Photo of a Facebook user by Rodrigo Buendia/AFP/Getty Images.

Social networking websites such as Facebook and Twitter have helped users mobilize around a common cause like never before. But what if their message is one of hate?

The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Los Angeles-based group working against global racism, has compiled a list of hundreds of websites it deems hateful and is pushing their host sites to remove them. They range from a white supremacist motorcycle group's blog, to the sale of a Nazi-era ring on eBay.

The group's associate dean, Rabbi Abraham Cooper, recently spoke at a briefing on Capitol Hill, where he described the group's efforts and what they're up against.

After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, said Cooper, many experts were concerned about U.S. homegrown militants -- such as neoNazis and KKK members -- adopting al-Qaida-like tactics, but instead al-Qaida has co-opted theirs by using the Internet to spread its message of violence and to recruit members. The ease of communication that the Internet brings is supplying groups seeking to do harm with a tool to inspire bad behavior in others, he said.

Cooper and his organization are hoping to convince social networks, which have their own guidelines and standards, to become more proactive in taking down objectionable content, rather than waiting for users to flag it.

Rick Eaton, senior researcher at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said Facebook personnel "do a pretty good job and are very receptive to our concerns," but they allow some sites like "F--- Religion" to stay if they consider it a "discussion." Twitter, on the other hand, has not agreed to a meeting with the center, he said, and continues to let troubling users have accounts, for example Jabhat al-Nusra, whom the State Department has identified as a terrorist front.

Facebook declined to be interviewed for this article and Twitter did not respond to our interview request.

Facebook has a page that explains how to report an objectionable page and what the company does in response. It also lists types of prohibited content, such as threats to public safety and pornography, that it can remove.

Twitter also prohibits direct threats of violence, and describes when it can suspend user accounts.

YouTube starts its user guidelines with a message of trust and outlines its grounds for permanent banning.

Individuals can continue to point out objectionable pages, but the social networking companies have the expertise and could be more effective at it, Cooper said.

Liz Heron, director of social media and engagement at the Wall Street Journal, said all three social networks have enormous amounts of content that make it hard to regulate. Facebook and YouTube have teams of people looking for and taking down harmful content, but it's not always a perfect process, she said.

She cited as an example a nude painting of actress Bea Arthur that was sold at an auction earlier this month for $1.9 million. News organizations that covered the sale were blocked from posting their stories on Facebook.

Twitter has taken a more hands-off approach, Heron said. "I think free speech is really important to them and because of that they tend not to get involved in what should or should not be taken down."

Twitter posts a transparency report twice a year on the number of requests it gets via court order or from government agencies around the world to remove objectionable material. In its latest report, from July 1 through Dec. 31, 2012, Twitter got 42 such requests and withheld access to one account in Germany and to 44 tweets in France. There were four requests in the United States and none were blocked.

In the case in France, where making anti-Semitic remarks is illegal, a student group had objected to anti-Semitic tweets. So Twitter blocked access to those particular tweets in France.

The technology to detect a user's country of origin does exist, but it's up to the social networking sites to use it, said Paul Schiff Berman, a law professor at George Washington University. The websites then could filter content according to what kind of speech is illegal in each country.

"It's hard when you're talking about millions of tweets, but it's not necessarily impossible," he said. And the companies that want to do business in other countries might find themselves taking on that massive effort.

In the meantime, groups concerned about hate speech can continue going to the intermediaries, such as search engines and social networking sites, rather than the person who posted the material or the end user who is downloading it, because those individual people are harder to find.

Cooper admits it is an uphill battle. He said he approached Facebook to ask why it removed the "F--- Muslims" page but not those lambasting other religions. Facebook ended up restoring the Muslim page.

What do you think the social networking companies should do, if anything? Let us know below in the comments section.

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JEFFREY BROWN: And we turn to the blockbuster deal announced today in the tech world: giant, but troubled Yahoo buying the popular blogging site Tumblr. The purchasing price: $1.1 billion dollars. The prize: a fast-growing social media site that features more than 100 million blogs in its network and reaches several hundred million people worldwide.

It was started just six years ago by David Karp, who dropped out of high school to work in the tech field. He will remain as head of Tumblr.

This is the biggest move yet by Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, who joined the company just 10 months ago from Google. Today, she wrote on a Tumblr post, "We promise not to screw it up."

Rebecca Lieb is research analyst of digital advertising and media for the Altimeter Group and joins us now.

Welcome to you.

So, why does Yahoo want to buy Tumblr? What's the appeal?

REBECCA LIEB, Altimeter Group: There are several appealing things about Tumblr. There's certainly the size of the audience, as you just mentioned, but also, perhaps more than that, the demographics of Tumblr's audience.

Yahoo has been losing users, losing eyeballs for years now. Tumblr represents the millennials, those 20-somethings who didn't abandon Yahoo because they probably never aligned with the platform in the first place.

JEFFREY BROWN: Well ...

REBECCA LIEB: This is a group that is incredibly important to the advertisers Yahoo is trying to attract.

JEFFREY BROWN: Explain for our non-Tumblr users in the audience what it is. How has it been able to rise so fast and appeal to so many people?

REBECCA LIEB: Tumblr is a blogging platform that is very, very image-centric. It's very focused on users uploading photographs.

And this younger demographic is a very, very mobile demographic. These are people who have their smartphones with them at all times. And as anybody with a smartphone knows, it's much easier to update your status with a quick photo of what you're doing or what you're eating or what you're seeing than it is typing with your thumbs.

We saw a very recent move like this when Facebook acquired Instagram last year, also for a billion dollars, which raised some eyebrows at the time. And Facebook has subsequently redesigned its news stream to focus more on these images, as its users migrate to mobile platforms.

I believe that Yahoo is trying to do very much the same thing. And, in fact, since the announcement of the Tumblr acquisition, Yahoo has announced that they will be giving users substantially more free space on Flickr, also a Yahoo property.

So we're seeing a big move towards images and a big move towards mobile on Yahoo's part.

JEFFREY BROWN: In all of these new deals, and this one in particular, the question is still, how do you make money out of it, right? I mean, what would happen in this case? Is it likely we'd see money made through the advertising on Tumblr or what?

REBECCA LIEB: I think that this is a very interesting two-way street.

Yahoo, of course, is a traditional new media company, if you can -- to coin a phrase. In other words, they have very interruptive display advertising, the "click here, buy this now" type. Tumblr has been experimenting with what's called “content marketing” and forms of what's known as “native advertising.”

This is -- these are marketing messages, but they're more subtly integrated into the interface. They don't shout at the user. They don't interrupt the user. They're part of the stream and they're meant to attract, rather than to interrupt.

Yahoo for the time being will leave Tumblr alone. If they slap these interactive ads up on Tumblr, the users will probably abandon the property. At the same time, Yahoo is going to learn from these Tumblr products and try and incorporate them into Yahoo's more traditional properties.

JEFFREY BROWN: When you -- go ahead.

REBECCA LIEB: At the same time, Yahoo can introduce Tumblr to larger brands and more traditional advertisers, the P&Gs of the world, the McDonald's of the world. So, this does have the potential to benefit both parties monetarily.

JEFFREY BROWN: I was thinking, when you were referring to the possibility of users migrating or leaving, apparently, there's reports that already some of that is happening. But that just shows how fragile this whole system is, right, this ecosystem of companies and where users go.

REBECCA LIEB: Absolutely.

You know, we have seen companies like Yahoo stumble and lose their luster, AOL, MySpace, in periods of times that are less than a decade. It took companies like Pan American Airlines or Ford Motor companies perhaps a century to rise to ascendance and then to lose their luster.

Internet companies can do it seemingly overnight. Marissa Mayer is trying to bring Yahoo back from the brink, as her former Google colleague Tim Armstrong is similarly trying over at AOL.

JEFFREY BROWN: And just briefly, when she writes that post, "We won't screw it up," she is writing that because she knows a lot of people remember Yahoo apparently just -- doing just that, right, with other acquisitions.

REBECCA LIEB: Not on Marissa Mayer's watch.

JEFFREY BROWN: Right.

REBECCA LIEB: She is relatively new at the company. She's been there less than a year.

