being trump, not as a problem, but as an opportunity, to have conversations about the things that he is talking about. Because trump is not we were talking about this earlier, is not just like i dont think even think trump is the problem. He is a symptom of the problem. He is saying things that a lot of people are feeling and are thinking. And he is saying them out loud. So i think its offered a really Good Opportunity to talk about how we feel about immigration, how we feel about women, how we feel about all of these things. How we feel about muslims, and why some of those assumptions and some of those stereotypes are wrong. And are actually bigotry. What try and do with 2016 which is a show i host on vox is take the camera off the candidates and turn it on the people and turn tonight issues. The perfect example was actually last night. The Senate Democrats did this amazing filibuster, this 13 or 14hour filibuster until 2 00 a. M. Around gun violence and just wanting to push very common sense gun security reform. And so they did this amazing filibuster, and i turn on cnn, and they are they have four people talking about what trump said. And im trying to find this filibuster. Why cant i find this filibuster . So we use this program called slack at vox, like many other companies, its a chat system. Its nine p. M. Or 10 00 p. M. On the east coast. We need to get this up. So we put it on Facebook Live. We created there Facebook Live of the filibuster. And we reached 3. 7 Million People. It was our biggest Facebook Live ever. And so many people were like thank you for showing this. Thank you for and people were tuning in and commenting. And we kept it going because there were so many people watching. And i actually think it broke, like it broke down because there were too many people watching. Anyway, all of this to say that, yeah, i think Digital Media generally is offering a different conversation and position on all of these issues and conversations that we really need to be having. Well, and alicia, im sure obviously fusion has been experimenting a lot with Facebook Live. And its sort of taking broadcasts into a new form. It feels different, but were wrestling with a lot of the same desires to show, right . And to sort of get inside there and tell stories visually, right, not just in terms of text and other things. So this year, what are you seeing that is different with broadcasts . How is it how does it when you think about producing broadcast journalism, what are you thinking about, especially were going into the conversations. Like im sure youre having a lot of conversations about how you do that in this space. Im in a unique slice of the broadcast world because were trying to broadcast to millennials, the youngest most diverse generation in American History, the generation we all know is cordcutting. What a challenge there. And going into this election, i think there was a lot of concern that following the two elections of president obama that there was going to be a dropoff in the interest of young people. Well, that could not have been less true. In as much as i dont think we were prepared for donald trump, i dont think people were prepared for Bernie Sanders and for the extent to which this generation was going to feel the burn. So there was a lot of attention, a lot of enthusiasm, and candidates do many more press avails than we ever could have anticipated, right . Normally you get a handful of debates or town halls every cycle. It feels like its a wall. Every night there is a new debate, new town hall. I think that allowed a lot of networks to experiment with different formats for us. We had the opportunity to have Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Martin Omalley when he was still in the race oneonone in iowa talking about issues specific to the Hispanic Community and the African American community. And we got to topics that ordinarily you never get to get to because youre assuming there will only be five of these opportunities and you need to cover all of the, quote unquote baseline issues. At the same time that there is this wonderful opportunity on the tv side because there is so much interest both from the candidates and from constituencies, there is this reality that now people are consuming so much more of their news online. And so that means its not just enough to report about the news or to do this form of punditry. You really have to be doing deep dives on issues, on stories, and they have to be characterdriven. Which is wonderful if someone is a storyteller. But you to be aware always that youre producing both for television to take up the time that you have promised the cable networkious will deliver them. But also to think as youre telling that story how youre going to tell it online. I think one of the mistakes that people made in the early days of that was assuming coy do a sevenminute Television Package and just cut that down two minutes and put it on facebook. Thats never going to work. It has to be uniquely composed for the platform youre going to deliver it to. And so i think that there is a lot of learning going on in realtime. There is certainly exceptions to that. Like im sure you all saw Anderson Cooper on cnn had this exchange with pam biondi in florida that has gone viral. Thats an example of a television clip just being cut down butch thats an amazing moment of unscripted, unprompted live television. If youre actually producing something that is storytelling, it has to be told different on every medium. And i think the final thing i would say is already you see innovation in part because of, you know, Donald Trumps habit of calling out the press and refuting statements that he has made. You now see msnbc and cnn which have to do 24 7 coverage doing fact checks in realtime as they interview donald trump because its the only way that they can keep up with the interview and keep their viewers informed. Thats something you have never seen before. Right. It used to be like Fact Checking was like a nonprofit enterprise which happen lead days after a debate or something. Maybe if you get around to it, youll see what was true and what was. No its like part of our daily diet of understanding now. Katherine, youre at politico for seven years during the explosion of that brand and its domination, and i think like really setting the bar for what doing realtime news in the political space looked like. I also worked there and learned a lot about that kind of pace, which is very challenging to keep up with. Inextricably linked to the brand. So much they really changed the way i think news became disseminated around politics. And i think of it like no scoop was too small. Right. And then you started seeing as other platforms and companies emerged like mike, like fusion, and were all trying to get in that space a little bit, and you saw the New York Times start to get faster and faster, everybody is trying to be fast all the time. And i think politico really started that, especially in politics. So what has the company done to go beyond that . Sure. Because obviously thats not you cant just sustain you hit scale, right . And you cant just sustain on that. So what are some of the things this year that politico has been reaching in to continue to grow and innovate around the political space . Yeah, no. I think youre right. So politico started in 2007, which was a unique opportunity because thats when people could start the 24hour news cycle you. Could be reached on your devices. And then pretty quickly other news organizations caught up. So one of the best lessons that the founder, jim and jim harris who were initially with the Washington Post and saw this shift in the industry coming is that they taught us that your worst enemy is complacency, both as an organization, as an individual, and so that they knew even though politico still does generate revenue from its daily print edition that it basically serves capitol hill and that congressional audience, as well as a magazine, they set into place pretty early on things that have been helpful for this current election. And i just want to talk about a few of the platforms because they have been successful, and were really smart about always innovating, always experimenting. Some of them some of the experiments i wouldnt say failed, but there are a lot of Lessons Learned from that. So the first one was in 2011. Again, it was primarily Online Advertising and print advertising. And we started politico pro, which is our policy arm. Its behind a pay wall, a subscription based, and its really a mustuse tool for policy professionals, not just in washington now, but through our states expansion of people who need intel in realtime about these niche policy areas. And even from health to energy to financial services, name it. And so that helped offer another revenue stream. Another thing that we have seen that i think a lot of other Media Companies have started to utilize as well is live events. And in 2012, we created an events team that is now 15 people. They are able to produce 150 events a year, which is pretty impressive. Most of them are sponsored. And we are very proud that we did not adopt the pay to play, meaning the sponsor does not have a seat on the panel. And they cant do opening remarks. And then so those are just some examples. Now in the current day, weve been talking about caitlin in terms of podcasting. I think politicos biggest asset sets people. And the personalities, the brands going back to that events is that its a live extension of our journalism. Glen plush who is a respected White House Correspondent launched message off podcasts which has been hugely successful not only in terms of audience and downloads, but also the type of guests he has been able to secure, one of which was president obama in the oval office. And then part of 2016 coverage, they launched the politico caucus, which is kind of a weekly insider survey of more than 300 people around the United States who are really plugged in, whether theyre politicians themselves or consultants or activists. And so with all these different platforms in terms of experimenting, the one mission that they all have is to break news. And another one we were talking about in terms of realtime, we also have an addition to these local bureaus. We started politico europe a year ago. And they have a big vote coming up on the 23rd about the eu referendum. And just today they launched an app that has live results, polling, and feedback. So it goes back to that founding principle about not being complacent. I think that its going to be interesting past this election. Politico has famously been banned from several trump events. Welcome to the club. Anybody else . Has anybody here been banned interest trump . My colleague ramos is on the list, yeah. Anyway, its been great obviously, as hillary mentioned, i have just recently moved on to work with matter studios. But im still rooting for politico. And im really excited to see what theyre going to create next just because its been such a variety of experiments that im very proud of. Sticking with like the youre talking about glenn thrush and his voice. I want to talk a little bit about people in this election who are covering and how its how weve seen the pool of reporters and voices expand this year i think. I also ran the 2012 coverage for yahoo news four years ago. So ive done that like people on charters and all of that. And we made a decision not to do that at fusion. And sort of look for new voices, Diverse Voices to elevate as part of our coverage. And caitlin, you mentioned the podcasting space being a space that is