NBC Nightly News | Tom Brokaw | Talks at Google

Good morning, everyone.

I want to thank you all for coming. One of the things that I really enjoy most about Google is the fact that everybody here is committed to learning. I think it really is a hallmark of our culture, and I think there's really no better. I don't want to say no better, but one of the finest illustrations of that is the program that we have here called Authors at Google. It's a great opportunity for people who are involved in different aspects of society to come talk about their work, talk about their lives, talk about their interests so that we can learn from them. And I think it can help shape the work that we do here. I think it's a wonderful reflection of the good judgment of the people who work at Google that we have so many people in this room here today, as well as in 13 other locations around the world to see our. To meet and hear our author. Today, Tom Brokaw is going to be interviewed by our chief executive officer, who in many ways is an equally inspirational figure to many of us for his ability to juggle on a, shall I say, somewhat busy day, a lot of different things, and yet find time to. And really find time to explore some really interesting issues that I think he finds interesting, and I know you will, too. So I'm going to turn it over to Eric.

Thank you, elliot.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thanks.

Thank you very much. Thank you. That is such a relief. I did commencement at Stanford this year, and the week before I was to appear, the student newspaper did a kind of survey of the graduating class about what they thought about the selection of me as the commencement speaker. One of the graduating students said, broca, that's like adult contemporary radio. I don't want you to look at me and see Michael Bolton. That's all. I.

I don't know that Tom needs an introduction, but I'll do my best. He was born in South Dakota and rose up through the ranks in television as a local newscaster and reporter. And during that time, he developed a lot of very interesting reporting skills. He spent five years on the Today show as a co host. And many of us grew up watching Tom Brokaw at a very early hour in the morning, I might add, especially for this group. And in 1981, at a very young age, he was selected to be the lead anchor of the NBC Nightly News. This decision is one of the most important decisions ever made by a media company, and they made the right one. And for the next 25 years, until 2004, he led number one in the ratings in the news. Nationally, all the time. 25 years of number one. Hard to top that. What's interesting is that his renown and his reporting skills have been so successful that not only did he force them to retire him after many entreaties to stay, but they came back and signed him up until the year 2014. Welcome to Google, Mr. Tom Grokoff.

Thank you very much, Eric. A tiny correction. I wasn't number one for the entire 25 years. There was a kind of a trade off. Dan was number one for a little while. Peter was number one for a little longer. I was number one in between and then came back and finished the last 12 years as number one. So I knew when to get out when I was number one.

You were number one for virtually all the time. We're scientists here. I wanted to start with a couple of questions and have some questions from the audience and some of the remote sites as well. I just have a personal question. What's it like to be TV anchor? What's it like to spend all those years on television reporting traveling around? Do you have a staff? Do you write your own stuff? What's it like every day?

I did everything on my own. I didn't need any help. You know, the easy metaphor is that you really are. I used to describe it as being the captain of a 747. I'd get up at 5:45, 6:00 clock in the morning and I'd have kind of a flight plan that would begin to take shape. And I knew where I was going to fly this plane every day to some destination at 6:30 at night, either in New York, in Islamabad, or in Baghdad or someplace in the world, Philippines. Because what happened on my watch is that the technology changed so rapidly. Your technology came along later. But a transformational technology for us was portable satellite transmission. So it meant we could get out of the studio and go wherever we wanted to in the world. It was always a good job. It became a far better job then because those of us who went into this line of work really went in because we wanted to be reporters, we wanted to be journalists. We wanted to go where the story was so you could both be an anchor and be a journalist on site. I was the most conspicuous part of a very large team. It is kind of a pyramid down behind us. Steve Capus, who is president of the news division, is here with me today. He was my executive producer in the last cycle. I had a team that worked with me. They called it Team Broke. Most of them were women at the end. By the way I had just one guy working for me, and the others were all women, which was one of the other changes in our business. It's a very collegial enterprise, putting a broadcast on every night. And a piece of it that there's so little appreciation of are the techies. We've got a group in London who would meet me somewhere in the world, wherever all hell was breaking loose. Somalia, Baghdad, whatever. These are guys from the East End who were wizards at getting us on the air because you could go and do brilliant reporting and get everything in order, but unless you could get it up to the satellite and get it back, it didn't count. And they really became family for me over the years. And one of them was a cameraman from South Africa, for example, who, when I left once all hell was breaking loose, he got on a plane in Jo' Burg and started in the same direction. And I didn't get up every morning and think, I am anchorman.

There's a movie where that happens.

That would be paralyzing A and B. I lived in a matriarchy. I lived with four of the strongest women you can possibly know. And I was always grateful when they remembered what it was I did for a living. So if I got up in the morning and kind of put on my anchorman ego, it drive me out of the house until I got my act back in order again. When you were most conscious of being anchor would be on something like 9 11. And that's when you would sit out there in that cockpit, so to speak, you know, in the captain's seat, and you'd have to steer all this stuff in a direction that you try to keep the plane stable. You try to share the information with people so it would be useful to them. I didn't think of myself as a comforter or a healer. I always thought the best thing I can do is give them the best information about that we can possibly develop and do it contextually and trust the American people to make the right judgments.