But, indeed, Yahoo has made acquisitions and screwed them up. So did News Corp. when it acquired MySpace. One of Yahoo's real challenges is going to be how to keep Tumblr cool when it's owned by what is very easily perceived by its very young, very hip user base to be a corporate overlord.

JEFFREY BROWN: Rebecca Lieb, thanks so much. 

Watch Video The Watergate hearings began on May 17, 1973. Public Television aired all 250 hours of testimony that summer. Here are some of the highlights. Video edited by Justin Scuiletti

The Watergate scandal began with a burglary in June 1972 and ended with a president's resignation in August 1974. During the summer of 1973, a special Senate Committee held hearings, co-chaired by Sens. Sam Ervin, D-N.C., and Howard Baker, R-Tenn., to investigate the burglaries and whether "illegal, improper or unethical activities" had been committed in connection to President Richard Nixon's 1972 campaign for re-election.

Public television aired all 250 hours of the hearings, gavel-to-gavel. The parade of witnesses and testimony, from former White House counsel John Dean's allegation that President Nixon knew about the cover-up of the burglary, to former presidential aide Alexander Butterfield's revelation that there were tapes that could prove it, shocked the country and ultimately led Nixon to resign from office -- the only time an American president has done so. Here are some of the highlights from those remarkable hearings.

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The PBS NewsHour is marking the 40th anniversary of the Watergate hearings with reflections from Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer, who covered the hearings gavel-to-gavel. Watch their conversation with senior correspondent Jeffrey Brown on Friday's NewsHour.

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Attorney General Eric Holder may be the lone witness at a House Judiciary Committee hearing on oversight Wednesday. Watch a live stream of the hearing, which will begin at 1 p.m. EDT.

Even when the White House says it disapproves or didn't know of the latest government action spiraling into a political scandal, it's hard to keep the president out of it.

A trifecta of breaking stories has put President Barack Obama on the hot seat. He and his team, from inside the White House to Cabinet members, must juggle questions about the handling of a terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, that left a U.S. ambassador dead, a phone records subpoena by the Justice Department that surprised the national news organization it targeted, and a practice at the Internal Revenue Service that scrutinized certain political non-profit groups' tax-exempt status applications.

Politico's Glenn Thrush reports on frustrations with how the West Wing seemed to be lacking spin control. "Our hands are completely tied" on the IRS and Department of Justice stories, one administration official said, because of legal limitations with the agencies. The communications team has been "very, very slow on the draw" a former official said.

While a news conference with Attorney General Eric Holder and a formal report on the IRS practices provided some answers Tuesday, the continued focus on these stories is reshaping Mr. Obama's political narrative. And it's not in the way he would prefer.

Thrush's colleagues Alexander Burns and John F. Harris sum up the arc of the story around Mr. Obama this way: "None of these messes would have happened under a president less obsessed with politics, less insulated within his own White House and less trusting of government as an institution."

In other words, a perception of a culture of intolerance inside the White House can be a major distraction when a president wants to focus on his policy long game and legacy. It's unclear what kind of impact the week's events will have on the rest of his term -- or the press' coverage of it.

The Associated Press, which was the target of the Justice Department subpoena, went to the heart of this idea with its first question to White House spokesman Jay Carney at Tuesday's press briefing:

"Doesn't responsibility for setting tone and setting direction ultimately rest with the president on these matters?" the reporter asked.

Carney insisted that the reporters treat the issues separately, and look to Mr. Obama's day-to-day work.

Both the IRS and Associated Press scandals continued to grow Tuesday.

First, the Justice Department and FBI opened an investigation into the IRS' special review of groups, including those linked to the tea party and conservative politics, as they sought tax-exempt status.

Holder condemned the IRS' discrimination in a news conference and assured the government he would hold any wrongdoers accountable:

"To the extent that we have determined that actors in government have gone beyond what they were supposed to do, broken regulations, broken rules, broken the law, we have prosecuted people. We have held people accountable. We have tried to do things according to the rules. There are going to be people, occasionally, who will not do so. It is then incumbent upon us who -- upon us who have enforcement responsibilities to make sure that we hold those people accountable, and I think our record shows that over the last 4 1/2 years we have been -- we've done that."

The Wall Street Journal provides a full transcript of Holders' remarks here.

The Treasury Department inspector general for tax administration also chimed in on the problem with a report Tuesday. The inspector general cited "ineffective management" as the reason the IRS caused unnecessary delays and information requests from conservative groups for more than 18 months. The IRS has now resolved the problems, the report says, yet should put measures in place to make sure it doesn't happen again. The report suggests that the IRS better track tax-exempt group applications under review and train employees before election cycles.

The report also clears the White House and others outside the IRS from wrongdoing.

"All of these officials stated that the criteria were not influenced by any individual or organization outside the IRS," the report states.

The report also includes a response from an IRS official explaining how the service reviewed groups' tax-exempt status applications.

Mr. Obama responded to the report in a statement Tuesday night, saying Treasury Secretary Jack Lew would hold responsible the accountable IRS employees and make sure the recommendations are put into practice. "But regardless of how this conduct was allowed to take place, the bottom line is, it was wrong," Mr. Obama added.

The report and Mr. Obama's statement likely won't stop growing criticism from Republicans, much of it stemming from a senior Utah Republican's dealings with the service. Sen. Orrin Hatch had asked the IRS in June why it needed donor information from some groups seeking tax-exempt status. On Tuesday, he said the former IRS director had "purposefully misled" him. Others, such as Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., called for the resignation of acting IRS Commissioner Steve Miller.

Although Miller was deputy commissioner when Hatch first inquired, the focus will stay on Miller this week. He's due to testify Friday before the House Ways and Means Committee.

On Tuesday's NewsHour, Jeffrey Brown spoke with two reporters following the IRS story. The segment, featuring Juliet Eilperin of The Washington Post and CQ Roll Call's Eliza Newlin Carney, is here or below:

The IRS scandal wasn't the only one drawing political ire, especially in regard to Holder. The Justice Department's handling of the Associated Press -- seizing reporters' phone records and investigating leaks that appeared in an AP article on a foiled terrorist attack -- prompted Republicans and the media to criticize the administration Tuesday.

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus called for Holder's resignation. Holder has come under fire before with Republicans, most recently when the House investigated the Fast and Furious gun smuggling operation.

Like on the IRS issue, Holder held firm at his Tuesday news conference. He had recused himself from the investigation, he said, and instead said the deputy attorney general authorized the phone records subpoena. "I'm confident that the people who are involved in this investigation, who I know for a great many years and I've worked with for a great many years, followed all of the appropriate Justice Department regulations and did things according to DOJ rules," Holder said.

Deputy Attorney General James Cole wrote to the Associated Press president, defending the investigation. "The subpoenas were limited to a reasonable period of time and did not seek the content of any calls," Cole wrote.

Holder said the government leak that spawned the AP subpoena, however, was "within the top two or three most serious leaks that I've ever seen. It put the American people at risk."

Watch Holder's address here or below:

Of course, Carney was pressed on both issues at his press briefing Tuesday. While he would not comment on the specifics of the AP story, Carney said, "I can tell you that the president feels strongly that we need the press to be able to be unfettered in its pursuit of investigative journalism."

Watch that here or below.

The main event Wednesday will be Holder's testimony on Capitol Hill. We'll live-stream the hearing at pbs.org/newshour.

Holder and the Justice Department's biggest critics may lie outside of Congress and government altogether.

News organizations and journalism groups were unsparing in their criticism. The New York Times editorial board accused the Obama administration of having "a chilling zeal for investigating leaks and prosecuting leakers," and said the White House had "failed to offer a credible justification" for its actions.

The editorial board of the Washington Post concluded that any national security threat in the matter was probably "outweighed by the damage to press freedom and governmental transparency."

The head of the American Society of News Editors said the administration's "outrageous actions" were "appalling" and invited Holder to join ASNE's June convention to "explain the Justice Department's actions to our editors."

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, in a letter to Holder, demanded the Justice Department return or destroy the phone records, while Poynter laid out "what journalists should know."

Meanwhile, David Carr of the New York Times compared the AP situation to Bloomberg News reporters' breach of client data and pulled both stories together with a key observation: "So many lines are being crossed in so many directions, it is tough to keep track of who are the victims and who are the perpetrators." (Bloomberg News editor-in-chief Matthew Winkler weighed in on the matter Monday.)