really receptive to people of color and other i mean maybe other voices we havent heard of before. I would just like to sort of see what you guys think about like what youve seen in terms of new voices, and has 2016 created opportunity for more voices we havent heard before . Because i still think of politics as being like a pretty white man dominated space. But i assembled this panel. So obviously there is hope for the future. So i mean, caitlin do, you want to talk about that for a second . Yeah. I think i would answer that question two ways. The first way is Digital Media by definition is much more inclusive. And i think all of us have at least at one point in our career either intern order set foot in or put in blood, sweat and tears in legacy media organizations. And legacy media organizations dont do the greatest job traditionally of being representative. And thats something that the Digital World does instantly. Because everyone is on the internet. And the barrier to access has dropped significantly. So in my space, when you talk about the kinds of values and the kinds of Success Stories that i was enumerating, storytelling, liz, you were talking about getting involved in peoples personal narratives, trying to find the people to focus on instead of just covering in a lot of cases like oh blif yating kind of politician. Those are stories that women in particular i dare say are better at telling. And i think the barrier to entry at least in my podcast landscape has dropped so significantly, people can get involved in the conversation in a way that, you know, they couldnt have in the last election cycle. And i think because the internet represents america much more than legacy media organizations represent america, diversity and inclusion and most importantly the two things together representation equal audience. If you show somebody enterprising that they can get an audience, theyll do whatever it takes to get that audience. I think some of the smarter organizations that im here on stage with are realizing that. And as a result are elevating people who are good at telling those kinds of stwhoerks are recognize opportunities, and who are part of the push towards being more representative of the kind of stories and the kind of people who should be more involved in the political conversation. So i think thats every part of us. And more representative of the electorate. Completely that. Is now going to be making decisions about who are president. Even as we stand here, this is an all female panel. I am hispanic. But were still missing voices here, right . Even as we do better, we know we have to do better. And one of the things i notice working in a diverse newsroom, i think sometimes you think diversity in terms of what you can see. But there are a lot of conversations that happen behind the scenes that i think are really important about which issues are important to cover, how you tell certain stories. Not just reporters, but opinionaters, right, whose opinion gets to be out there. What cutes the news. In as much as i think its whose name is in the by line and who gets to show up on screen, its also about the Production Team that is making really core decisions. How many rounds did you and i go over whether or not we should ask a question about reparations during our brown and black forum because it seemed radical there was a question of how much space. How in a hierarchy of issues do you place an issue that often does not get spoken about . And so the fact that you have a more Diverse Group of people making those decisions is really just good business. Can you also talk a little about the focus groups youve worked on this season . Because i think that was also i mean, a big effort to hear voices that you often dont get to hear in this space. Ive been traveling across the country, talking with my generation. So 18 to 34yearolds about the election. We did a focus group in new hampshire. We did a focus group in iowa of young republicans that absolutely called that caucus, which was crazy, because it was week out and they were telling me who was going to be number one two, and three. Weve done them with young latinos in vegas. Weve done them all over. I think when you talk about the most diverse generation in American History, we want to paint it as a monolith, right . Oh, millennials, theyre all this. No. Its really like every other generation, where you live, your ethnic group, your socioeconomic status, your level of education really finetunes the issues that you are interested in. You see incredible political fluidity within this generation. I just did a focus group that is going come out this week with never hillary democrats with never trump republicans. Have i young republicans that are going to vote for Hillary Clinton. Have i Young Democrats that will never vote for Hillary Clinton. This is so wild and yet predictable in the sense that this is a generation that has a skewed political party, does not want to be identified with labels, and has a very complex set of beliefs about policy and the direction america should be going in thats not about which candidate is cool, which is sometimes the way the media reports on it, but rather the realities of living in a generation where student debt becomes intertwined with your ideas about home ownership, about marriage, about employment and about retirement and security. I mean, this is just what happens to this generation is what is going to happen to america. And the sooner we can come to terms with that, the sooner we can begin building policy in politics that really supports that generation. Well, liz, what are you hearing when youre out talking to people . What do people want to talk about the most . I think they want to talk about issues, just like everyone else. I think theyre sick of hearing what theyre hearing on television. And not to bash cable news. I go on cable news all the time. And i talk about my opinion. And im very sorry you have to listen to me talk about it for that long. But unfortunately, thats what drives still i think a lot of mainstream coverage. And i think the fact that we have so many more women now working in the media and being reporters. I think nbc has an all female campaign trail they call them gladiators, i believe. And you know a thing or two about being called a gladiator. I think thats amazing. And i think that really changes the narrative. I mean, i went to my first Trump Press Conference a couple of months weeks ago. And he just won five primaries. Ted cruz had dropped out. And all these people were asking questions about that, right. Who is going to be your vp, what do you think about ted cruz. And i was like we have to talk about the fact that he said that hillary was using the women card. That morning he had gone on fox and he just sort of said that. And no one, because he says so many things in one day, was covering that. And i was like wait a minute. We need to talk about this. So i ended up asking being able to ask him that question. And that his response was very intense. Like i actually was just speechless by the pure amount of vitriol against her saying that she has it easier because she is a woman. Anyway, that led to a few weeks of that dominating the news cycle and that being a conversation, and us talking about the fact that the way that donald trump talks about women. So, yeah, it absolutely changes the way that we tell stories. And its important to remind that a women arent this niche part of the population. Were the majority of the population. Were a majority of the electorate. We cast most votes. And so new stories like can we have an all female ticket around Hillary Clinton, perhaps picking Elizabeth Warren as her vp. Its just a weird news story. Like its just weird. Most voters are female. So we dont most women dont have a problem with women. In leadership positions because a lot of us are in leadership positions. So i think its and that in part is powered by social media, powered by the digital road. I think to link what you guys both just said, and i should have said this earlier, because from covering these past three elections, who has it sounds simple, but who has the power to say this is the a story. This is not a story has radically shifted. And therefore the stories that were telling are radically shifting. And maybe not everyone has caught up to that because theyre not consuming in the same place that all of russ making them. That is the biggest shift. It sounds so simple, but its so powerful when youve been in a newsroom and youve been told by usually a male editor or somebody who comes from a totally different perspective than you do that thats not a story. Do you let it die . Do you fight for it . Now we have people that say oh, that is a story. Go. And people on twitter or facebook. If something is trending on facebook or twitter, mainstream cable news has to cover it. Speaking of filibusters, this was a couple years ago. But the wendy davis filibuster was a perfect example of that. Wendy davis did a 12hour filibuster about this abortion bill that was being passed in texas. Nobody again, cable news i believe was talking about Blueberry Muffins there was an actual screen shot of cnn talking about the calorie count of Blueberry Muffins while all of twitter was watching this filibuster, livestream was available. And the next day wendy davis who before then was a nobody in terms of mainstream coverage became this it was the front page of every newspaper. So there is a lot of power on social media. Ferguson happened the night that the white house was having a correspondents dinner. And i couldnt find it on tv. Right. On the social media front, we only have a couple of minutes left. But i was curious. We obviously its been a huge change to see how the campaigns are using social too. And sort of watching, i mean, we know how trump is using it. Its like his statements are coming out on twitter constantly. But we also had this great moment last week with Hillary Clinton responding to donald trump with her now infamous delete your account tweet. So i would i guess im curious from you guys what have there been other moments this cycle that have felt like just these epic social moments coming from the campaigns . It really feels like to me theyve empowered some people on the staffs to well, at least on hillarys staff, you know, i feel like trump is doing it all. It feels like he is actually doing it. But seeing the campaigns try to sort of catch up with vernacular on these platforms. Like do you think its going well . Weve also seen some miss some pretty bad moments too. Right . What was the worst moment this campaign on social . I think it was hillary. And thats the worst part. It was like a snap you remember chilling with chillary . Does anybody know what im talk about . Im in cedar rapids. And it was the worst snapshot. She looked like she looked like what my mom would look like if she tried to use snapchat for the first time. I love my mother, but she is definitely not familiar with the platform. So it was just so bad. And then she also had the best moment, right, that tweet. She told trump to delete his account, which is an inside joke for twitter when someone says something horrendous, but also not that horrendous. People say delete your account. And that was the most retweeted tweet that shes ever had. And one note is to say that social media is actually the only department in media where there are more women than men right now. And its the Fastest Growing portion of media. So i think there is i dont know who is on hillarys social media or on trumps. But the fact that it is a femaledominated