What was it that made you excited.

About writing a book?

Right, because here you are, you're an anchorman, and you have this, and we're going to explore this a little bit, your view of the world. But you ultimately, and this is our authors at Google, you ultimately wrote one of the most successful books, literally this century, Right? The Greatest Generation. And the easiest way to summarize it is it's a set of vignettes and stories about the people who did this. Let me read you just a sentence or two so the audience, many of whom have copies of the book here, the young Americans of this time constituted a generation birthmarked for greatness. A generation of Americans that would take its place in American history with the generations that had converted the North American wilderness into the United States and infused the new nations with self determination, embodied first in the Declaration of Independence and then in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. You go on further and say it is a generation that by and large made no demands of homage on those who followed and prospered economically, politically and culturally because of its sacrifices. It is a generation of towering achievement and modest demeanor, a legacy of their formative years when they were participants in and witness to sacrifices of the highest order. They know how many of the best of their generation didn't make it to their early twenties. How many brilliant scientists, teachers, spiritual and business leaders, politicians and artists were lost in the ravages of the greatest war the world has seen. Is that what moved you?

It was in part, it was mostly a life experience. I was born, I know you'll find this hard to believe, in 1940, and my first memories of life were of World War II. We lived on an army base, and I believed that I would go through life with war all around us because our earliest impressions helped form our expectations. And then the war came to an end very quickly, and this country went back to work in a way that's hard to describe now. It put the war behind it, and we were industrial colossus in the world. We had a lot of catching up to do, and I was a beneficiary of that. I then lived in a kind of a quasi military environment. My dad went to work for the Corps of Engineers, and they were building big dams on the Missouri river. And all my schoolteachers and Sunday school teachers and the coaches and the businessmen in town and the doctors and their wives were all part of this generation. And it was all hands on deck. Everybody joined the school board, churchwarden, ran for office, got something done. I didn't think about that, about the consequences of it for society, until I went to the D day for the 40th anniversary and I thought I was going to go to Normandy and drink some Calvados and have some good food and walk the beaches and do this documentary. Stepped onto the beach, Omaha beach below Couville Sur Mer, which is the burial ground of 2,000 people. And I looked at the man to my left, Gene o', Murley, who was from a small town in Pennsylvania, wearing a windbreaker, his wife with a tight Knit permanent. And next to him was Harry Garten, who lost both legs later in the war. And it was, frankly, a very emotional moment for me because I was looking into the eyes and into the soul of the people who had raised me. And they were 20 years old when they landed on that beach. And they were just beginning a year of fighting that day. And they talked in the most hushed tones about what they had gone through. One of the stories that they told was they pointed out a sand dune and they said, do you remember that? To each other? Because they came over in the same landing craft and there were sappers. These were guys who had gone in advance to try to detonate the land mines. And part of their role was to sacrifice their own bodies, frankly. And their legs were shattered, and they rolled off to the side, shot themselves up with morphine, and then pointed the way to the guys who came next. There were a number of these people that I ran into that week, and it was a life changing experience. And I began to collect their stories and think about them and how much we owed them and pull it out of them. And by the 50th anniversary of D Day, I went on the air and said, look, these people came of age in the Great Depression. Life was about sacrifice and deprivation and commitment to one another. It was a very difficult time in America. And just when they were beginning to emerge from that, then they had to go off and fight this horrendous war in the Pacific. Europe, all the skies and all the seas, six of the seven continents. I think it's the greatest generation any society has ever produced. Some people have challenged that. My easy answer is, that's my story, and I'm sticking to it. But it resonated in a way that I could not have, mostly with people this age. The children and grandchildren of that generation. And that generation to this day will say to me, oh, but it wasn't about me. You should have known my buddy, or you should have known the family down the block. What they went through, this collective humility and modesty and pride in what they did. And they made possible, I believe, the lives that we have today. The final analysis. I described myself as a doorman. I opened the door and said, there are some stories here that we need to hear. This way, please. And it's been very gratifying to have the response that the book is generated.

The reason I asked about the book, aside from it, it's an extraordinarily successful book, and I suspect a lot of our audience will be reading it. Is that it's also clear to me that you've had, maybe just because you're such a good reporter, you've had particularly good access to military theaters in your coverage. Afghanistan, all the conflicts in Afghanistan. A large. You had a lot of experience in Pakistan, as best I can tell. And you also spent some time in the Iraq situation. And I was interested again in both.

Both.

How does it really work? You know, you have this team from London, you all fly in, you talk to the military, you try to cover the war. In the coverage that you gave of the war, did you understand what was going on? Did you get the access that you needed? Was the story told fairly? Do you have any view of what's happening in Iraq now?

I'll try to do this in summary fashion. I went to Iraq twice, to Baghdad twice before the war began. And we knew that there was distant thunder that was likely to happen. And so I went all over Baghdad and I did that without any help, obviously from the United States government because they had no relationship there. I had some connections to the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein. I always had a minder with me. But I was able to get out and talk to students and young people. And what was startling to me then, how many young people who were not in the Saddam camp necessarily, they were at college campuses and working in the souks and all those kinds of things, were not happy with their lives. But then they would say to me, but if the United States comes, I will join jihad against America.