Watch the NewsHour's coverage of the AP and Justice Department controversies here or below:

LINE ITEMS

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel on Tuesday called for the retraining of tens of thousands of U.S. military recruiters and sexual assault prevention officers in the wake of a new revelation that an Army sergeant in charge of handling sexual assault cases at Fort Hood, Texas, is under investigation for alleged sex abuse crimes, according to Craig Whitlock of the Washington Post.

A majority of civilian Pentagon employees will be forced to take unpaid furloughs of up to 11 days this summer as a result of sequestration -- a few days less than expected, reports Anna Mulrine of the Christian Science Monitor.

Rep.-elect Mark Sanford, R-S.C., will officially be sworn-in Wednesday to rejoin the House.

Pablo Pantoja, who was the Republican National Committee's Florida Hispanic Outreach Director, is leaving the party because a controversial Heritage Foundation study and will become a Democrat.

At least six House Republicans are determined not to pass the Senate Gang of Eight immigration bill, reports Politico's Ginger Gibson.

Former Rep. Joe Sestak, who in 2010 defeated Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter in a Democratic primary and then lost the Senate race to Republican Pat Toomey, is preparing for a rematch.

CNN's Jake Tapper reports there are some contradictions about the leaked Benghazi talking points.

Vermont will become the first state to pass legislation allowing physicians to prescribe lethal medication to certain terminally ill patients.

Oh, Joe! No. 467: chocolate bullets.

Upworthy crafts a completely amazing video about income distribution in America.

Politico's Maggie Haberman says Anthony Weiner has hired a campaign manager.

Takoma Park, Md., is the first U.S. city to allow 16-year-olds to vote in local elections.

The House will likely vote Thursday on repealing the Affordable Care Act -- for the 37th time.

NEWSHOUR ROUNDUP

We live-streamed on the HatCam Wednesday morning. Watch the video of members of Team NewsHour -- including your Morning Line duo Christina Bellantoni and Terence Burlij -- running the ACLI Capital Challenge race, three miles for the Wounded Warrior Project.

Christina interviews author Nicco Mele about his book "The End of Big." Watch that here or below -- and weigh in on the comments thread with your thoughts on whether or not technology has empowered us.

Five families whose lives were radically impacted by U.S. immigration laws shared their stories with the NewsHour. Production assistant Cindy Huang produced the special report here.

How did Watergate affect you? Let us know ahead of our Friday special report looking back at the scandal that changed American politics and made the NewsHour what it is today.

Health correspondent Betty Ann Bowser looks at the BRCA gene test and what Angelina Jolie's announcement means in the bigger picture. And Ali Weinberg of NBC writes about her decision to pursue a mastectomy as a young woman.

What more can you say? Feline Fans Unite at Internet Cat Video Festival.

TOP TWEETS

What you call "bias"--being gay, being undocumented, being Filipino w/ a Latin name--I call "my life" #BuzzFeedBrews #immigration

— Jose Antonio Vargas (@joseiswriting) May 15, 2013

It's looking like a great day to out-run some Senators. #acli to.pbs.org/10MOvi2 twitter.com/cbellantoni/st...

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If you see Jay Carney at Safeway getting a gallon of ice cream, jar of Nutella, and five Redbox movies, just leave him alone.

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Scandal, Power, and The President. By James "Jay" Carney. time.com/time/magazine/...

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Map of student loan delinquency rates by state.The lowest South Dakota (6.5%) the highest West Virginia (about 18%) twitter.com/NYFed_News/sta...

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Leahy is just RIPPING the Dirksen building, where this #immigration hearing is being held. "The ugliest building in D.C."

— Jordan Fabian (@Jordanfabian) May 14, 2013

Little-known National Aquarium in the basement of the Dept. Commerce, operating since 1885, is finally closing. bit.ly/12xCqub

— Garance Franke-Ruta (@thegarance) May 14, 2013

House #GOP is wasting YOUR time and tax dollars on a distortion and spin campaign to #repeal #obamacare

— Rep.George Miller (@askgeorge) May 14, 2013

Season 44 of @sesamestreet has a new segment w/ Cookie Monster that helps him build executive function skills. #pbsam

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Christina Bellantoni and Terence Burlij contributed to this report.

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JUDY WOODRUFF: More on all this now from an attorney representing the Associated Press. He is David Schulz. He specializes in First Amendment issues and is a partner at Levine Sullivan Koch & Schulz.

We invited the Department of Justice to appear on the program, but officials declined.

David Schulz, welcome to the NewsHour.

First of all, why does the Associated Press consider this a violation of their constitutional rights?

DAVID SCHULZ, Levine Sullivan Koch & Schulz: Well, Judy, this is a really serious issue, because without sources, there isn't the news. Reporters need sources to figure out what's going on in the government.

And this was really a very large-scale intrusion into AP's news-gathering activities. The subpoena sought, as you mentioned, 20 phone lines in a number of bureaus around the country where 100 or more reporters -- 100 or more different reporters work. So it was extremely broad.

And the impact on that is really devastating, because it gives the government kind of an ability to see what the AP was doing, how it goes about its business, who it was talking to not on any particular story, but on every story that was being covered during that period of time. And it's just overreaching in a fundamental way that has an adverse impact on the press.

JUDY WOODRUFF: We heard the attorney general, though, say -- he said, this was a leak of classified information. He said it was one of the most serious he's ever seen in the damage it did to U.S. national security.

Why doesn't that justify a full-fledged investigation?

DAVID SCHULZ: Well, there always are issues and balances, I think, as the White House said today, between national security and the free press.

But this sort of action should be taken in very, very rare circumstances. And I don't think that the Department of Justice has demonstrated that what it did was appropriate here. Certainly, there's a lot of unanswered questions; 20 journalists involved in the story? We also know that the leak that we think that they were investigating was a story that was held by the AP. It was handled responsibly.

When they understood the government had concerns about the timing of the story, it wasn't broadcast or released by the AP. So there was a responsible effort by the press here. Now, whether the government has a right to go after classified information, it does.

But, bear in mind, if the government can get from the press any time it wants to information about who its sources are, pretty soon the only thing we are ever going to know about the government is what the government wants to tell us. This just really is not how things work. And it's a tremendous adverse effect on a free press.

JUDY WOODRUFF: I hear you, and -- but I also heard the attorney general say that this -- what happened. He said this leak put the American people at risk, and he repeated that.

DAVID SCHULZ: Sure.

And if that's the case, there are things that can be done. We have had a sad experience with this. It grew out of the Watergate era. And there are regulations in place that were put in to rein in the excesses of the Justice Department in going after reporters in the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate era.

And there are a number of those things in those regs. One is that the attorney general is supposed to personally sign off on a subpoena before it's issued. But, more importantly, before a subpoena goes out for this sort of information, they're supposed to be able to verify that the information is critical to a successful investigation and that it's not available from any alternative source, and then they have an obligation to be sure that it's narrowly drawn.

And we would like an explanation from the Justice Department of what they did to assure themselves that they couldn't get what they needed from other sources and how they can justify this terribly broad subpoena as narrowly drawn.

And there's one other safeguard that I just want to mention, because I think it's important. The way the regulations are written, when the Justice Department wants this information, this type of information, they're supposed to come to the press first and tell them what they want and negotiate so that they can narrow it and get what they need.

They're only authorized to do this in a secret way, as was done here, where they can demonstrate that disclosing in advance would undermine the integrity of the investigation. And it's really hard to understand on these facts how telephone logs from over a year ago that were sought in connection with an ongoing investigation that had been publicly disclosed -- we knew there was a special prosecutor looking at this -- how advising the AP in advance would have jeopardized that.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well ...

DAVID SCHULZ: And that's important, because if they had advised us in advance, a court would have been allowed an opportunity to review that. That didn't happen.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, all we have to go -- all we have to go on at this point of course are the words of the attorney general, the deputy attorney general, because the attorney general recused himself.

But we know in that letter from Mr. Cole, the deputy attorney general, he said this was only done -- and I'm quoting him -- "after all other reasonable alternative investigative steps had been taken." He said there had been 550 interviews, tens of thousands of documents they had looked at before they turned to the phone records.

DAVID SCHULZ: And, again, that's not all in the letter. I'm not sure where you're getting some of those numbers.