space not just in users but on staffs is significant too. There is also a lot of funky stuff going on. I dont know how many of you follow all of the candidates on facebook. But like the number of times ill see and name someone Hillary Clinton or ted cruz be like tax plan called amazing. And then the link is to tedcruz. Com or to hillaryclinton. Com. And it really is a way of feeding supporters. But i do think that as voters and as consumers we need to keep a more skeptical eye on the source that were getting our information from since a lot of it is now selfgenerated by the campaigns. We have like two minutes left. Oh, there are questions. Okay. Yay cool. Well take them. Im puerto rican and i just recently founded Diversity Matters that is a political site. Im so glad to have four fairy god mothers on stage. And im from philadelphia to cover the convention. I would like to talk to you after the event. But my first question is when you get started, because i just got started in march, what was the most difficult obstacle to really get your voice across in a meaningful way . For me do you want me to repeat the question . I think you need to be micd. Okay. My question is when they started their careers, what was the biggest obstacle to get their voice heard in a meaningful way and get a political voice that is worthy and powerful . My First Campaign was in 2004. I had just gotten hired as 24yearold to work at the Washington Post. And i got to go to a lot of the debates and the spin rooms and stuff. So i had access. It sounds like youre going to the convention in philadelphia which is wonderful, because fwlg is a lot of it. For me, i remember being really intimidate and feeling im not quite shy. But i remember feeling like oh, i need to prove my chops. And i did. So i did hard work and all that stuff. But i also that is actually when i got into podcasting, creating multimedia, working on our desk of continuous news coverage. I gravitated towards the stuff personally that people werent necessarily doing because they all a wanted to be in the print edition of the newspaper on a1. And i thought to myself, this is a crowded field. Everyone in this entire Washington Post building thats existed for well beyond my life span is fighting for the same thing. Im going try to work over here and ask a bunch of people questions about this other stuff over here whether its video or podcast or headlines to update the website. Thats my particular experience is zig when other people are zagging. Because you can find some space for yourself to do experimentation and innovation, especially in the campaign space. Those moments are rare. So look for them and seize them, i guess. And the other ones . I have to agree. I think i was my biggest problem when i started. And i still am my biggest problem. I think i, especially with political coverage, my first time covering the election, i looked at what other people were doing, and i was trying to be as good as other people, instead of thinking about what different thing i could offer or bring to the table. And maybe the way that weve been doing and reporting politics all this time is maybe could be improved by difference and a different perspective. So valuing that i think is important. Do we oh, im sorry. Were all done. Im getting the signal. Thank you so much for your time. And thank you, panelists. Thank you. [ applause ] yes, backstage. [ applause ] thinking about using that podium. Its kind of tucked away. Ill come right out here in front of you all. So im supposed to talk about technology, the election, and whats changed over the last 20 years. And there is a lot of ways that you could get into this topic. Ive been in Digital Media for about ten years. I worked for wired. I worked for atlantic, getting up to be Deputy Editor there, working on all the different digital efforts, and then i came over to fusion and became editorinchief. Ive gotten to see over the last ten years the way that the media landscape has changed. What i want to do is give you one complete thought about this and hopefully youll be able to just have this very clear vision of both how our industry has changed and how thats impacted the way that this election in 2016 is playing out. So first, the baseline bit of knowledge is that facebook has changed everything in terms of the way that media is consumed. Its the most powerful information gatekeeper that the world has ever known. That includes the googles of the world. If you look now for most websites that you know, including even the New York Times, the Washington Post, and certainly all the magazines that you know, facebook is the dominant way that people read and see their work. And facebook obviously for a lot of people has become the dominant way that they also access news. Even people who dont necessarily think they are, they go on looking for pictures of their grandchildren, and they end up seeing all these articles. So that creates this enormous scale for facebook, right . Its over a billion people. Most people in the United States not only use it like every month, they use it every day. And so its become this enormous battleground for ideas. And that is really a difficult thing. Because unlike the traditional media sources that weve known that we can kind of understand their institutions and the way that they work, facebook is a totally different beast, right . Its a combination not just of the software of facebook, which organizes and ranks what you see, but its also all of the people both, you know, just individuals as well as the media organizations that are working to use facebook as well as advertisers. And all these things kind of come together in really complicated ways. And so when facebook, which they do a lot, tweaks one thing, like one little tiny thing, for all the media producers, its incredibly discombobulating. It changes the way that we produce information. Everything from the way headlines work. Perhaps youve noticed that headlines look a lot different than they did five years ago. Thats mostly due to facebook. To the kind of images people use on stories there is all kinds of testing infrastructure. Sometimes you see that using one persons face versus another persons face might tempt ten times more people to click on that version of the post. All of these things are going into the way that youre seeing the news. So the dominant thing that has really happened to constitutions at an institutional level is theyve been pulled apart. So before if you read something, an article in a magazine, you said oh, yeah, i read this in rolling stone. Now people say oh, yeah, i saw it on facebook. So the brand equity of a lot of Media Publications is really hard to keep ahold of because people just think oh, i saw it on facebook or i saw it on twitter, i saw it wherever it was. And instead of people reading in a bundle like in little packages that you can add context around one big story, people instead are reading in a stream, usually on an app on a device like this or on a phone. And i think that that has made a lot of publications very different from what they would be before. They also reach many more people than they used to. Like the biggest magazines reach a million or two people in a month. But many, many, many websites reach 10 or even 20 or 30 Million People. And that just leads to a very different kind and very different kind of publication. For most publications, what they are now is what works on their Facebook Page. Its that dominant of a driver of traffic to the media ecosystem broadly. And what that means in a lot of cases, you end up targeting narrow and narrower slices of your audience that you know exactly want to read one particular kind of thing. And i think that that is a new phenomenon in the world. Meanwhile, at the same time thats happening for the publications, on the sources of journalism side, you know, the powerful, the famous, the celebrities, they dont need us as much as they need to, right . Theyve got facebook. Theyve got twitter. Theyve got snapchat. They go direct to their audiences. And the deal that has been struck in journalism since as long as there have been publishers and distributors of media is just simply that you need our audiences, and we need your information that you have. And what youve seen is that really, really, really start to break down. There is actually a fascinating article by a guy named john herman who is now at the New York Times writing about media. He is working for another site called the all, if you want to find this story. And he called the reaction inside Media Companies to whats happening, he called it access panic. Because previously if you wanted to get photos of a celebrity and put them into and show them to an audience, that was a really valuable thing for a celebrity magazine to do. Now they just put it on instagram, and everyone is seeing it on instagram. And their audiences, the celebrities themselves or in some case powerful politicians, their audiences are already much larger than most of the publications that might actually run those same photos or run information about that person. And so the balance of power has really, really shifted between publications and politicians. And between News Networks and between politicians and celebrities and other people too. But specific to this, politicians. Which brings me to someone everybody likes to talk about, donald trump. Right . We all know that donald trump goes direct to people through his twitter feed. Some people have asked just rhetorically whether donald trump would be the republican nominee if twitter didnt exist. And its just like an a interesting thing to contemplate, right . Because it has been his primary means of outreaching communication with his audiences. And the people that want know what he has to say as well as the people who dont want to know what hazy to say. Hes hes interesting because hes kind of to me almost like a tracer of what might happen for the future of the media ecosystem, right . He is showing us what these dynamics can look like when you have someone who is really, really good at playing within this new media ecosystem. And of course this is the first election that weve experienced the conditions that we have now. But its certainly not going to be the last. And though things will change, i think things are a lot more likely to look like this than they looked like 20th century, a few broadcast networks and big newspaper. So one of the things ive been thinking about this and thinking about donald trump, but other people too that ill mention in a second is that, you know, everyone recognizes that being telegenic is a thing. Some people are really good on screen. You just put them in front of a camera, and suddenly Everyone Wants to watch that thing. We need like that same kind of word, but for what happens on social media. And im going to dont write this down as im suggesting this word. Its a terrible word. But just so you understand, its like socialgenic. Its like a quality you create lots of engagement, that means comments, likes shares, on facebook and other social networks. When people write about you, when you say things. And there are some people who just have this quality, absolutely independent of Everything Else that theyre doing. Lena dunham is like that. But maybe the most fascinating example is ayesha curry. Im from the bay area. Im a warrior fan and all these things. When ayesha curry does almost anything this is steph currys wife there are huge social blowup all over the media. I cant really define character in person is. There is this that really exists. On the democratic side to take