Really.

And I came back and we reported that, put it on the air, talked about it at the Council of Foreign Relations, talked to Paul Wolfowitz of the talk to Dick Cheney about it. Of course, I've interviewed Cheney and Wolfowitz would say to me, they have to say that. I said, I don't think so. I think that this is nationalistic and tribal and they want to settle it on their own terms. They want to be liberated right before the war began. In part because of my work on this book, I was. I have a kind of portal, if you will, to military leadership because they think that I get it. And I was in Kuwait and I had a very classified high level briefing. And one of the briefers was a guy who was prominent in Bob Woodward's latest book, telling a slightly different story in Bob's book than he was telling me. When they were doing the briefing, they were very confident. They knew where the weapons were. They thought that they were in touch with the Iraqi commanders. And they'd had cell phone conversations. They thought through intermediaries and email with them, and they thought in Basra that they would put their weapons in a circle. And about five days into the war, when it wasn't going in that way and the insurgency was blowing up all around him, thanks in part to the world in which you live. I was able to email my briefer and I said, general, what's going on here? And he wrote back and said, this is unexpected. We didn't have any idea that they would be able to fight the way that they have been able to, but we'll still prevail. The planning pretty clear now was for a quick strike at Baghdad, which they successfully completed. And no anticipation that the insurgency would take hold the way that it would, or that the scope of resettling Iraq and rebuilding it was going to be as large as it was. If they'd talked to half a dozen people who'd been in and out of there and listened to them and had been inclined to listen to them, they would have known that. The first week that we were on the air, we had generals who were our consultants. Barry McCaffrey is a highly decorated Vietnam veteran, four star general, retired. He kept saying, we don't have enough troops, we don't have enough troops. And we started getting all this blowback from the Pentagon and from the State Department saying, you know, we're racing to Baghdad. And Barry kept saying, but it's not just about Baghdad, it's what are you going to do next? And they were furious that we kept reporting that, well, we're now seeing the results of this. This is a huge play. I remember going into Baghdad right after so called mission accomplished and seeing the CIA station chief and a number of other people were there and they all said, we've got about 60 days to get this right. We're at the tipping point and if we don't make it, this is all hell is going to break loose. And I actually said that on the air. I said, the test of this war is now taking down Baghdad. The test of the war is a year from now. And we're seeing that that test has some very painful prices attached to it. It's quite striking to me that the President who has this commitment to the idea of introducing liberty to that part of the world, will not acknowledge that this strategy is not working. You can maintain your commitment to the great goal of democracy and liberty, but then at some point you have to say, this game plan has got us stuck. We're not getting a first down here. Whatever metaphor you want to use going to have to adapt. And we're going to have to reach out to other constituencies in this country to get them on board. You want to watch something? Jim Baker, who is a former secretary of state and close to the Bush family, has just completed a study over there with Lee Hamilton. He talked about it a little bit yesterday. We'll hear more from him probably right before the election. Why would that be about what they're planning to do? Because they're in a state of terror. A quick Brokaw impression of where we are in this country. I have a favorite river guide in Idaho, tough old guy who runs the middle fork of the salmon, big Whitewater guide. And when he has difficult clients, he likes to say that they're half cocked in the ticked off position. Only he doesn't say ticked off. And I think that's where the country is. Country is half cocked in the ticked off position. They think things are not going well. They're angry about it because from the ground up, it's working. What they have control of, it's working. It works at Google. It works in the economy. It works in Austin, Texas. It works in Montana, where I have just been. They have very negative unemployment in a lot of the communities up there. But they're furious about how the country is paralyzed at the.

There seems to be something different now. The political parties seem to be more polarized. There doesn't seem to be a meeting of minds on anything. We have another cycle, which is the blog and the gotcha cycle that seems to have gotten worse. Can you take us from when you were literally guiding the country? Right in the sense of the responsibility to where we are now, what you think it means with respect to voter participation, which I think is declining what appears to be the lack of action or real outrage. You've spent the last few months talking to an awful lot of Americans.