But one of the key points here is, Judy, is if they had followed the procedures and notified the AP ahead of time, AP would have had the opportunity to ask a judge to review the situation and determine whether it really satisfied the criteria. And that's an important safeguard that was just short-circuited here. It was a unilateral action.

And it has a huge impact. The reason I think that there's been such a reaction in the press is, it really cripples the ability of the press to do its job. What source is going to talk with a news organization that's viewed as being some sort of investigative tool of the Department of Justice? And if their records can freely be obtained in this manner, then there's really a problem. This is a big step.

JUDY WOODRUFF: I was just going to say, that description I was using, I was quoting the attorney general as saying there had been an exhaustive search. And then I guess there were some other anonymous quotes from others.

But I guess my final question, David Schulz, is where does the Associated Press, where should others in the media draw the line? Because if the administration is saying classified information shouldn't have been leaked, it put people's lives at risk, and the journalists are saying, but we need to be able to do our jobs, where is the -- where should that line be drawn?

DAVID SCHULZ: It's a difficult question. And I won't deny that there are circumstances where that line -- where the government may need to cross that line, but it should be very, very rare.

I mean, bear in mind in the 35 years I have been practicing law, I only know of one other instance where the Department of Justice went after a reporter's records without giving them advanced notice. And that was just a single reporter for his home records and his office records. This is 20 different phone lines and not of individual reporters, but of bureaus.

It's just massively overbroad. And I think that's part of the problem here. It's not to say the government doesn't have some legitimate rights here, but it just overreached dramatically and it short-circuited the procedural safeguards that should exist so that we know that the sensitivities, the First Amendment rights, the need of the public to have information about the government is being protected.

JUDY WOODRUFF: David Schulz, attorney representing the Associated Press, we thank you.

DAVID SCHULZ: Thank you. 

Watch Video | Listen to the Audio

JUDY WOODRUFF: We turn to the other story the Obama administration is being criticized for, the collection of journalists' phone records in the name of tracking down classified leaks.

The Associated Press says it was notified Friday that the Justice Department secretly subpoenaed records for more than 20 of its phone lines. The AP's Kathleen Carroll says they listed outgoing calls from April and May of 2012.

KATHLEEN CARROLL, Associated Press: They haven't told us what they're looking for, and nor have they explained why we got no prior notice, which our lawyers tell us is not only customary, but required.

JUDY WOODRUFF: AP's president and CEO, Gary Pruitt, sent a letter of protest to Attorney General Eric Holder. In it, he wrote: "There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications.”

He said it amounts to -- quote -- "a serious interference with AP's constitutional right to gather and report the news."

Pruitt demanded that DOJ return the records and destroy any copies. But this afternoon, Attorney General Holder said he had recused himself at the start of the probe. Instead, he said Deputy Attorney General James Cole authorized the subpoena for the AP records.

ATTORNEY GENERAL ERIC HOLDER, United States: I don't know all that went into the formulation of the subpoena. This was a very serious -- a very serious leak, and a very, very serious leak. I have been a prosecutor since 1976, and I have to say that this is among -- if not the most serious, it's within the top two or three most serious leaks that I have ever seen.

It put the American people at risk. And that is not hyperbole. It put the American people at risk. And trying to determine who is responsible for that I think required very aggressive action.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Holder suggested the focus is on government officials who did the leaking more than on reporters.

ERIC HOLDER: We have investigated cases on the basis of the facts, not as a result of a policy to get the press or to do anything of that nature. The facts and the law have dictated our actions in that regard.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And in a written response to the AP's Pruitt, Cole cited a May 2012 investigation into the unauthorized disclosure of classified information. He also wrote that call records subpoenaed covered only a portion of that two-month period, and include personnel involved in the reporting of classified information.

On May 7^th of last year, the AP reported that a CIA operation in Yemen had foiled an al-Qaida plot to bomb an airliner bound for the U.S. That same day, AP reporter Adam Goldman spoke to the NewsHour's Kwame Holman about the decision to publish.

KWAME HOLMAN: You had been in discussions with the U.S. government about holding the story and decided to go with it today. The government didn't want this story reported.

ADAM GOLDMAN, Associated Press: Last week, my colleague Matt Apuzzo and I learned about this plot as it was unfolding. And we agreed for national security reasons that we wouldn't publish. Once those concerns had passed, we decided today that the public had a right to know that the U.S. had thwarted what we consider to be a very serious plot against aviation.

JUDY WOODRUFF: The Justice Department has not confirmed that story is the focus of the investigation. And at the White House today, Press Secretary Jay Carney wouldn't give specifics.

JAY CARNEY, White House Press Secretary: I can't comment on the specifics of that, but I can tell you that the president feels strongly that we need a -- the press to be able to be unfettered in its pursuit of investigative journalism.

He is also mindful of the need for secret and classified information to remain secret and classified in order to protect our national security interests. So there are -- there is a careful balance here that the must be attained.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Politicians from both parties warned, the Justice Department may have gone too far. Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy, chairing the Judiciary Committee, said he is very troubled. Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus called for Attorney General Holder to resign. 

On the Friday May 10 PBS NewsHour:

A seamstress was pulled out alive in Bangladesh from the ruins of a garment factory that collapsed more than two weeks ago

Details on the $45 million dollar bank heist involving ATMs in 27 countries

The breakout of violence in Pakistan that has killed more than 100 people ahead of critical elections on Saturday

Analysis of the week's news from syndicated columnist Mark Shields and The Washington Post's Michael Gerson

The story of how one victim from the bombings at the Boston Marathon is healing from her injuries from the blast

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"Covering Watergate," a PBS NewsHour special report, will air May 17.

Forty years ago, in the summer of 1973, Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer led public broadcasting's gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Senate Watergate hearings -- co-anchoring all 250 hours of the proceedings, and launching the beginnings of what the PBS NewsHour is today.

On May 17, PBS NewsHour presents a special report looking back at the scandal that transformed American politics and journalism and ultimately ended a presidency. In it, MacNeil and Lehrer recount their memories after some of the more gripping moments in the hearings and explain how their partnership and expansive coverage changed not only the face of television journalism, but also their lives.

As we ready this retrospective, we want to hear from you -- our viewers, those of you who spent the summer of '73 watching John Dean and Alexander Butterfield testify, or even those of you who learned of Watergate's impact much later.

How did the Watergate scandal and hearings affect your life or the way you perceived government or the media? And, what do you think Watergate's effect was on the nation?

Fill out this Public Insight Network form with your written memories or comments.

You can also call our oral history hotline at (202) 599-4PBS and share with us your story in a voice mail. Please be as specific and concise as possible. The call will cut off after three minutes.

Tweet #CoveringWatergate

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The PBS NewsHour is marking the 40th anniversary of the Watergate hearings with reflections from Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer, who covered the hearings gavel-to-gavel. Watch their conversation with senior correspondent Jeffrey Brown on the NewsHour May 17, 2013.

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JUDY WOODRUFF: Now: what a high- tech future may mean for your standard of living, personal privacy and how governments deal with their citizenry, a big subject, to be sure.

But those visions are the focus of a book called "The New Digital Age" by Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, and his co-author, Jared Cohen, who recently worked at the State Department. He's now at Google as well.

I sat down with them in Washington recently.

Eric Schmidt, Jared Cohen, welcome to the NewsHour.

ERIC SCHMIDT, Google: Thank you for having us.

JARED COHEN, Google Ideas: Thank you.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So you describe in the book connectivity, technology as a force for good, something that's going to improve the quality of human life. How can you be so sure?

ERIC SCHMIDT: You know, we're going from a time when people had almost no information to the whole world being fully interconnected, with all the world's information available to another five billion people who are joining us.

That means they will solve their medical problems, their health problems, obviously, economic problems. It will make the world safer. It will help our exports and the globalization that is going on around us. But there are issues. But, overwhelmingly, it's a good thing.

JARED COHEN: Well, if you think, 57 percent of the world's population lives under some kind of an autocracy.

Those 57 percent of the world's population in the future will have more choices, more options. They will be able to be witnesses with their smartphones in the face of atrocities. They will be more empowered than at any other time in human history. Now, as Eric mentioned, that is not necessarily a silver bullet answer to all the world's problems, but it is an important change that is going to take place.