it to the election, many publications learned that Bernie Sanders was socialgenic. There was a lot of him particularly relative to what you saw on television networks. I think this concept, it is very important for understanding what has happened with donald trump. Ill borrow a little bit from the 20th century field that people dont talk a lot about called cybernetics. It predated what a lot of people think about the internet. The study information flow and networks. And one of the things that they talked about, that networks had certain kinds of properties and one property of certain types of networks is it would get too much. It would get run away positive feed back and i dont mean positive feed back as in good job. They meant it as a technical math ma mathemetical things. Think of it as a herd of cows. If one starts running, the others start runs. That is mathamatical feed back. That is exactly what is happening with donald trump in the Current Media eco system. So when you write something about donald trump, it generates engagement which drives traffic to different websites which then also means that individuals who are posting those articles and they see that people comment on all of the donald trump articles, post more donald trump articles and those get fed back into facebook itself which software looks at it and says oh, donald trump articles gets lots of engagement so you get these mutually reenforcing systems that just say show more donald trump and there is no, there is no breaks built into our Current Media ecosystem. It is people looking at numbers and saying we have to do more donald trump, we need to post more donald trump. I dont mean just social Media Companies, i mean people at large out there engaged in discussion on social media sites. And so the next thing you know, what weve had happen with donald trump is not only did he get incredible amount of coverage on Television News and a large part for some of the dynamics were talking about here, but enormous coverage within the Digital World. And regardless of what you think about donald trump, i think it is actually kind of a dangerous thing to have certain figures that can essentially create run away feed back within the system without the checks and balances that the media system used to have in the past. So i think for us, thinking about you know, fusion and thinking about, you know, journalists of many stripes, particularly thinking about my own team. We sort of an audience of young, diverse millennial people. Many of whom feel directly or indirectly targeted by donald trump. And i think one of the things that weve tried to think about is how do we, not that we want to stop donald trump, but how do we stop playing into that run away feed back that you see in the media ecosystem right now. For us, what that means isnt that were going to stop writing about donald trump or only write about Hillary Clinton or start writing tons of things about the libertarian or green party candidates, but it just means that we want to take the trump attention bubble and start trying to redirect it into issues that we think are important to the audiences that we serve. So instead of necessarily following the immigration line that donald trump may be talking about, we may talk about other types of policies and things that could happen around immigration, for example. I think the other really important thing is remember i was saying earlier that because publications are so dependant on facebook that they take to their Facebook Page and start microtart gettinmicr microtargeting certain portions of their audience. This is for the black member of the audience, the jewish members of the audience, the mexican audience and they tend to get narrower and narrower into the niches and it takes away from the idea of a Common People who are all trying to make decisions together about the way of the world should work. Instead the stories go into a narrow slice to activate those people very narrowly. So i think what were really trying to do and what i think were going to need more of in the future of journalism is trying to rebuild these sort of atomized and micro targeted audiences into a larger group of people who actually care about each others issues. And i think that is really the only way that we can build a polody that can stand up this strange new media ecosystem that weve somehow magically created. Thats it. Thank you very much. Cspans washington journal, live every day with news and policy issues that impact you. And coming up wednesday morning, Texas Republican Congress Louie Gohmert will discussion about the decision on Hillary Clinton. Michigan democratic congresswoman will talk about the flint water crisis, the congressional response to the orlando Mass Shootings and the president ial campaign. Watch washington journal beginning live at 7 eastern wednesday morning. Join the discussion. Our road to the white house coverage continues with the Democratic National Committee Platform committee taking place live in orlando friday, july 8th starting at 3 00 p. M. Eastern and continuing saturday, july 9th at 9 00 a. M. Eastern. Committee members will debate and vote on the democratic partys platform for this years elections. Live coverage on cspan, cspan radio and cspan. Org. Now, a panel of former government officials and journalists look into the causes of Political Polarization in america. Well hear from former rnc chairman haley barbour, former Clinton White House Press Secretary mike mccurry and Brett Stephens from the wall street journal. This is just over an hour. Well it is great to see you all here this afternoon. Thank you for joining us and thank you so much to the Dallas Morning News for hosting such a remarkable event. It is true, it came up earlier today, questions of diversity in the newsroom, diversity on the panels and it is not always easy to embrace all sorts of diversity in any event but i want to celebrate this event for doing a remarkable job for embracing ideological diversity. It is terrific to be building at an event cohosted, cosponsored by the george bush library, the lbj foundation. It is remarkable. I want to put you out of your spence. Can democracy survive . Yes. Okay . So, the question i think were probably all going to be talking about today is how . I mean, first of all, how bad is it actually . Do we really think there is an issue here and if we do, what do we do about it . We all know a couple of basic facts, for example, there is the shift in how much members of each party view each other unfavorably. In 1994, 16 of democrats viewed republicans unfavorably, in 2013 it was 38 . On the other side of the aisle it was 17 of republicans viewed democrats unfavorably in 1994, now it is 43 . Perhaps the more Interesting Data point is the one that suggests the issues are no longer idealogical but a matter of life style and identity. The fact that in 1960, 4 of democrats and 5 of republicans would have disapproved of their child marrying someone from the other party, okay . But what are those numbers now . 33 of democrats would disapprove of their child marrying a republican and 49 of republicans would disapprove of their child marrying a democrat. So, i pulled out some of the fun facts but nolan, you studied this for a living. Is polarization real . I think it is true that polarization is real. One of the ways that political scientists studied this over a much longer history than the one that danielle describes is to look at patterns of voting in congress. A best measure on how partisan or bipartisan or National Institutions have been overtime. The headline fact is that the levels of bipartisan ship in congress now are at the lowest levels since reconstruction. So to put that into perspective, a party system based on the regional cleavages of a just resolve civil war had more bipartisanship than the current congress. Now, polarization has not been a congress in the history. Through much of the 20th century it wasnt that way at all. There were large blocks of conservative democrats that were republicans. They compromised on the important land mark pieces of legislation in the 20th century. We have seen over the past of the 40 years, roughly from the late 1970s through the current, a large deterioration in the level of partisan bipartisan cooperation and i think it has serious consequences for the governing of our society. And what do you think happened, nolan . How do you explain this . That is one of the kind of core academic mysteries at this point as to why a very, you know, bipartisan, unpolar aislesed system began to take a different trajectory. There are lots of arguments out there related to kind of individual historical events such as the election of ronald reagan, the defeat of ronald borgs nomination. The impeachment in 1998, 2000 election. I dont think there is much behind those arguments, there were specific events. There has been a lot of focus on the way in which we conduct our elections, whether it be partisan primaries or congressional districts or uncontrolled Campaign Finance. I think there is very little evidence that it really has much at all to do with jerry congressional districts or the way we conduct primaries. There was a lot less polarization in the 1950s and 1960s with a lot more partisan loads of selecting candidates modes of selecting candidates. There is some evidence that the Campaign Finance system is contributed to a system that had already polarized and i think it is probably making it worse at this point. Im inclined to believe that our politics became more polarized because the United States has become a much more Diverse Society over the past 45 years. Whether that be through a changing pattern of immigration, the racial ethnic of society or the economic differences like economic inequality. I think weve become a much more divided society on many of the important political cleavages and that will be reflected in the way that congress represents the type of society that we live in today. So you pointed to some of the historical touch points and said you werent so sure any event matter. We hear reagan and o neal as part of the bars and the bourque nomination. I want to turn to us who lived here. Ill start with you governor barbour. You were the chair of the National Committee during the contract with america and the government shut down. From the point of your lived experience, did you feel a change in how members of the different parties interacted with each other . The first time i went to washington in 1968, im from mississippi. Some of you might have thought this is a south new jersey accent. Ive seen the United States senate, jim easlen, an old segregationist. My granddaddy was his daddys lawyer. I went by, they told me to come back at 5 30. I came back, senator easlen was having a drink with teddy kennedy. And two conservative republicans from nebraska and a democrat senator from georgia. He was the chairman the democratic chairman of the judiciary committee. They knew each other. They were friends. They socialized, having a drink together was not unusual. It is incredibly unusual today. Most of the members dont live there. It used to be their kids went to school together. They played ball together. Their wives knew each other or husbands but that is one of the reasons, i think. I think another reason, and i have a different view than nolan. I think it has made a difference. Particularly in the house. We have a census that made the legislators reapportion the state legislators. Four years ago, both parties figured out hey, we can change the judiciary around a little bit and well have a lot better