Well, what I find is that people want to be heard and they're eager to participate and they're not being invited in because it's been made into a kind of professional gunslinger's arena in both parties. You don't have the congressman going back to his or her district and getting his hair cut or taking the laundry on a Saturday morning and talking to the constituents up and down the street. The money is enormous. Conrad Burns is running for reelection in Montana and he's in some difficulty. Montana has 650,000 voters. He's going to spend $10 million. Wow, $10 million. You do the math. Think about that for a Senate seat that pays not quite $200,000 a year. And that's what's happened in this country, is that we walled off real people from the process and turned it over to the professionals. And the professionals are not interested in, in advancing the common welfare as much as they are advancing their own bottom line. And so they, you see it here in California all the time. You have character assassination ads. We've developed in our political culture a culture of blame, not responsibility. It's always somebody else's fault. People don't step forward. I'm working on another book now, about 68, and the consequences of that for now. And one of the things that, you know, I was here in 68 in California, and one of the parts about 68 that was attractive was that people stepped forward, they put their feet on the ground and said, I'm not going to let this stand now. There were excesses that we're paying some price for at the moment. What has happened now is that we are, and you are a big piece of this in this transformational time. Eric and I were talking earlier. I think that this is truly the second Big Bang. The physical universe was created by the Big Bang. You are in the process of creating another universe. And it's hugely important and it has profound consequences for all of us. It's the most, one of the most meaningful things that's happened in my lifetime. But as we look out into this new universe, it's still hard to know which planet will support life, which planet will get too close to the sun and burn up. Is there going to be a new sun? And as we watch all these collisions take place, it's hard to sort out what we can rely on. And the other Brokaw Theorem is that you get this matter that gets sucked into this universe. You don't know where it came from. The antecedent zipadar, what it means. Was it just mischief? Was it malicious? It gets picked up by Morning Talk and then it gets passed around the Today show a little bit. 4:00 clock in the afternoon. Brian Williams and the NBC Nightly News crew, now they're saying, what do we do with this? Where did it come from? How can we test the integrity of it? And you make application to that, to the blogosphere. That's tough. So I think we're in a big sorting out period, Eric and I don't have the formulation for how we're going to get through it. But I always trust the American people to, you know, they'll take a look at something for a while and they'll say, this is reliable. And then they'll say, look, I can't trust this one. This is. They're trying to mislead me or manipulate me here in a way. But we're going through this huge new creation of communication and information exchange globally, which is profoundly important.

I'd like to ask one more question, which is more about the future, and then we'll get some audience questions, not just from here, but hopefully from remote sites as well. In terms of stuff that you're doing, in addition to working for the NVC until 2014 and probably longer would be my. You also did a Discovery show on global warming, which you've become interested in. You're also involved, in fact, you're out here in California for something called the International Rescue Commission Committee, which is involved in resettling refugees. You've also been part of something called the Committee to Protect Journalists. And I think maybe for our audience, you might want to talk a little bit about what you think these initiatives are about. Why are you so involved in them? Why do you care so much, much about them? Why are you spending your precious time around them?

Well, again, I am a product of the greatest generation. I grew up with the idea that you had to constantly give back, that it was not just enough to have a good career and earn enough money to get from week to week and have a good time with your family, but that you owed something larger to society. And these are two organizations I care deeply about. The Committee to Protect Journalists, a group of us formed 20 years ago in a small cocktail party saying we are the most privileged journalists in the world. What are we doing for our brothers and sisters in other places where they're subject to political oppression, physical harm, unfair jailing?

Well, there was this lady just killed.

Anna Poboskaya was a very brave Russian journalist who had been covering corruption in the Putin regime. And we honored her. She came to New York two years ago, and we celebrated her at our dinner there. And a few years before that, the brave Irish journalist, the woman who had uncovered drug trafficking in Ireland, she too was murdered. We had honored her earlier. These stories are hugely inspirational. Every year these people come from Africa and Central America, even from Western Europe, and we get them out of jail. We have websites so they can get access to us and say, I need help, because we believe strongly that it's the least that we can do. International Rescue Committee is the gold standard in refugee resettlement around the world. Big operations in Africa. Little piece of celebrity here. George Clooney just went into Darfur with our folks. You probably have Never heard of it, in part because it's always been very modest in this country in terms of drawing attention to itself. But in this modern world, we have to work harder at saying, hey, we're here and we need help. We have 13,000 people around the world who are water experts and rehousing experts and medical experts. Part of what you were talking about earlier, my daughter Jennifer, who worked for him, she's a Stanford graduate, before she went to medical school, worked for him in Pakistan on the border when the Russians were in Afghanistan working with Afghan women, changed her life, came back, said primary care medicine. That's all I'm going to do. I just want to be hands on. She was telling me the other day that because of the new technology, they can go into remote villages in Africa and in real time get a signal out. Epidemiology studies that they're doing, they can get a real reading on diphtheria or infectious diseases and get it back to a base and then have a quick response to it. I just think, and I would hope that you would share my feeling and my passion about this. We have so much to offer and we have so many resources and life is not just on these screens. It's about boots on the ground and hands and the dirt and what I call nights in scary places. And you'll be a more complete person if you make sure that you step away from the keyboard from time to.

Time, but not too much.

Or on your own time. They don't have any time.

But why don't we move to some questions while we get some folks to the mics? We've got a couple questions that have already come in. The first question came in from New York and I'll read it to you. What do you think of the situation in North Korea?

This is, this is a very vexing problem. And it's a. I think it's a manifestation perilous times in which we live, the proliferation of nuclear technology here. The North Koreans have millions of people starving and they're spending their time and their effort on developing a nuclear device. And they have missile capacity. This is serious stuff, folks. And it's. But it's not going to go away easily. The Iranians are hell bent on building a nuclear device. If you go into Iran, as I did last summer, you find a lot of students very unhappy with the political leadership. But you say, why should you have a nuclear device? And they get outraged. And they say because you do and because the Israelis do and because the Pakistanis do. We need a nuclear device. This technology, as you probably know, is available out there. And if it gets in the wrong hands, you can make a small, dirty bomb and do one hell of a lot of damage in a hurry. And I think it's not enough for us to lecture the world. I think that we're going to have to say we have to look at our own nuclear arsenal. How much do we need? What is our role in all of this at some point? And we're going to have to get the world together on this. I think it's an opening for the president in some ways with the Chinese and others to find some common ground.