JUDY WOODRUFF: At the same time, of course, there is the dark side. And you spend a lot of time in the book writing about it. We have been forcefully reminded of it in the last few weeks with what happened to Boston, two young men who, thanks to the Web, to the Internet, were able to not only have their ideology converted, but also to get information on how to make bombs.

What about that side?

ERIC SCHMIDT: So, my question, of course, is how many plots were foiled before that of others whose activities were seen by the police before they did something terrible?

And, indeed, the problem of the sort of the lone -- the lone young man who has been radicalized is not a fully solved one. But with this technology, we can detect this kind of behavior. We can give these people choices. We can get them educated better. And I believe that there will be fewer such attacks as a result. We will foil more of them in the future. Thank God the Boston police did such a good job.

JUDY WOODRUFF: You mean by finding them ahead of time and ...

ERIC SCHMIDT: Finding them ahead of time, by seeing what they're doing.

It's very, very difficult to do the kinds of things that these people were trying to do, and ultimately were successful, without leaving a digital track.

JUDY WOODRUFF: But you still have, Jared Cohen, these terrorist jihadist websites which are so easily available. They're now proliferating, we're told, by the thousands out there.

JARED COHEN: Well, I like to compare and contrast this to the old model of back-alley religious madrassas, where extremism is preached in the tribal areas in Pakistan, maybe the slums of Riyadh, where there's no opportunity for a counternarrative to emerge, where there's no visibility into where radicalization is taking place.

If people are trying to radicalize at-risk young people, you would much prefer them doing it out in the open, where it can be challenged, where it can be seen by everybody from law enforcement to just citizens that oppose it. And the diversity of opinions cannot be escaped, even in the most radicalized environments, when the entire world is online.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Meanwhile, you have -- Eric Schmidt, you have repressive governments who look at all this, in free-flowing information, people feeling empowered, and they see it as a threat, whether it's a country like China or North Korea or any other number of countries where leaders want to keep control over what's going on in their country.

ERIC SCHMIDT: You know, this shift of -- the shift has a bias, and that bias is an empowerment bias. It empowers the citizen of a country.

And a sort of rough -- rough balance emerges in a democracy, where the more empowered citizens have a better say in what the government is doing. The government changes its policies and so forth. But in an authoritarian government, one which is not held accountable by its citizens, the citizens just get more unhappy. Their expectations get higher. They know more about the corruption, as they define it, that goes on in their government, and it becomes a significant threat to these governments.

They will try to block the Internet. They will try to slow it down. Indeed, 35 countries now are blocking Google in one form or another, and it's a constant problem for us and I'm sure for other Internet companies.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And particularly in, say, a country like China, where you have, what is it, over two billion people, a government determined to keep control of the information. Not only that, there's all the cyber-spying that is going on, snooping into what Western governments and businesses are doing. Where do you see that headed?

JARED COHEN: Well, it's important to understand there's three things that China is really doing right now.

They're stealing intellectual property. They're restricting the civil liberties of their population. But, internationally, they're also testing the waters to see what they can get away with in terms of nefarious cyber-activity.

But there's a larger point here, which is, one, China is certainly not the only country -- country doing this, but the vast majority of the world's technological infrastructure has not yet been built. And for states that are coming online, many of which are autocratic, they have two options. They can build it based on open principles or built it based on closed and autocratic principles.

And there's only so many countries whose companies have the ability to build that infrastructure. We have to ensure that the rest of the world comes online with technology that is conducive to the free flow of information. Otherwise, it is going to be difficult, and, otherwise, the autocrats will have an extra edge.

ERIC SCHMIDT: And a situation where the Internet is balkanized, literally blocked, becoming piecemeal, is one which doesn't serve the interests of the United States, doesn't serve the citizens of the world. It may serve the governments, but it ultimately means less information, less freedom, less markets, less trade, less innovation.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Let's broaden this out and just talk about individuals as they're affected by this brave new world of a hyper-connected Internet technology.

Eric Schmidt, is there even going to be such a thing as privacy?

ERIC SCHMIDT: Well, of course there is.

And privacy becomes more important in this new interconnected world because we need privacy. We all -- everyone wants it. And I think you're going to have to fight for it, that it's going to be important, right, to say, I want my privacy, I don't want the government snooping on me for this reason or that.

I'm not as worried about the mature Western countries, which have a history of privacy legislation. But I'm very worried -- we talk a lot about this in the book -- about countries that don't have a history of privacy or individual rights. In a country that is sort of a police state, the notion of personal privacy is sort of a foreign concept.

So, when they get all connected, the governments will then put in snooping software, they will track everybody under the guise of police and normal activities, without any civil liberties protections.

JUDY WOODRUFF: But in terms of here in the United States, I mean, people -- you already see a generational divide, don't you, on this question of privacy?

JARED COHEN: Well, it's interesting that you mention generational, because one of the things -- Eric is -- you have one author who is a parent, the other author who is maybe an aspiring parent.

And so one of the things we have done in the 30-plus countries we traveled to for this book is talk to a lot of parents about this issue of online privacy and security. And whether you're in the United States, or in Asia, or in Africa, parents are observing that their children are coming online earlier and faster than ever before.

And our logic is, when it comes to protecting privacy and security, you have to start younger and younger. Parents need to literally talk to their kids about the importance of online privacy and security years before they even talk to them about the birds and the bees.

JUDY WOODRUFF: What about the -- and this is kind of connected to this, Eric, is the loss of human contact.

The more we do everything in front of a screen or in front of a handheld device, a smartphone, the less person-to-person connection there is. How much does that worry you?

ERIC SCHMIDT: So, this was an issue when the telephone came out. If you go back to the history of communications, everyone has had this concern. Yet, humanity has flourished during this period.

So, it looks to us like the connectivity of these devices and so forth amplify human communication. They allow you to get more things done. But we don't see people spending less time with their loved ones as a result. They may just share it a little bit with their distractions that are going on, but there's an off button for that.

JUDY WOODRUFF: What is your message to folks who are out there, some very comfortable with technology, others literally frightened of it, feeling that they are way behind when it comes to understanding where we are?

ERIC SCHMIDT: The good news is that, in my professional career, computers have gone from being essentially impossible to use to being very, very useful at many, many tasks.

You think about the ease of use with which you can watch a video, answer a question, sort of navigate, the new mobile phones and tablets are just so much better than anything that preceded them, and that's going to continue. Eventually, these devices will become very good at anticipating -- this is, again, with your permission -- the things that you care about.

You will carry them around. They will make interesting suggestions. They will become sort of your best digital friend and make your life fundamentally better.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Eric Schmidt, Jared Cohen, thank you very much.

JARED COHEN: Thank you.

ERIC SCHMIDT: Thank you.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And you can watch more of our conversation online, where we discuss what it will mean when the poorest people in the most remote regions of the world gain access to the Web.

On Thursday's NewsHour:

President Barack Obama travels to Mexico with trade, security and immigration on the agenda

The fight over access to emergency contraceptives continues as the Obama administration moves to appeal a federal ruling

A bloody April for Iraq, where a wave of attacks has killed more than 700 people in the deadliest month in nearly five years

Google's Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen on their new book, "The New Digital Age," and the intersection of technology and democracy

Evidence of cannibalism from dire days of Jamestown

While the above promo is written for the radio in the morning, it is a tentative snapshot of what we're covering on the show. With the ebb and flow of news headlines, chances are segments will be added, scrapped or moved to another night.

Tune in to the broadcast at 6 p.m. ET, online and on-air.

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JUDY WOODRUFF: Now our look at how social media affects and infects the world we live in.

NewsHour political editor Christina Bellantoni is here with the Daily Download team.

CHRISTINA BELLANTONI: We learned last week that a tweet can send markets crashing in a matter of minutes. How can news outlets protect themselves from hacking? And how difficult is it to stop something once it goes viral?

We discuss the issue now with two journalists from the website Daily Download. Lauren Ashburn is the site's editor in chief. Howard Kurtz is Newsweek's bureau chief and host of CNN's “Reliable Sources."

Lauren, Howie, thanks for being here.

Last Tuesday, we saw that the Associated Press sent out this tweet to 1.9 million followers. What exactly happened here?

LAUREN ASHBURN, Daily-Download.com: Well, the tweet as you can see here says: "Breaking: two explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured."