deal. Today there are probably 350 of 435 house seats that are not competitive between the two parties. That means those 350 members of the house, theyre not worried about the general election. Theyre worried about the primary and if youre in a safe democrat district in the northeast or the west coast or wherever, they wont let anybody get to the left of them. If theyre in a safe republican district, they wont let anybody get to the right of them. And that has hallowed oollowed center. It hasnt directly affected the u. S. Senate but it indirectly does because of the legislation, the arguments that the senator constituents are hearing. I dont think there is any question this has happened. I do think there is more than one reason. Im sure redistricting is important. Well come back to that. I want to get more to nolans views on that side. Well push more to the Party Strategy in the 90s as you were moving into the majority republican congress. That was a huge accomplishes as chairman of the rnc to pull those off in elections and to give your party that sort of power. How did you your party strat guise around questions of bipartisan in the early 90s. I will say to you, that was a big advantage that we had a contract with america. We hadnt had a majority in 40 years. The last time republicans was in 1952. We lost it in 1954 and that was 1994. It gave someone to vote for. Most people who voted republican for congress that year were regular republicans or were mad at clinton over xy or x. Having something to vote for made it easier for them but it also meant when we got the majority, we had an agenda. Mike will remember, we spent the first 100 days, lord, it felt like 400 days. We spent the first 100 days bringing up all of the 10 points of contract with america and very interestingly, at the Democratic National convention in 1996 when president clinton made his acceptance speech, he mentioned six things that had been done that were in contract with america that he took credit for, including welfare reform and very shortly there after, the first balanced budget in a generation. And lets get your memories, mike, what did you think of bipartisan at this time and i want to add in another detail of course, this was the period in 19 1995 where the white house did a study of the internet and political communication and that is the first indication of being on attack against the clintons and that is the theme of the Clinton Administration picks up. How did you guys see this question of bipartisanship. At the beginning of 1995, this is after the speaker ginwich took office. We started in 1995 in the contentious environment. Remember in the early part of that year, there were routine stories in the press about is the president relevant anymore . Because all of the energy was with the new speaker and the new majority and the congress. But then the building wag blown up in Oklahoma City and president found his voice and shape the counter argument to the contract on america as we used to call it. There we go, polarization. And we hit over and over again the fact that we needed to invest in the future of the country. We needed to balance the budget. We needed to protect the environment and we had to make sure that we kept Social Security and medicare strong and that discipline around this message carried us all the way through the year to the point in 1995 where we had the showdown with the republicans over whether or not the government would be shut down and leo leon pinetta ran the Staff Meetings in the morning and we did not know and were not confident that we would come out ahead of the republicans over the question who is going to be blamed for shutting down the government. I think balls of our discipline, because i think the president , we actually ended up, i think, and haley, you probably agree with this. We came out on the upper end of that and it moved us into the 1996 reelectioneer with a strong headwind but i would go back to one thing that haley said. When mrs. Clinton was in the u. S. Senate. We had her down for a Breakfast Event in our Office One Day and i asked her, what is the source of this disfunction and gridlock and polarization in the United States senate, the worlds greatest that is the Pulitzer Prize board, sorry. Side joke. And she made exactly that point. She said we dont trust each other. We dont spend enough time with each other, get to know each other well. If i feel like i go out halfway and put something politically at risk sborks have any confidence that someone will meet me halfway coming in the other direction and i think there are a lot i would add to that, in that time, now, yes, there was a study of the internet in 1995, but frankly there, was one all news cable station at the time because fox hadnt come along. Nobody was using social media because it didnt exist. The internet site for the website for the white house had transcripts of my press briefings which were not, i guess, mildly entertaining, sometimes given the subject matters that we dealt with occasionally, but you know it was not an era it was an era in which the major Mainstream Media shaped the contours of the National Discussion and you still had, you know, i think at that. 75 to 80 of the country reporting that they got most of the news from broadcast reports from daily newspapers, from the traditional sources of information that we used to be coherent as a country. And that of course has desegregated and newspaper circulations have declined. Audiences share for the Major Network broadcasts have been in decline. We dont gather around a common campfire. Now, to share our stories and develop a narrative and that is one of the things i think that doesnt bring us together as a country so we have a common good conversation. So youre making an argument a bit like nolan that it is fragmentation instead of poleair observation that we should polarization that we should be worried about. There is a list of things that people often invoke as possible causes. Redistricting, pain finance, general fragmentation of the country. But sometimes people also point to the fact that since roughly 1980, elections have been much more contested than they were in the decades prior to that and in that regard, we should recognize we live in a period of contested politics and maybe that is a great thing. Make that is what democracy is about. We should get in the thick itself and fight with each other over the direction that we are heading, but so you know, bret, youre in the thick itself arguing with people in the election. This is a very contested election season right now. How has this issue of polarization affected your effort to be a voice, adding thoughtfulness and deliberateness to the public . Well, in many respects it is more difficult just because if youre in the opinion business as im in and offer a view that is not perfectly in line with what your audience anticipates, youre going to be treated not as someone who disagrees on one issue or a few issues, but as a traitor and youll hear it almost immediately from 4,000 people on twitter denouncing you on one way or another. It takes fortitude not to try to mollify that side of your argument to think there may be an audience beyond simply the angry people who have time on your hands to fire off a tweet or a nasty email but that is a real, look, that is a real issue in journalism. I mean, one thing that i fear about modern journalism is that editors increasingly have lost control of the narrative. Why . Because were looking newspapers at large, are looking at stories that are going to be popular with audiences. Did you get on the most viewed, most popular, most emailed list this week . And how does that, what does that say about the quality of what youre writing . There is nothing more depressing than when the wall street journal sends me a huge expense to deeply report a story from burma and four people read it. Forget it, i can write another piece about donald trump and i know it would have a huge audience. So there is a shallowing of journalism and i think therefore, a shallowing of public of public rhetoric, public discourse, and very naturally, i think both politically, people want to play to those shallower narratives it becomes difficult to see complexity in issues. It becomes so much easy dwroer simply say youre on one side, youre on the other, there is no gray zone, there is no in between and there is no room for judgment or views that are some what shaded or colored by some complexity. I think that is a real issue. One thing i want to point out, since i do write about foreign policy, what is happening in the United States in this season is happening all over the world. The philippines just elected as president , a man who is described as the donald trump of the philippines, we have a populist right wing party in many years illliberal party in poland. The movement on the left is gaining traction in spain. The kind of centrist politics that define the post war era are fragmenting, fracturing, falling apart, not just in the United States, and so i think it is worst asking why this is a global phenomenal. I mean, they say all unhappy families are unhappy in its own way but it all seems to be happening at the same time. I think that is a question that ought to trouble us. Im not worried about whether democracy can survive. Im pretty sure democracy can survive. Im worried about whether liberalism can survive. Not liberal as in left wing. I mean liberal as in that set of values that inform tolerant pluralistic, rule based, law based societies. Let me just follow up with bret balls what he makes about journalism and the pressure of this purity is felt by political operatives and elected officials. I mean, there is a group in the country that wants purity. Look, in a two party system, purity is the enemy of victory. Lets just get straight about that. I used to work for ronald reagan. I ran a political office, fred and i worked there together. Ronald reagan compromised on everything because the democrats had the majority in the house the whole time and he compromised. He used to say, a fellow agrees with you 80 of the time is your friend and ally, not your traitor. As bret said and think, if you think it is hard up at the wall street journal, think about if youre in the Campaign Headquarters in South Carolina or kansas or montana. That pressure of if youre not pure, im going to be against you and where am i going to be against you . At your partys primary. Where do you think that came from . When is the moment that you first registered this was a dynamic. Let me tell you where it didnt come from. I think a lot of people attribute this to divided government. You know, republican, congress, democrat house, i mean, democrat white house. I dont accept that and ill tell you why. Ronald reagan was enormously successful in divided government. We passed reagan economic plan, immigration reform, Social Security reform, and tax reform with huge, hundred seat majorities democrat majority in the house. Now, i mention those four because theyre complex and controversial, but bill clinton was the same way. All republican congress, we passed welfare reform, first balanced budget in a generation, it is not divided government. It is, the president has to lead and this president has not chosen to try to lead the congress but in fact, he is polarizing. It is not the only reason, but that is a fact. One of my previous bosses was Daniel Patrick monohan. He wrote a wonderful essay. That is partly what has happened here. There has been a slow motion erosion of those things that bring together a common good in a sense