We have another question. This one's from Santa Monica. Which networks and news programs do you watch and or admire? This should not be a hard question.

It's like asking you what you think about Google. I suppose I'm in favor.

It's a great company.

Well, here's what I'll tell I do watch NBC Nightly News, obviously every night I watch the Today Show. But I'm a little bit agnostic about it because I like to watch everything. I'm fairly clinical. Someone may ask the question, what do I think of Katie Couric in the CBS Evening News? I watched that as well because I was interested in the effect it was going to have on our audience and our share of audience. And I was relieved and a little surprised that she didn't sustain the spike as long as I thought that she might. I thought we would prevail, but I thought that the curiosity would stay longer. I think it was the right thing for CBS to do to try to shake up the forum. If I were there, I would try to do it as well. I think it's very much a work in progress. However, I don't feel a sense of urgency or there's no dynamic about it. And Katie's very gifted and ambitious and she didn't go over there to fail. So she's very tenacious. This is not over, so we have to pay attention.

Go ahead.

Part first of all, I'd like to say I enjoyed watching you at KNBC earlier in your career, sort of continuing on that same line about news coverage. I'd like to get your view on what's happened to the news and why it's still sort of giving certain administrations a pass five years later with basically no review. And why is it that the Daily show seems to be the best source of news? I have a slightly contrary point of view on a lot of this. I think we're in pretty good shape and I'LL tell you why I think the expansion of the universe is healthy. It's not all perfect by any means. When I was coming, when you were watching me on knbc and when was that? 1912, right? The world that we saw on the evening news was seen through the prism of white middle aged men living on the Atlantic seaboard. It was very hard to get stories about even California that were reflective of the serious things that were going on out here. I was working in the Burbank bureau. I didn't want to come to California. I wanted to go to Washington. They said, go to California. It's the best thing that ever happened to me because it raised my sights and expanded my horizons. I got to know this culture and I covered Ronald Reagan. When I got off the airplane and started covering Ronald Reagan in 1966 and saw this phenomenal rise him in politics, I think you have to be more aggressive as a, as a viewer, as a consumer of news and work harder at it. Now used to just kind of, okay, I'm going to watch Huntley and Brinkley, I'm going to watch Cronkite, or I'm going to watch Frank Reynolds. Now you've got many more choices. I watch the news on television while I'm online. A lot of the times, you know, I'm, I'm multitasking. I'm looking at that and I'm reading the BBC website or I'm going on Google to find out something else about what's going on. So I just say to people, hey, got to get proactive.

Next question.

Thanks.

So you mentioned that we're in the second big bang and the universe is expanding and unpredictable. But you trust the American people are going to figure out what are the, you know, the sources we should believe and the sources we shouldn't. I'm wondering what gives you that confidence when it seems to me like we're seeing just ever increasingly sophisticated echo chambers. And as time goes on, it's easier and easier to surround yourself by news that reinforces what you already think. And rather than more information enlightening people, people just find more information that supports the opinions they already hold.

That's always been true. If you go back to the days of the 1950s in newspapers when New York had eight or nine dailies, every daily had a constituency, it had a readership. And the readership was drawn to the paper because it reinforced kind of their view of the world. What's great about this new world is that it's just easy to go across the horizon a Little more. I don't think you're ever going to force people to go to places that they don't want to go. But the ease of it may, in fact, expand their horizons. It's hard for them to resist that.

Let me just insert myself. Do you believe that in fact, 25 years ago when you started, you had more share of mind versus what you would have today if you started over?

Sure.

And is that in fact a problem, or do you view that as positive?

No, I think it's not a problem. I think, first of all, when I started in television news and broadcast news at the network level, we were a duopoly. I love that there were only two of us, CBS and NBC News. You didn't have any other choices. The other thing that was going on that people have not paid attention enough attention to. It was new, and people were bedazzled by the newness of it. We're about to have a 50th anniversary of the beginning of Huntley and Brinkley. A lot of you in this room don't know who they were, but I.

Grew up watching them.

That's right. They were. They were the founding fathers of serious broadcast news on television in a new form. They were unbelievable rock stars in this country. David once told me that they were doing some stories out in Los Angeles. Hume, Chet together, and they were going to go back to New York. But they decided they'd never been to Las Vegas. And word got out they were going to be in Las Vegas. And like 2,000 people were at the airport. And it's just hard for my generation to describe to this generation how transformational that time was. I grew up in remote areas of South Dakota where we didn't have a television signal. When I was 16, I moved to the big town of Yankton. And we had a black and white television set. And Molly and Brinkley came on the air and bang. My universe expanded. I could see things I never expected to see on that screen. And the man who produced those broadcasts was a genius by the name of Reuben Frank. And he said, tell television that's something no other medium has been able to do. It transmits experience into your living room. That was as transformational in some ways as what you're going through.