Everybody went crazy online. It was retweeted 1,800 times to the Associated Press' almost two million followers. And after that, we saw a drop in Standard & Poor's, in the stock market.

HOWARD KURTZ, Newsweek/CNN: And $136 billion lost. Of course, most after that rebounded in the seven minutes that it took for people like me to start rushing over to the White House and find out there were no explosions and for the Twitter to suspend the Associated Press account, which obviously had been hacked, which we all suspected.

CHRISTINA BELLANTONI: And which the AP then put out a correction, saying this did not actually happen.

LAUREN ASHBURN: They said this is a bogus AP tweet, which I thought was very short and tight.

HOWARD KURTZ: And yet AP had some indication that somebody was trying to break into the system.

LAUREN ASHBURN: They did earlier. And they had actually sent out a warning to all of the 2,000 journalists plus all of the other people who work at the AP saying someone is trying to phish or get into our system. Do not click.

CHRISTINA BELLANTONI: And the phishing scams, this happens when somebody might send you a link that looks like an article. In this case, it was Washington Post and Reuters articles. And then if you click on it, it's asking for your data.

HOWARD KURTZ: Exposes your password.

What with underscores I think, Lauren, is the way that Twitter has become threaded into the fabric of our society. It's now OK, according to the government, for companies to deliver what is called market-moving information through their Twitter feeds. Bloomberg News terminals, which many traders rely on for those split-second trades, now include Twitter.

If there's a hack, if there's a false tweet -- and we saw this with China hacking into the New York Times website.

LAUREN ASHBURN: We saw it with "60 Minutes" as well.

HOWARD KURTZ: Right. It's almost becoming the new normal.

And it cannot only put out false information to the whole world in the blink of an eye, but can affect the stock market.

CHRISTINA BELLANTONI: What are the consequences here? What are we seeing to sort of curtail this potential problem?

LAUREN ASHBURN: Well, this really goes to the power of social media.

We need tighter password restrictions. And a lot of sites have things that are called two-step verification. Twitter doesn't. Two-step verification means that you have to get your password from a different place. So it has to be sent to your phone. And so there's actually two steps in creating a password and getting that password.

HOWARD KURTZ: Twitter now looking into adopting that.

This is a black eye for Twitter, no question about it, even though it wasn't Twitter's fault. Tomorrow, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission is going to have a hearing tomorrow because as we mentioned the billions and billions of dollars that are traded on sometimes false information if there are hackers involved on how to tighten up the system, how this can be prevented from triggering a run on stocks.

CHRISTINA BELLANTONI: Well, and this all comes as it shows people are more engaged than ever on social media online. We have this new Pew Research Center study that we have been taking a look at here. What is it telling us how about people engage on social media?

LAUREN ASHBURN: Well, we have seen a big increase from the last political election to this one. And we have a graphic to show exactly how that is happening.

People are posting political articles on social media at a much greater rate. It has been 28 percent this election and it was 11 percent in 2008.

HOWARD KURTZ: And friending a political candidate has also jumped from four years ago to last year.

This is great because social media is such an efficient and fun and vibrant way of putting out information. But as that hack last week underscores again, you have got to be wary, whether you are a consumer, whether you are a journalist, or whether you are somebody who has got a few dollars in the stock market.

LAUREN ASHBURN: But you also have to understand that as social media is growing and growing so rapidly that the back end of all of these organizations need to catch up and put in tighter security controls.

CHRISTINA BELLANTONI: Right. We have seen that from the media to the stock market, you know, the world market, and now to politics, of course.

Thank you very much, Howard Kurtz, Lauren Ashburn, Daily Download.

HOWARD KURTZ: Thank you.

CHRISTINA BELLANTONI: Online, you can find a number of resources that can help you protect your accounts and our how-to guide for what to do if you are hacked. That's at NewsHour.PBS.org.

March 30, 1981 was a routine day for Judy Woodruff as she traveled with the press pool to cover a speech by President Ronald Reagan, two months into his presidency, at the Washington Hilton.

But the events Woodruff witnessed as an NBC reporter that day more than 32 years ago would lead to one of America's longstanding and contentious policy debates -- how much should the country regulate firearms.

Woodruff, now a senior correspondent for the NewsHour, shared what she remembers from the 1981 shooting in a newsroom interview with political editor Christina Bellantoni.

Reagan survived a bullet to the chest, while press secretary Jim Brady was permanently disabled and paralyzed after being shot in the head. Brady and his wife Sarah would become ardent supporters of gun control battling against the efforts of groups who wanted to protect rights granted under the Second Amendment. In the wake of recent mass shootings across the country, that argument has been renewed.

Woodruff's recent report on the defeat of a bipartisan proposal to expand background checks on firearms sales shows the evolution of this fierce policy debate over guns in America.

Follow our coverage of the debate here.

Joshua Barajas shot and edited this video.

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The Daily Download's Lauren Ashburn and Howard Kurtz discuss the #stopKony movement's effectiveness with PBS NewsHour's Christina Bellantoni.

The Kony 2012 video skyrocketed to almost 100 million views on YouTube in the course of one year. But was a nonprofit group's attempt to make the African warlord a household name effective if he's still in power?

Lauren Ashburn and Howard Kurtz of the Daily Download explored the #stopKony movement with me in a special web-only segment. The key question -- one year after activists promised that the world would know Joseph Kony's name -- did it work?

"There was something about it -- maybe because it was such an odd phenomenon -- that caused it to catch fire," Kurtz said. "What we learned in even the most viral of videos, the Internet is far better at enlightenment than enforcement."

But perhaps the unfulfilled momentum wasn't for lack of passion from the Kony campaign's supporters. An Australian newspaper looked at the finances of Invisible Children, the group that launched #kony2012 and the viral video, and found that the largest portion of money it took it in last fiscal year went toward promotions.

As we noted in the segment, the effort is still alive, despite officials suspending the manhunt earlier this spring.

But Alex Naser-Hall, a spokesman for the Invisible Children group, sent us this story which reports that Ugandan authorities have said they would resume the search after "requisite consultations" with the African Union and United Nations.

Naser-Hall took issue with Kurtz's statement questioning "concrete results" from the effort, and pointed us to the group's year-in-review roundup.

"There has been so much progress made since the film's launch and the public response," he said. "However, as you all discussed in your clip, the main objective of the campaign -- seeing Joseph Kony arrested -- has yet to be completed. A ton of progress has been made, though, by the U.N., A.U., Ugandan Military, U.S. advisers, etc. They're getting closer."

Naser-Hall added it is the group's hope that "these discussions continue until he is captured."

His comments echo the perspective of other nonprofit group leaders. In most cases, the strategy with social media is to tell the story of the nonprofit.

AdAge spoke with the founder of a creative studio who worked on the Kony project after it went viral. "Usually in the nonprofit space, it's about storytelling and visuals and making sure the donation platforms work. This was a totally different kind of beast," Javan Van Gronigen said in the article.

Kelly Williams, vice president of marketing and communications for Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, one of the largest U.S. charities, echoed him in an interview with the PBS NewsHour. A video that finds millions of viewers is "always absolutely awesome," she said, but that the goal overall of marketing content online is to drive donations.

Big Brothers Big Sisters posted a series of webisodes beginning in November 2011 that told stories of mentor relationships. The projects' view counts haven't been enormous -- they're downright modest by Kony standards, with some 3,000 to 5,000 views per episode. But by the last episode's release one year later, online donations to the group had jumped 7 percent. That money may not intensify the public's activism in the operation, but it does allow an organization to expand.

"Its all integrated. It all works together," Williams said.

Invisible Children has a new video on its site, and it concludes with a fundraising ask. Watch it below.

And here is the story Lara Logan recently did about Kony for 60 Minutes.

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Ruslan Tsarni, uncle of the two Boston Marathon bombings suspects, attributes their alleged actions to "being losers." He pleaded with the younger suspect, who is still at large, to turn himself in and ask for forgiveness.

The uncle of the two men suspected in Monday's Boston Marathon bombings appeared overwhelmed with anger and emotion in front his home in Montgomery Village, Md., Friday. Ruslan Tsarni said he has not been in touch with his nephews in a number of years and that he hasn't seen the boys since 2005.

