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What the press has to say about IQ2 : |
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New Debate
Series Addresses Pressing Questions of
the Day
By ANNIE
KARNI - Special to the Sun - January 2, 2007
In a packed
auditorium at the Asia Society and
Museum earlier this month, a panel of
distinguished scholars, editors, and
filmmakers debated the motion:
"Hollywood fuels anti-Americanism
abroad." The hour-and-a-half
conversation about whether the film
industry or the war in Iraq was more to
blame for growing international ill-will
toward America was part of a new live
debate series called Intelligence
Squared, which is funded by the
Rosenkranz Foundation. The debate
series is seeking to trade punditry for
dialogue, according to the executive
producer, Dana Wolfe. The series caters
to an intellectual audience eager for
more than sound bites on political and
social issues of international concern.
"Media was
getting too partisan, Congress was
getting too bitter and rancorous — even
ordinary social conversations about
public policy were getting too angry and
emotional," the chairman of the
Rosenkranz Foundation, Robert
Rosenkranz, said. The debate
series should "expose people to both
sides of an argument and foster greater
respect for the opposing view," Mr.
Rosenkran
z said. Debaters
have included columnist Christopher
Hitchens, the editor of the Paris
Review, Philip Gourevitch, and the
Israeli ambassador to the United
Nations, Daniel Ayalon.
At the
Hollywood debate, witty and convincing
arguments were greeted with laughter and
applause from the audience.
"Anti-Americanism abroad would exist
without Hollywood, just as cancer would
exist without cigarette smoke," a
panelist for the motion, Roger Kimball,
said. "But Hollywood tends to make the
malignancy worse."
Mr.
Kimball, an editor and publisher of the
New Criterion, said Hollywood films
foster a view of America as "a decadent
society in love with nihilism."
Speaking
against the motion, a screenwriter,
Richard Walter, said Hollywood films
"show that we're an open society." The
violence and sex in such films "was not
invented by 11 Jews at Paramount
Studios a couple of weeks ago." Before the
debate, a majority of the audience said
they favored the motion or were
undecided; afterward, 59% voted against
the motion.
Debate
topics in the series range from whether
America should tolerate a nuclear Iran to whether freedom of expression
includes the right to offend. The
debates have not been advertised, Mr.
Rosenkranz said. Instead, he is sending
out invitations to leading journalists,
investment bankers, public policy
scholars, and political donors.
"The idea
is that the quality of the questions
would be higher, and the evenings would
have not only an intellectual dimension,
but also a social dimension," Mr.
Rosenkranz said.
"I think
the format causes the audience to focus
much more intensely than it would if it
was just a lecture on the same subject,"
the chief investment strategist for the
hedge fund Pequot Capital, Byron Wien,
said. "There was an element of
competition and excitement about it."
"The
audience was very engaged, physically
responding to the debate," the publisher
of Dead Horse Media, Elizabeth Spiers,
said. Ms. Spiers only criticism was of
the format. "I think they let the
panelists talk too long," she said.
The form is
traditional, Oxford-debate style: one
side of three speakers proposes a motion
and another side of three speakers
opposes the motion. An impartial
moderator presides over the debate, and
the audience, which votes before and
after the debate, decides the winner by
its final vote.
"I came
away with a good feeling about the
exercise," a scholar at the American
Enterprise Institute,
Joshua Muravchik, said after
participating in the Hollywood debate.
Intelligence Square members who pay a
minimum of $10,000 for the series are
invited to dine with the panelists after
the debates. Individual tickets are also
available for $40 a debate.
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