of common purpose which even when clinton and gingrich were battling back and forth. They were on the phone every night yakking with each other. It would annoy with everyone because they would get it caught in their space. At the end of the day, they were working in a system that was designed to produce an outcome in the end which was some sort of compromise or mutual agreement that youre going ahead. That has what has gone now. Our fundamental functions of government, the things that madson wrote about in the papers were not working. The question is whether the eak down of social relations, capacity to compromise, either call orientation to the common good, so forth, is symptom or cause. I want to pull you back in, nolan and get you to share more. Well, i mean, i do think that all of these things are tightly related to one other. It is hard to get the symptom versus cause. You mentioned earlier the rise in party competition, that everything is very competitive, every election is about control the white house or control one or both branches of congress, that is obviously a factor, follow up on brets point about you know orthodoxy, one of the things that has gone hand in hand with polarization is just the amount of heterodoxy within correlations. Being a republican is a set of policy positions that all somehow go together. They may not be logically c cohere coherent. They understand it just as they understand the democratic policy issue on each question. And so this kind of extreme orthodoxy within both parties and the willingness to kind of punish the heterodox has gone along with it in many ways and i think a lot of the opposition or compromises comes from the fact that these coalitions, as were seeing today, are kind of fragile aisle in a way. You have to enforce this, this orthodoxy because it is not particularly coherent. If you look at donald trump, the Silver Lining is he is the first person that is willing to challenge this orthodoxy and say well, the republican set of positions are not coherent. It doesnt appeal to voters and so im the one that will go out there and break it. And so it will be interesting to see what happens in the future now that we have you know, a candidate that is willing to say the republican positions on trade and the kind of orthodox position on immigration are not ones that appeal to the electorate and so well see what will happen, but getting back to your original question why do all of these things go together and why do they start to change at the same time is still very hard to explain. So, bret, back to your question. Why do you think that the global, centuis it collapsing globally. Lots of reasons, one large point i would think is that since 1978, to give you one data point, france has not had a single year of more than 2 growth, so 38 years, not once more than what, in the United States has considered really mediocre growth. 10. 5 unemployment rate. 25 youth unemployment. Same story throughout much of europe. For the last decade in the United States, weve hf about 2 growth. Stagnant economies tend to lead to radicalized politics. The second thing is, at least for the last ten years. I dont mean to be sort of marxist and materialist. It is the chicago training in you coming out. But you know, historically, in economies where investors do very well and savers do poorly or speculators do very well and savers do very well, it tends to be a breeding ground for political radicalism and listen, if you were an invest glor the Dow Jones Industrial average in the last eight years, youve done great. If you had a savings account at td bank, maybe youve made 100 bucks. And that is, by the way, that is a phenomenon that is true from japan to europe to the United States. I think there is an economic explanation. There is also, look, there is a historical fact which is that in the 19920s, in the 1930s for a broad set of reasons, the west became disenchanted with liberal democratic applicable aepolitic institutions that werent perfect but were broadly fair and inconclusive and there was this inclusive and there was this sudden thirst for men of action, for guys that would cut through the bull and make things work. You know, the businessmans ethic that will get through all of the regulatory nonsense and get rank, famous story in new york that donald trump is ridden to the republican nomination and make it happen. And i think part of the story here is that a failure of ordinary politics to deliver on the expectations that noddern western societies have in terms of their economic well being, their anxieties, their prospects, has typically, and is, again, turning people, turning people to say, well, lets look at these more radical nonmainstream alternatives. What the hell, lets give it a shot. There is a lot of that in the politics right now with the strength of Bernie Sanders, donald trump is the presumptive nominee, but throughout the entire world, if youre a middle class person or lower middle class person with money in the bank, you have not done well and youve seen the speculating classes as it is or as it were, done fabulously well and i think that is one of the contributing factors. There are all kinds kf other things but those are two that come to mind. Let me just, again, im not trying try punctuate what bret said but look at it. In three years in a row, they look at the average that they publish every day, more than 60 of americans have said that america is going in the wrong direction. Since only about 37 of americans are republicans, that means there are a whole lot of people that are not republicans or independents or democrats that have now for three years felt we were going in the wrong direction and why wouldnt they . If youre in the heart land, if youre in the middle class or working class or Small Business person, you cant tell the difference between the recovery and the recession. It still feels like the recession. They published a report that based odd four simple Economic Indicators like growth of gdp, income, tax, only 7 of our 3,000 plus counties are out of the recession. 93 are still in the recession based on those measurements. That, you see why people are mad, and theyre scared. Yeah. And the other point i think that is interesting and the hardest thing to understand, we have polarity with a central parity. The the two parties are very close in numbers. I mean, theyve got the white house, we have the house and senate. We have 31 governors, most of the legislatures, but theyve got, it looks like an edge in the electoral college. Usually in our counties, when weve been at parity, weve been bunched up in the middle. Today there is no middle. So although this election season is an interesting one as a couple of you have pointed out because on both sides of the spectrum, weve got dissenters inside of party. Heterodoxy. Trump and sanders, immigration, and trumps case debt and sanders case so forth. And then the question, youve made the point, bret there are serious economic and political problems that generate moving politics towards extremes. Empty out the center, if were thinking about the how to fix it system, how much do we, in fact, need to address these basic issues of interaction, forms of civility, risk tolerance for alternative views and so forth as a part of preparing to actually engage the policy questions, that is, do we have to fix polarization in order to do the work on the policy questions or can we just muddle forward, not worry about polarization, just focus on policy. What do you think about that . Well, i think we need campaigns that are more aspiration. Hearing this discussion, the one thing im struck by are the numbers that say Many Americans in fact, the majority of americans no longer believe that if they work hard, play by the rules, their children will have a better quality of life than they have. That is the fundamental American Dream that has been at the kind of in the dna of what we think we are as americans, and unless we restore some sense of hope for the future and hope things are getting better, by the way, there are different measures, i cant let haley get totally away with this. Some measures that obama has been able to accomplish and do, that indicate that were, maybe it is not a strong recovery but weve had 77 straight months of job growth. If anyone from the white house were here, they would tick off a list of things and say obama has accomplished a great deal as president. Im a communications guy. I dont think they have told that story very well. And i dont think the country feels it and that is the important thing. We have got to restore that sense that we are a country that moves forward, that does provide a Better Future for our kids and we need candidates and politician thats speak at that kind of lofty level to really make us feel better about our future and you know, were not getting a lot of that in this campaign. And do we need to be also in addition to seeking those aspirational and common purpose narratives. Do we need to do deep institutional work. Let me bring it back to restricting and well have a debate on whether or not we need to be working on that. Do we need to restructure the electoral process as part of building incentive aemz that work in the opposite direction. There are limits to restoring the electoral process can do. I think, to respond to haleys point. I think one of the reasons there are 350 safe members of the house has more to do with regional realignments in the south and the northeast. People tend to find themselves now in states and regions of the country which were heterodox in the 1960s or 70 oos that are strongly partisan. I think Campaign Finance has to be looked at. I dont think it is the primary initial cause but i think is a major contributor. If you go back to 1980, the top. 01 of the donors contributed 8 of the money for national campaigns. So the top you know, say, 10,000 people contributed about 8 . Now they contribute about 40 . So we now have a Campaign Finance system that is basically fairly unaccountable and very wealthy people can put their policy views, put their policy agendas before the people without the same type of accountability, the parties, candidates, and so forth have. I think that has been a fuel for exaserbating campaign financing. I think where we have to look at in terms of Institution Reform is about governments. I think ultimately polarization is not necessarily a bad thing. In of the 1950s, political scientists worried there wasnt enough differentiation between the parties. You know, the eisenhower republicans with the heck of a lot like true man democrats and that is a real problem because votier dont have choices it is hard to hold parties accountable. You know, you wish for someone, you might get too much of it. Were not a situation where we have the differentiation but we havent figured out how to govern with that level of differentiation. Some of it is changing norms. It is a normal of dissent. I understand where youre coming from if i understand where im coming from. Well have the debates, we wont paper them over. We just have to figure out ways to solve them. Some of congress can do, come up with procedures that are less partisan and more able to simply to have the debates and resolve them. Let me give you unexample of an institution that i think should be reformed. In almost every other parliamentary democracy in the world, the speaker of the Lower Chamber is in an administrative bureaucratic position. Theyre elected to recognize speakers. Kind of uniquely in the United States, speaker is a partisan institution and we saw last year what can happen when you