Francis Foster

And as bad as we think the internet is, ancient Rome was far worse.

People making up all sorts of wild stories.

People thinking the conspiracy theories of the internet

Ancient Rome had this times 10.

And they realized if we didn't do something, if we didn't start to say what the actual casualty figures were in the battle that we lost, or what the actual territory we just took was, wild stories would abound.

And that would mean that there would be trials, sometimes executions, coups, upheavals, all sorts of things.

So if we could give the public, and this is why it's proto-news,

common share of facts things that we all know are true and can roughly agree on that that would cause peace not perfect peace not perfect harmony but at least we're not arguing about basic facts

And that is the beginning of understanding the importance of news.

If we all have the same vocabulary of facts, then we're debating about how important this is compared to that.

Why is our politics so polarized today?

Because we no longer have this shared diet of facts.

But when it works, and we're all agreed as to what is going on, what the facts are, and the debate is about the emphasis, we're in a much less polarized world.

that's why the romans created the act that they are that's what they were trying to do now news really begins and maybe francis this differs entirely from what pbs told you and so i apologize um about in the 1400s along the river rhine now the rhine is a very special river in european history

It begins in the mountains of Switzerland, it goes through Germany, and then it empties into the North Sea in modern-day Netherlands, Holland.

And along this river, we see a tremendous amount of Protestant movements emerges.

Germany at this time period is not a united country, even though technically it's the Holy Roman Empire.

There's different princes and principalities and dukes and so on.

And your royal leader, your princely leader, could decide what flavor of Protestant you were or whether you're still with the Roman Catholic Church.

And you would be on a boat going down the Rhine, and you would be, if you were a Protestant, you'd look out on Catholic cities, and you know that if you came to shore, the chances of you being tried and burnt alive as a heretic were very high.