Next question. Thank you.

Well, I keep going through, and I have like 50,000 questions.

But I guess actually one that I think would be the most interesting is.

What do you read?

What kind of books?

Fiction, nonfiction, whatever do you find interesting? Stink. I mostly read. I'm a fan of fiction, but I have not had as much. There's a new Cormac McCarthy book out that I want to read because I like him. A friend of mine is Tom McGuin, who writes short stories in the New Yorker. I read that. But I'm a voracious consumer of nonfiction, and it's been hard to keep pace with the books that are coming out, describing how the administration went wrong.

It's whole section, sections of books.

It's unbelievable. Bob Woodward obviously is the 10,000 pound gorilla when it comes to writing those kinds of books. I was not surprised by the critical nature of this book because I've watched Bob over the years. He's actually quite a close friend of mine. And he was getting a little criticism for being too close, too cozy in the early the first two books. And I said to Tim Rusher about six weeks ago, watch, he's going to unload with both barrels this time. And he really has. But there's a very good book out called Hubris by Mike Isikoff and David Korn. There's another book called Fiasco by Tom Ricks, who's a Pentagon correspondent for the Washington Post. These are books that are worth reading because they give you an idea of the times that we're living through in the fabric of the construct of this administration.

Yes, ma'.

Am.

Mr. Brokaw, you spoke a little bit about how the political process has been ceded over to professionals. And as you were talking, I was thinking that as a layperson, we read something similar about the commodification of media. So I wondered, as an insider if you could share your experiences or thoughts on whether you think corporate interest, how much it does shape media, how much it doesn't.

We get that question a lot. Especially I often tell people that my heart sank when I heard that General Electric was going to be buying NBC, because I'd grown up with the idea that those were people who made appliances. And I said at one point, do.

You get a discount?

Yeah, I said at one point, people say, what do you do after the news? I say, I go door to door talking about the really good deal on a freezer refrigerator that GE's got. But in fact, GE saved NBC. We were not well run before that. It was owned by rca, which is a huge conglomerate, had its own interest in the defense area and so on. And Jack Welch was a very aggressive boss at ge, but he knew where the firewall was. He used to love to say in public meetings, especially before his business colleagues. You know, I think that Brokaw and those Guys in the newsroom are communists. But if I went down there and said to them, I want you to do it this way, Brokaw would lead everybody out in the street. We wouldn't get anything done. I mean, it was just. He was exaggerating, obviously. I think up to a point, we never had a moment of interference from them. And we were the only Network, for example, GE had with PCBs and the Hudson river at one of its plants when it was still legal to do that, but they contaminated the river. And it was a big, huge environmental dispute about it. We were the only network that went and covered the story. And I called Welch and I said, you're not going to be happy about this, but we're going to do that story tonight. And we need to do that because, A, it's a good story, and B, because you own NBC News. And another friend of mine in California once gave me, early on, he said, whenever you do a story that involves something, even in a peripheral fashion with ge, said, you must take the extra time to say NBC News is owned by General Electricity. And we did stories that didn't show up. The other networks wouldn't think about doing that. There was a diamond industrial diamond scandal within GE at one point. We did that story because we didn't want anyone to think that they somehow had us in their pocket. It's tricky. On the other hand, gotta tell you, 911 comes along, we're burning through mounds of cash, no commercials on the air. We're sending people all over the world and using satellite time. The meter is running like crazy. Jeff Imholt had just been on the job six days, came down, went through the newsroom, clapped everybody on the back, seated. We're really proud to be a part of this. I walked out and I said, I know how. He said, don't even start. It's okay. We can take care of this. That was a huge relief to me, and I think it was a service to the country, frankly. Thank you for that.

Yes. Next question.

So you've been saying how you always trust the American people to do what's right or to filter out what's the wheat from the chaff. How do you see that the culture has changed from this greatest generation that you're talking about to what it is today, and how is it that you still have such a great trust in the American people?

You know, I asked. People ask me that a lot. My daughters are your age, and I'm very proud of them, and they want to. They ask me from time to time. How do you think we're doing? And I tweak them a little bit from time to time, but I think you're doing exceptionally well. And the reason I think that is that I see evidence of it all around the world. I see young doctors and Doctors Without Borders who are doing things. I see young people in uniform in Afghanistan and Iraq who are trying to win hearts and minds and kill the bad guys simultaneously. I see the work that is done in communities in this country. The greatest generation will say of all of you that they're in awe of you, that you're so much better educated, you earn so much more money, you travel so much more easily than they do. And then they always kind of laugh and say, and in most instances, just looking at this audience, you're the grandchildren of the great. They'll say, we have so little. We wanted them to have everything, and we probably spoiled them a little bit. I would just ask you to constantly think about their legacy and your obligation to it, the resources that we have, how privileged we are in this country and especially in this industry that you're all involved in. Give back that much, and it'll be a lot.

Next question.

Thank you. Sort of building off your last point. As a very privileged generation, ourselves, the grandchildren of the greatest generation.

And giving.