have the speaker of the lower house be a partisan institution where a small fraction of the Majority Party can hold that position hostage. So i think there are things like that that we can do. I dont like ideas of saying lets erradicate poleair observation. I dont think that is consistent with the under lying values. Can i throw out one modest proposal and it connects to the Campaign Finance reform because many of these members of congress, part of the reason theyve got their head down when theyre in washington going to fundraiser after fundraiser, they spend all of their time doing that, so i was thinking the other day, what if every wednesday that congress is sitting in session we declare from 8 00 in the morning until 10 00 in the morning to be a fund raising free zone and we instruct the Party Committees, the dnc and the d triple c and all of the people raising money, there will be sanctions against you if you host events for your candidates during that period of time because they would call someone from the other side of the aisle. There is a faith in Politics Institution that gets people together for bible study and that has actually been very important to the members that participate. I think theyre a third of the senate participates in that but we create some spaces for these people to actually get to know each other and create relationships that can then translate to more trust when it comes to legislating and doing the work of the country. Bret . My own modest proposal is ma marry a liberal. Or a conservative. Advice i took and it does me some good in the sense that, look, the essence of a good citizen and a liberal democracy is a person who can say i might be wrong. Im only in possession of, say, 80 of the truth and i dont know which fifth is wrong. And that is an important personal characteristic to have and i guess the question i come to are what are the institutions in our society that are cultivating qualities of self doubt. I mean that. You know, this is something we think about often in our editorial meetings and, which might shock some of you to hear. Say more. Tell us more about selfdoubt at the wall street journal. Well, we try to resolve them before we put words to paper, but also in terms of our institutio institutions, i would turn around on you and say what are universities doing. One of things that astounds me when i get mail in connection to the current political season is this line, you know, we gave up on this do nothing republican congress, we gave the republicans these big majorities and what do they do with it and youre at this timed to write bag, do you realize that the government cant be run out of the congress . That you need the cooperation of the president . That that is the way the system works . So this nonstop assault from certain radio show hosts, i wont mention here about you know, the losers in congress that did nothing and they didnt over turn obama care and im bea peach the president and xyz, they dont know how the checks and balances work and i wonder why that is. And i wonder what failures have taken place from grade school to college to what people are listening to on the morning commutes or what theyre reading and their papers if they still read papers that they dont understand these things. I really mean, all of these institutional fixes are terrific, but theyre not going to work unless you have human beings who might say to themselves, you know, i might disagree with the president. I might disagree with him but that doesnt mean i think he is a bad man. Right . Can we do that as a country . I guess that the question i keep returning to and one last point, you know . The Republican Party was born, emerged from a president who summoned the better angels of our nature. That is the great line from the 2nd inaugal and i wonder kwlowh summoning those angels in this political season where one guy is saying put all of wall street in jail. Another is asking for mass deportations of one ethic groups or the other. Who are the summoners of the better angels. I want to pick up your question on education there for a second and talk about Civic Education, because, in fact, i think it is one of the victims, you said list the victims of polarization, i think Civic Education is one of them. Governor barbour i will ask you about that. I believe you were in office when they were working on the common core curriculum which was, in the beginnings a bipartisan effort on the part of governors on the state level and as we all know now it is a very controversial issue fully embedded in the polarized conversation. One feature of the development of the core curriculum as they were working with educators around the country, the goal was to establish standards and math and Science Education and engli english, Language Arts education and the third piece fell out. It was unachievable because polarized views about how we should engage with American History and in some sense, the battle of or whether or not the narrative should be fund mentally trimumant and the failure to over come and we have a quite deep problem, i think, actually, with regard to this issue of education in our inability to share a common historical narrative. So i dont know if were you in office . I was in office and in fact, some of you may know that my stay was a little conservative and there were a lot of people against common core. I publicly supported the development of a common core curriculum. Supported put taking into place but here is what never gets said and im going to come back to this point in a second. Common core only affects english and math. That is the whole curriculum was english and math. And all of the complaining of taking religion out of the schools and teach god knows what in terms of history and social studies and everything. That is bunk. I mean, the Mississippi State department of education ultimately decides what the curriculum is and they have common core standards for english and math that they decide are we going to use those teaching the state totally controls it at the end of the day. But that goes back to something that i think was the one point i was going to make here if i didnt any other, i became chairman of the republican National Committee about the time of the rise of rush limbaugh. I loved it i grew up in the same america as y all when i graduated from high school, any week night. 6 00, 90 of the tv stakss on b nbc, cbs, abc, we thought they were liberal. We thought we were getting conservatives telling our side. It worked that way for awhile but in the last three or four years, the most bitter, the most harsh, the most negative critics of republicans have been the conservative media elite. The shawn hannity, some of these people are friends of mine but the fact of the matter is, and it may just because of ratings, but they are the leaders. They are the agitators for the purity caucus, for the people who say if you dont agree with me 100 of the time, youre a i bad person. That is just exactly the opposite of how you win in our system. The American Two Party System is about a bigger party. It is about addition and multiplication. Not about division and subtraction, like i said, mitt romney got 60 million votes last time. If you think were going to have a party where 60 Million People agree on anything, you need your head examined. My wife and i dont agree on everything. She says i have the right to be wrong sometimes. But in our party, democratic party, Republican Party, we cannot get to where you have to agree on everything to be a good republican. One of the biggest victories i ever had in 1994, one of the things i was most proud of is in state after state. You see prochoice Republican Voters vote for prolife republican candidates. Prolife republican candidates vote for prochoice republican candidates. He decided he agrees with me on ten issues out of 12 and im not going to vote. That is how parties are supposed to think and until we get back to that, were going to have a hard time. Thank you. What do we do . Were on their prior point, there was or is a National Commission on Civics Education that really looks at the curriculum k through 12 that would leave us with more fully functioning citizens going out into the world as they move into college and become voting age, and i think there has to be a very intentional commitment to that kind of work in schools. Now, youre asking a largely Public School system to do things that are risky and i knowledge that because social studies teachers when dabling in things like how does government work, how do parties work and how do they function, you know youre on shaky ground sometimes and youll get some parent group coming in to complain but i think that is where you know, collect ravely, voices will collectively voices will stand up to say we cant cheat these kids out what it means to be a basic decision and the liberal tradition that we have. So i think that a lot of work has to be done on that but ill tell a very short story. When i first went to work in the u. S. Senate as a Senate Press Secretary it was in the 1979, there was a big piece of labor legislation that was going to reform labor law and i worked for the chairman of the senate labor committee, very pro Union Democrat and as i wrote a press release one day, i was, it was actually aimed at oren hatch leading the filibuster. Haley and i are old enough to remember this but i wrote a quote in a draft press release that said any senator that would suggest that this legislation leads to mandatory union observation stretches truth to the breaking point. That was the exact quote. And the guy who was my boss and my mentor, we call him the administrative assistant. He said come with me and he took me in the wall and he said you better be damn glad that press release hadnt gone out. Because if it went out, i would fire you. That puts into the mouth of our boss a statement that calls one of our colleagues on the senate a liar. Now, stretches truth to the breaking point . That is toxic language compared to what we have now, but my question is who are the people taking the young hotshot press secretaries out and washing their mouth out with soap . Who are the people trying to enforce some sense of civility in our discussions . The media is gone. The media used to be Something Like a referee like this but for reasons haley said, theyre more part of the problem than part of the solution and i think collectively, you know, it sounds polyanish and school marmish saying there are statesman that want to stand up and say to the Party Committees and people throwing out the toxic quotes, that is not what we do here in the world of politics. We dont have enough people doing that. Let me ask one last question to bret before we turn it over to everyone else for questions. Your points about setting standards are very well taken and thank you for that. I want to ask this question about, you know, bret from your point of view, what can news organizations do to set standards in this regard . Can they do anything to set standard snas standards . Is that a lost cause . What do you think . That is a great question and a long, more than a 2 minute and 25 second answer. Look. There has been a shallowing of the news and it turns out that not only i think does it make for bad journalism, i think it makes for bored readers. It is not an accident that the newspapers that are still i think doing reasonably well, magazines, are the ones that take the deeper dives because in a country of 300 million, if you have even one of the country, that is a lot of readers. That is the journal has 2. 