Late Thursday night, the two suspects led Boston police on a wild car chase through suburban neighborhoods before one of them, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, died in a shootout. The other suspect, identified as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, remains at large and was considered "extremely dangerous."

Tsarni has urged the younger Tsarnaev to turn himself in.

"Dzhokhar, if you are alive, turn yourself in and ask for forgiveness," Tsarni said to reporters from his driveway Friday.

Tsarni said he hasn't seen them since December 2005 and did not know of any possible involvement in terrorist groups or whether either had any paramilitary training. He added that his family is ashamed and that he loves and respects the United States.

"Of course we're ashamed. Yes we're ashamed. They're children of my brother," he said.

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Teen Suspect in Boston Bombings a 'Regular American Kid'

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Bombing Suspects' Aunt: 'They are Just Normal Young Men'

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The Boston Police Department sent this tweet after a flurry of conflicting reports from several media organizations.

Editor's note: PBS NewsHour subscribes to the Associated Press wire, which we rely on for national and international reporting. NewsHour tweeted AP's initial alert reporting an "imminent arrest" regarding the Boston Marathon bombing, but when it seemed that there was some confusion we refrained from further updates.

In the span of about an hour on Wednesday, reports clashed regarding whether an arrest had been made in the Boston Marathon bombing.

It's unclear why such confusion erupted. But perhaps the biggest issue was a lack of credible sourcing, as news organizations reporting on an arrest sourced each other or unnamed sources. A misunderstanding over "custody" verses "arrest" could also be the culprit of the confusion, as Al Tompkins from the journalism institute Poynter tweeted. At publish time, the FBI and the U.S. attorney's office in Boston are denying that a suspect is in custody.

The online community began speculating about a possible suspect in the bombing Wednesday morning when the Atlantic Wire pointed to security footage that had been posted on the Reddit sub-forum "Find Boston Bombers".

By the afternoon, a flurry of arrest reports started hitting Twitter. At 1:42 p.m. ET, AP reported via tweet: "Arrest imminent." Ten minutes later the Boston Globe tweeted that an arrest had been made. A few moments after that, CNN chimed in with news that law enforcement sources were confirming an arrest.

NBC, followed by CBS, NPR and Reuters countered with reports that no arrest had yet been made. Within the hour AP, CNN and the Boston Globe began to retract their original reports. The confusion finally ended at 2:33 p.m. ET when the Boston Police Department, the ultimate source in this case, reported that no suspect had yet been arrested.

View the Storify timeline below on the conflicting breaking news reports. [View the story "Timeline of Conflicting Reports on Boston Marathon Bombing Suspect" on Storify]

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GWEN IFILL: Technology changed the speed and the accuracy with which we learned of the Boston attacks, but it also quickly became a platform for the nation's shock and grief.

NewsHour political editor Christina Bellantoni talked with our Daily Download team about that.

CHRISTINA BELLANTONI: For that look at how technology factored into yesterday's tragedy I'm joined by Lauren Ashburn, Daily Download editor-in-chief, and Howard Kurtz, Newsweek's Washington bureau chief and host of CNN's "Reliable Sources."

Thanks for being here.

So, after 9/11, we saw people physically putting up photos of their missing loved ones in Lower Manhattan. Yesterday, the Internet provided a sense of comfort for some. What did we see?

LAUREN ASHBURN, Daily-Download.com: Well, Google Person Finder factored into this. We have a graph that can show you exactly what it looks like.

There's a big button that says "I'm looking for." You can type in the name of somebody. Or "I have information about," and you can also type in the name of someone. Then you can take this tool and embed it on your own website.

So, in the aftermath of disaster, Howie, it really seems like this tool and others are much more effective than going to the bulletin board near the World Trade towers and scanning all of the pictures.

HOWARD KURTZ, Newsweek/CNN: And the tone of Twitter, where there were about five million tweets in 24 hours according to the website Topsy, was very striking to me, because, in the beginning, when Twitter was young, journalists kind of looked down their nose, well, anybody can post anything. How do we know it's true? And often things were not true.

Now, while there were examples of excesses in partisanship, I found, really, Twitter has almost grown up. There was a tone of restraint and people saying they were not going to retweet every last bit of speculation, and even criticizing the mainstream media for speculating about who was behind this attack.

LAUREN ASHBURN: Journalists did that, too.

CHRISTINA BELLANTONI: And there was a lot of misinformation out there. You have seen that in the wake of a lot of different types of tragedies, that major news ...

LAUREN ASHBURN: Not so much now, though, during this one.

You remember Hurricane Sandy, when there were doctored pictures of a shark swimming through a New Jersey neighborhood. And the call, as Howie said here, was for restraint, a lot of journalists and other people saying don't retweet things that you don't know to be true.

HOWARD KURTZ: There was the New York Post mistakenly reporting, for example, that the death toll was 12, not initially two or three, and saying there was a Saudi suspect, when that was unconfirmed. Twitter spanked the news organizations that went off the rails.

CHRISTINA BELLANTONI: Sure.

And, on Facebook, this became a site where people could check in on their friends that were running the marathon or people that lived up there. You also saw like this online tribute that was created by a D.C.-based designer, Matt Ortega. He posted all these sports-themed Facebook images that you could share with your friends to sort of show solidarity there.

LAUREN ASHBURN: I saw lots of memes put together, a heart of the city of Boston saying "We love you" that had the actual map of the city on it.

It was an outpouring of love, as there is oftentimes amidst tragedy. But there was also not some very helpful things. There was an "_bostonmarathon" on Twitter that was taken down within an hour because it was fake. They were asking for money. And we have seen that a lot in the past. But this one was caught very quickly.

HOWARD KURTZ: And not just on Facebook, but as you were saying before we came on the air, on Tumblr and Instagram. You had a sense of community, sharing of photos, sharing of feelings, sharing of sympathy.

It used to be television was the place where everybody gathered around the hearth. And television still played a very important role, the broadcast networks going wall-to-wall for a while, but now you see that much more online. And the tone was heartening.

CHRISTINA BELLANTONI: Even our own Mr. Rogers from PBS, this quote that he said about finding the helpers, that's a way to comfort children in times of tragedy, was going viral.

LAUREN ASHBURN: I found it very interesting also who was first.

You know, journalism, part of the problem in breaking news stories is that everybody rushes to be first. Well, here, it was a Twitter picture of someone saying "Holy cow" and hashtag "explosion." And that was at 2:50 p.m. on Monday.

HOWARD KURTZ: Monday.

LAUREN ASHBURN: And then the Boston Police Department didn't confirm it until 3:39.

Twitter had the actual pictures and eyewitness accounts, and TV and radio and the Net had to really play catch-up.

HOWARD KURTZ: There are more people tweeting than there are journalists in the world. So, it's often going to get there first.

CHRISTINA BELLANTONI: Sure.

And you saw some actual physical tributes, like this Light Brigade picture that we have here, the Overpass Light Brigade. This was something that was really shared a lot on social media as well.

LAUREN ASHBURN: And there were other ones, too, like that, in different cities. There was one in New York that said "N.Y. Heart" and then a B. in the ...

HOWARD KURTZ: Boston Red Sox, yes, logo.

LAUREN ASHBURN: ... Boston Red Sox logo.

HOWARD KURTZ: You mentioned the Boston Police Department. Now, that was very aggressive in using online, Twitter.

CHRISTINA BELLANTONI: Yes.

Let's talk more about how investigators are soliciting this information from crowds via social networking, like this tweet from the Boston Police Department saying that we're looking for video of the finish line. Is this unusual?

LAUREN ASHBURN: Well, they used it more.

What I found interesting is if you looked at the Boston Police Department's Twitter feed, at 1:38 in the afternoon, they put up a picture of runners at the finish line. And at -- by the time it was 3:39, they came out with the announcement. They used that Twitter feed to get out information, like a -- commissioner, what he's saying, what areas are closed, what you can do for loved ones, where you can find things.

And the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency said, use your -- if you're having a problem with your cell phone, use your texting, and that has less bandwidth.

HOWARD KURTZ: With cell service having been shut down for a while after the bombings, this really was the way to communicate for the police and for people using social media.

CHRISTINA BELLANTONI: Lauren Ashburn, Howie Kurtz, thanks very much.

HOWARD KURTZ: Thank you.