Back, what role do you see technology playing in the sort of battle against extreme poverty that we're all so familiar with? Well, I think it's hugely important because it does give us the ability to share information and to bring the stories. And if you just take. Take something as simple as nutrition and the ability to go online and to convey things and to make resources available to people so that they can know about it. But there is no substitution for putting your boots on the ground. There's no substitution for going out and getting your hands dirty. I don't want you to give this up. I think this is the most exciting thing in my lifetime. And, you know, I'm as addicted to it as all of you are, I dare say. But there's something very energizing about stepping away from it and going out to difficult places and seeing what you can do. Here's a small example. There's a very resourceful colonel in the Army Reserve in Kabul in Afghanistan. It turns out that she was an African American woman from Houston. She was over there, and she was looking around for something to do. So there was a National Guard unit from Iowa, and she said, you know, you guys aren't doing enough. Come with me. And they went outside the base and they went out and they still planted their crops in northern Afghanistan by broadcasting the seed randomly. So she got laptop computers and got in touch with Cargill and with all the big agriculture companies and, and use these Iowa guys who were mostly farmers and they were the, that became the interface and it was, that's a good example. You had to have people on the ground, but this took them back to the research centers and they, they knew the soil composition and they, and they were teaching these farmers how to do things. So it makes a big difference. It's astonishing when you go. I was with special Forces in a really remote fire base in the middle of nowhere in a hot zone in Afghanistan. And this 30 year old captain got up every day and popped open his laptop and talked to his kids, got his orders, you know, and would go on Google to find out about this particular tribe that he was working with and what more he should know about it. So these are tools, but it also requires boots on the ground training.

Thank you.

Next question.

Hi there.

What is your opinion of blogs as legitimate journal sources?

Well, you tell what blogs remind me of. You're all, at one time or another, you were students of history. The blogs today are the Tom paines of the 21st century. You know, they're on the street corner and they're pamphleting in their own way. They just have a greater reach. And I actually like the idea of it because I think, if you will, it has opened the world to very smart people who are around this country who had something to say. But again, it's then a matter of you have to determine which ones, A, you want to listen to and B, which ones have something that you can count on, that there's a certain amount of integrity to their information and which of those who are just nihilists, who are just out to cause some kind of trouble and are polemicist in the worst sense of the word. But I really think it's very healthy for democracy to have these other voices. It makes it tougher in our business. Dan Rather, in a final analysis, probably lost his job because of the blogs who said, hey, wait a minute, those fonts don't match up on that letter. And it took them three weeks to get to it. And in our newsroom we were saying, my God, they're probably right. It's everything that we can see that's probably right. Why is it taking CBS so long to get to it? Next question. Hi, Mr. Brokaw.

So I'm kind of a big media consumer and a big news consumer and Something that continues to register with me as a trend over all my years of watching the news and reading it online, so forth and so on, is that news seems to be very trendy in its coverage. I did a fair amount of direct work in Hurricane Katrina about six months, and then nine months after Hurricane Katrina hit, it impressed me how the area in New Orleans and in the Mississippi Gulf coast, those areas were still in. They looked like war zones, essentially even six months or nine months afterward.

But.

But Katrina had kind of fallen off the radar screens. Same thing has happened with Darfur, for example. So what would you say to someone who is a news consumer who is disturbed by the fact that disaster can still be kind of a lasting part of areas in this country? Wars can be going around the world where thousands of mothers and children are dying every day, but you look up and you see that tickle Me Elmo is a front page news story. How do we find news that is important? How do we keep important news on the front lines? And how do we take news stories, both as individuals and the media, from something that's just up there in the papers or on a headline and turn it into action that lasts?

Well, it's the trickiest balancing act that we have all day, every day. I would suggest to you that Katrina got plenty of attention, that Brian Williams almost took up residence down there, that he felt very strongly about it. He was there when it happened, did some of the best reporting of his career from there, and has gone back there a lot. One of the other things that we did at NBC News was to look at what I knew personally had existed, which is the black underclass. But a lot of this country was stunned, and in Europe, they were especially stunned by what they saw, the conditions. So we thought we should do an hour on how this is possible in America. And we didn't want to do it in New Orleans because we knew they'd be getting a lot of attention. So we looked all over the country, and we decided we could have done it in northern industrial cities and southern cities. And we went to Jackson, Mississippi, because of its historic importance when it came to race. And we did a story called Separate and Unequal, and it was about the unintended consequences of the Civil Rights act and how that helped, in a way, create a black underclass, because those who could get out of traditional black neighborhoods in the south did and went to law school, became doctors and were merchants and got out of there. And the people who were left behind, who didn't have the resources, were really left behind and they were kind of out of sight, out of mind. And we took one traditional black neighborhood in Jackson, Mississippi with a black high school that was well known in the state and spent nine months in the fabric of that community telling the stories. I can't tell you how gratifying it was the response that we got to it. People wanted to help in the state of Mississippi. They were terrified that we were down there doing it. And it has changed the dialogue on race in the state in the 21st century. They're talking about it again in a way that they need to. So you're constantly balancing that. But it's just like Google. You want people to come to your site as well. And it's not just eat your spinach all day long, you know, it's the mix. And finding the right mix is tough. And sometimes we're, you know, if I don't hear about Brad and Angelina one more time, I'll be a happy person.