4 million. We would like to get to 1 . And that means sort of bucking the almost ir resistible trend of catering to the audience, to audience preferences, and to what seems to be popular now. It means, you know, essentially following steve jobs admonition that you dont know what you want until i give it to you. You had no idea you wanted an iphone until you got one and then you cant live without it or whatever, whatever kind of phone that you happen to have. I think the News Business could do something similar which is to try to rest back control of who actually gets to set the agenda. There is a wonderful line in scoop in which the lord, whatever his name is, the evil press barron insists that all questions be answered with either yes, sir or up to a point, sir. And so the question is yokohama is the capital of japan. The answer has to be up to a point, sir. A lot of what we do in the News Business should be considered up to a point way. Of course we want the readers to be in synch with us, like what we do, admire what we want. But up to a point. We also want to have grown ups in charge of the newspapers. Not be the slaves to audience preference and i think that is true in academia. The professors have lost the Agenda Setting prerogatives. Maybe in government as well where senators, you know, as haley mentioned are always terrified of being primaried. How do you get get the grown ups to be in charge is a great question but i dont think that liberalism survives, well talk about democracy another day. I dont think liberalism survives unless they reassert the prerogatives. We have these mikes. We would love to hear from you. Start over here. I understand that George Washington in the early days of our country worried that the beginning of the two party system would be the death of the republic. So this year, in the primaries, what im seeing and i understand that in primaries there is always going to be a disagreement and people saying mean things about each other, but in this particular year, candidate after candidate has said that one of of the candidates is a con artist, a a pathological liar and dangerous and all sort of scary things. Now, suddenly that hes presumably going to be the nominee, suddenly, thats okay. And, i have a problem with the idea that Party Politics is just some kind of game. I think that the preservation of our country as we know it should be more important than that. So, i am wondering how you use those things. Brett and then governor. Well, yeah [ laughs ] that wonderful prophase of pat to find deviency down. We have a new normal where president ial candidates getting to say things. Thats not all right at all. We are going to run you out of our political system for saying these things. This is what really worries me about this political season. Bear in mind, i will Say Something overtly partisan. One day growth is going to be minus 2 . Where are we going get that and whats going to be considered all right then. You mentioned George Washington and i was rereading the other day, George Washington spent some time as a young man writing out rules and conduct, it is wonderful and worth reading about. Not spitting in public. This was how the republicans have founded. Republicans going on the character issue, rightfully so should care about the character of the candidate they put high in office. Let me go into the two party systems, one of the 19th century of the philosopher said, it acted like a teeter totter that if one party got too far this way, the public would run to the middle and getting it straighten out. It certainly has not happened in either party this time. One of my old friends from the white house today, i saw him the other day said can you understand anything of this. No, nobody can. They have create add new term to describe the nominating process after sanders and trump and clinton. It is called electile electiledysfunction. [ laughs ] well, i think we all needed that. Thank you. [ laughs ] first, i fully agree with. I am too would be very concerned of becoming the 92 growth rate. My question now goes to the opening remarks whether there is some presentations of consistency about the negativity thats felt towards our potential candidates. Over the past 30 or 40 years, we have seen a diminishing percentage of our citizens voting. Are we going to continue to see that . If so, is that a real threat to the democracy . Noah. Actually, we have not seen it deminu diminishing dropping. Once you factor that in, the real change has been increasing and residents who cannot participate. Since 2008, turn outs have been higher than it has ever been and looks like it is going to stay there. Yet, it has not resulted in this conflict. One of the things that concerns me is that you look at Public Opinion polls and you see murders ha voters having more views than not voters. Once they become voters, they become just like voters. [ laughs ] i have just the extreme view. I hate to be negative on this, but turn out is probably not the problem. The problem is the people. Thanks. Um this has to do with the income gap and i have a question for the governor. If you were the Committee National chairman, what do you have for trump . It is a choice. Hillary clinton or donald trump. The next time the real choice that i got. And, having been through, a Third Party Candidate is voting for clinton. Thank you for i dont know if you were born then. [ laughs ] thank you. It is not my party. Not mine, not one of those. But, he has won and i am not going to put my opinions and views above these people. They got the right nominee and i got the obligation to compare the choices. I voted for whomever in my life. Dont get me wrong. Noah. So we do know that periods of american politics, divisions have been the largest. So earlier politician is quite high during the guiilded age through about the 1920s, obviously, it goes with the High Economic and equality. And then the upper trend again in 1975 was like there is still a lot of debates of the ultimate causes. I do think there is some pausable relationship thats different groups of americans and suffered different economic success. I think economic and low growth have also correlate with one another. And, low growth does lead to political extremism as we have seen in the United States and increasingly throughout the rest of the world. Yes, please. Thank you. Thank you brett for sharing your thoughts. Very appreciative. My question is more on the line of difference between governance and ideology. We have seen ideology playing out for several decades as far as what is being kcalled as tru demon. We play so much in our Political Campaign process. I am starting to see it more and more breathe into our government where we have state legislatures here in texas. That proposed solution to nonexistence problems. Instead of sending huge amount of taxpayers dollars, existing in peoples minds or politics. Again, where it is not based on facts but based on solely on opinions or politics. What do we do about when it creeps in the way we govern . Well, i want to say, i was a republican governor in my state. I had democratic majority in the state everyday. I had a democratic majority seven years out of eight. I want party line vote. So what we did, we made sure that democrats are not condemned. We as a problem, we had to deal with and big problems we had to deal with. The facts and focus on solving problems. Brett, you wont be surprised, hes a third year law student and i was a freshman. Anyway, the difference between governors and senators is senators talk about doing things and governors do things. [ laughs ] thats the attitude that i have. Brett and mike were both talking about that this week as we went through this, learning to Work Together and learning to get the job done and it does not have to be 100 my way every time. It is not going to be 100 my way everyday. Thats the attitude you got to have. I have an ideology but my job is to get the job done. Thank you. I wanted to defend the press since we are here, a surprising thing for a guy that [ laughs ] you know the ability to really make facts come alive and make a difference in people engaging regularly, thats the hallmark of brilliant journalists. It is not sufficient and back to something you said earlier for journalists, say look, we got to run our numbers up and we got to get more likes or tweets or do circulations. Thats never been the task of the journalists. The task is to take the Important Information and make it interesting enough that people will pay attention. We didnt know in chicag chicago thats what we got to get more of. I tell editors that i meet all the time that we understand communication of politics, you dont have to say things over and over again for them to penetrate. You all in the News Business, we tell once and we have given you the news and so there is no longer news so we dont have to report it over again. It is day after day and interesting angles and different tapes and new perspectives. We need more of that if we are actually going get people to focus on that, which is truly important. [ applause ] if well can thank our panel for the conversation, thanks so much. [ applause ] i. On American History tv on c span 3, saturday afternoon, members you have to be we memo memoirs you have to be aware of. Most of these people do not want to disclose too much and some case to dissemble and trying to mislead people. Historians talk about teak techniqu techniques used by nra and now it is changed since the attack of 9 11. Many whites thought this is it. It is finally happening and it is really happening of a full scale black uprising and they panic. White men are not with pistols, formed spontaneously downtown and marched to the scene of a shoot out and begin to shoot and beating every black person they could find. The 1866, dozens of americans of the assault of women. Just before 9 00, an argument on Benjamin Franklin of an example of what he calls America National character. If you had a Small Business to start out, would be the backbone of the new economy. Indeed one of the things that his group did was he made a set of rules and maxims on how to be a good start up entrepreneur and innovator. Sunday morning at 10 00, a road to the white house rewind. [ applause ] in the music of our children, we are told you everything that there is a season and a time to every purpose under heaven and for america, the time has come at last. You do know that every politicians promise has a price. The taxpayers pay the bills. The American People are not going to be taken in by any schemes where government gives money with one end and takes it away with another. [ applause ] the 1972, republican and Democratic National convention with Richard Nixon accepting the gop nomination. And south georgia governor excepting the nomination. For a complete schedule go to c span. Org. Federal reserve governor Daniel Tarullo will talk about the Financial Regulation and monetary policy. Thatll be live at 9 00 a. M. Eastern on cspan 2. Now, a look at nuclear challenges where the next president may face. This Panel Discussion is about an hour and a half. All right, thank you everyone for coming back. I want to thank so much for those moving and important remarks that remind us all why we are here and why we do the work that we do. For the spread and the use of nuclear weapons. And it is a reminder that we have all been at this past for a long, long time. More than seven decades of the United States under a republican and democratic administrations alike have actively discouraged allies and folks seeking nuclearnuclear weapons. This effort have been says full a