Well, I.

And let me tell you the latest one. It was too bad the young man died, but Nicole Smith's son. How many more times do I have to hear about this? How many more magazines?

I'm really interested in Brad and Angelina. We have time for two final questions. We have a final question from New York, which I'll read to you. How do you view the role of China in the order of the world? Is it a threat to the United States? What role do you think the media has played or should play in helping the American people understand China? Rise of China being a great story.

It's critically important. It's, you know, I think we can still project that the 21st century, if it's not entirely the century of China, that China will be a huge player in it. You think about it every day. I know about how you're going to do business there, what the rules are, how all those people are going to find ways to live together. Which I think is an issue that has not got enough of. Interestingly to go back to the Korean question. The Chinese foreign minister is somebody I've known for a long time because I've done a lot of reporting from China. And I said to him at dinner 18 months ago, why don't you, the Chinese make this your big step into the world by working with the North Koreans about why they don't have to do this. And he just looked at me, that kind of thousand yard stare and they were not going to go there. It was clear to me they're going through a very difficult passage. Is it 400 million people that are going to move from the rural areas to the cities in the next 20 years.

That's correct.

Think about that. That's the entire population of the United States plus 100 million.

And they're building five new cities to accommodate them.

That's right. And I was in Shanghai. I did a two hour documentary on China in 1983, prime time. Huge audience because we were still fascinated by what was essentially a closed city. I was in Shanghai in the old Peace Hotel in a five room suite that they gave me because nobody had stayed there in 25 years. And this is a terrible image, but I had rats running through that thing of the size of cocker spaniels. And look at Shanghai now. This was not that long ago. And that tells you the warp speed with which societies can change these days with the resources that we have. And I don't think we're thinking about China in a kind of cosmic way enough that we do need to be thinking about it. The big issue, I believe, for the Chinese is how they continue to grow, how they keep that economy and keep everybody employed and still try to maintain the political controls that they think are necessary for them. I just don't see how it works. And I hope that the explosion is not of a great magnitude, but I do think that they're in for some difficult paths.

Let's hope it's a peaceful rise. You have the honor of the last question.

Well, thank you very much. As you talking about, you know, boots on the ground type operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and the positive things that are in fact happening over there and me personally having personally a stake and a family member that's served time in Afghanistan and Iraq. I've heard personal stories of women's liberation and, you know, building schools for children. Do you feel that the American population has been educated on the positive things that are in fact happening? Are they being overshadowed by, you know, particular shortcomings of the Bush administration?

It's complex. Women in Iraq in Saddam's days had a lot more liberty than they do now. They had real positions in government and in industry. It was a secular society. And I knew a number of very prominent women in Iraq who were physicians and government officials and ran energy departments and so on. That's not happening now because it's become much more Islamic because the real power is with the mullahs and the, especially in the Shiite society. Iraq, if Iran has its way, will just be an annex of Iran. And Iran is run by the supreme religious council of 12 mullahs who run that place in Afghanistan where the administration has made a great deal out of the liberation of women. That's true. In Kabul, you go outside of Kabul. That's not true. These traditional Islamic villages, women still are subjugated. If I. This happens to me a lot. When I go into a village, the women scurry out of the way and they go up and stand. They. They go to a hillside 100 yards away and watch us because the men don't want them around and the American military on the ground there. If they set up a medical clinic, they don't have women to be the physicians. So the guys won't. The men won't bring the women to the clinic. We've got a long way to go. It's very complicated. Let me just close on one final note, and that is that we're all here and I'm having a wonderful time with you. This is a real privilege to be a part of this and to see this great place. I guess this is what Eric's idea of public housing in Silicon Valley is. I have no idea. But you also have to think every day about the people who are not here, who are in uniform, however you feel about the decision that put them in harm's way. Their families and those people have volunteered for this duty in the national interest and to give their lives, if necessary, to protect your security. Again, these are complex times, and the political decisions obviously were greatly flawed, but that wasn't the fault of the young man or the young woman who stepped forward and said, I want to serve my country. You have to think about that, and you have to keep the connection with their families. We don't want to develop a society in which we have separate and unequal civilians and uniform military people. They're very aware of it. They want to know what you think, and they want you. They want to know whether you're aware of where they are and what they're going through. You have to think about that.

I think you can see why Tom has. Has had such an enormous impact on both the United States and the world around. And what I like the most about you is that you're still young, that you still have many years ahead of you on all these new initiatives. You seem just as busy, just as crazy, just as much you want to change the world. It is a privilege to have had you here as part of our Google experience.

Thank you very much. I really enjoyed it. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thanks a lot. Thank you. My final line is that I wish the numbers on my driver's license were not what they are. I Wish I were 30 years younger because I think the next 30 years in your business especially, and the opportunities that you have to change the world for the better are limitless. And so it really has been a privilege to be with you today. Thanks very much. Thank you.

Thank you.

All. The cars. Kirby hancock, bonnie tyler, stevie nix, men at work. Susie top.