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JUDY WOODRUFF: Now we look at new efforts to bring television online in a way that could alter the broadcast landscape.

It's about a company called Aereo, which picks up free signals from local TV stations and streams them for a small fee. Some broadcasters, including FOX, Univision, NBC-Universal, CBS, and PBS sued, accusing Aereo of copyright violations. A federal court of appeals recently ruled that Aereo could provide network shows.

This week, FOX and Univision fired a warning shot in response, suggesting that they may one day provide television programming only through cable.

Hari Sreenivasan sat down with Cecilia Kang of The Washington Post on the potential impact.

HARI SREENIVASAN: We're joined by Cecilia Kang of The Washington Post.

Thanks for being with us.

CECILIA KANG, The Washington Post: Thank you.

HARI SREENIVASAN: So, let's kind of flesh out what Aereo is trying to do.

CECILIA KANG: So, what Aereo in the simplest form does is it takes broadcast TV, network TV, and it brings it to the Internet. And it brings it to your Internet-enabled devices, so your smartphone, your tablet, your computer, or your Internet TV.

And it does that by capturing public broadcast shows like PBS, NBC shows, ABC, CBS, Univision, from the public airwaves, and it captures those signals through thousands of tiny, tiny antennas. And then a consumer can choose to pick and choose from a menu of options any show they want to watch on network TV on any of these devices. So it brings TV to the Internet, basically.

HARI SREENIVASAN: So all these broadcasters, including PBS, went to court and said that this is copyright infringement. And the judges disagreed.

CECILIA KANG: The judges did disagree.

And it was a really important case that everyone in the TV industry is watching, in that what the broadcasters are saying is that Aereo seems to be kind of look and feel just like a cable television provider. If you look at its menu, it actually looks a lot like your Verizon FiOS, your Comcast menu of options that they provide.

But what the judges decided and what Aereo has argued is that they are not. What they essentially do is they just provide thousands of tiny antennas that allow individuals to pull content that's already on the public airwaves. And they essentially act no different than a DVR. And a DVR service is actually deemed legal.

So the judges agreed with Aereo in a very technically complicated case that has big implications for the broadcast industry.

HARI SREENIVASAN: So how much money are we talking about? Obviously, the broadcasters are kind of concerned about this because it could compromise some of the money they make from cable companies that pay them for the same signal.

CECILIA KANG: That's right.

There's so -- there's millions and millions of dollars in contracts that the broadcast networks have -- receive in licensing fees from cable companies. They want Aereo to pay in the same way. So this is millions and millions. And this is an individual contract that they are losing out on in their mind.

At the same time, they say that they believe that they're losing out on advertising revenue, too, because they think that people skip through the advertisements when they see their network programs on the Aereo service.

Aereo does actually air all the advertisements just as the networks would provide.

So they're talking about lost revenue in advertising, as well as licensing fees, which are known as retransmission fees.

HARI SREENIVASAN: So one of the executives at FOX News said -- or I should say FOX overall said, maybe if this succeeds, we're going to go ahead and take ourselves off the public airwaves and put ourselves just on cable.

And would other content providers follow suit?

CECILIA KANG: It was a pretty audacious statement.

This was this week, where the president of FOX did say that. And other networks have also voiced support. CBS has also said that they sympathize with FOX's position. Univision said that they would do potentially the same thing. So there's a lot of -- and NBC -- there is speculation that NBC might be interested in the same thing.

There's speculation also, but there is sort of a -- some people think that this might be a business negotiation tactic, sort of just a threat that may not be really in earnest. But at the same time, it's a hugely audacious and very interesting idea to go completely behind a pay wall, if you will, to go from free over the air to cable only.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Right.

CECILIA KANG: And there's 54 million Americans who rely only on still broadcast over the airs -- over the air. And that 54 million who would lose out on television programming.

HARI SREENIVASAN: So that's obviously the market that Aereo wants to go after. They see that that is possibly money.

How disruptive is this technology, and what is maybe a parallel analogy? Is what Aereo doing to TV similar to what voice-over I.P. was to telecom companies? Or how do we keep this in perspective?

CECILIA KANG: Sure.

Well, I think big picture, the Internet is disrupting every single industry, my industry, the newspaper industry, the broadcasting industry, entertainment, music, et cetera. But it is very disruptive in the sense that it provides consumers something that they want increasingly, which is on-the-go, on-demand entertainment and information, and much more control over what they can see and get and hear.

And so they want to, wherever they are, on their smartphone, be able to watch the shows they want to see, live TV, live sports, live news, record it. They want control. And consumer demand is really what's driving these businesses, these new businesses to emerge, like Aereo.

So it is very disruptive for the traditional broadcast industry, but not only that. It's very disruptive for consumers because it provides consumers -- disruptive in sort of a positive sense, if you will, in that it gives consumers the kind of options that they are increasingly yearning for. They want to be able to pick and choose what content they get on TV, as opposed to being forced cable bundles of hundreds of channels, for example, which are increasingly more expensive each year.

HARI SREENIVASAN: So, what's next for Aereo, lawsuits or expansion?

CECILIA KANG: Both.

Aereo plans to continue to expand to 22 cities, including Washington, D.C. And it will continue to do so as long as the courts don't stop them. But the network broadcasters are continuing their fight in the courts. So they will take this, their case, into the courts continually. And they will probably also take this to the Hill to really try to get lawmakers to relook at redefining where Aereo fits in the space of communications law, and whether there needs to be new definitions for Internet online service providers.

HARI SREENIVASAN: All right, Cecilia Kang from The Washington Post, thanks so much.

CECILIA KANG: Thank you. 

On Wednesday's NewsHour:

President Obama's 2014 budget proposal, which calls for changes to Social Security and Medicare, as well as tax hikes for the wealthy

Then, with a Senate comproise on background checks breathing new life to a comprehensive guns bill, we look at gun violence in the nation's cities

A billion-dollar trove of Picasso and other important Cubist works, given by one man to the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Plus, a Cuban activist reflects on life as a dissident in her home country

While the above promo is written for the radio in the morning, it is a tentative snapshot of what we're covering on the show. With the ebb and flow of news headlines, chances are segments will be added, scrapped or moved to another night.

Tune in to the broadcast at 6 p.m. ET, online and on-air.

Follow @NewsHour

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JEFFREY BROWN: Next: With Tax Day looming for millions of Americans, a new investigation exposes the global use of offshore bank accounts to hide trillions of dollars and evade laws.

Again to Hari, who has the story.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Uncovering the complex workings of offshore tax havens has led to one of the largest cross-border collaborations ever between journalists.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists has been combing through more than two million files of financial transaction data for more than a year. It's taken this long because the digital file size is 160 times larger than the State Department cables published by WikiLeaks in 2010.

A team of 86 investigative journalists from 46 countries has collectively examined more than 120,000 offshore accounts belonging to individuals and companies from more than 170 countries. The records show how government officials and individuals in a number of countries use covert accounts and companies to shield their wealth and how some of the top global banks work within these offshore tax havens as well.

The investigation is already leading to a series of reports, including one spotlighting the transactions of a Canadian senator's husband, who has hidden money from their equivalent of the IRS, an Australian tied to arms dealing through shell companies, and a Mongolian lawmaker who may resign over the revelations of his finances overseas.

Gerard Ryle directs the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and joins us to discuss the findings.

Thanks for being with us.

GERARD RYLE, International Consortium of Investigative Journalists: It's good to be here.

HARI SREENIVASAN: So, first of all, how did you get this trove of information? What is the data?

GERARD RYLE: Well, the data is an enormous amount of sort of very unstructured data. It's got documents, spreadsheets, financial transactions, e-mails.

And it came about because of a long investigation I did in Australia about a fraud that effectively led me to this world, this secret world that I knew nothing about, which was the world of offshore.

HARI SREENIVASAN: So, in this report, you say that it's not just the super-rich and the super-powerful, but it's more pervasive. Explain that.

GERARD RYLE: Well, it was probably the biggest surprise that I found.

I initially thought that the people that you expect to use tax havens are the super-wealthy. But when you look at this world, you find that it's not just the super-wealthy that are using it. It is the sort of moderately wealthy. And it pervades right down through society to doctors, dentists, you know, small-time developers.

They have all discovered this world. And they're all using it.

HARI SREENIVASAN: And you said that it contributes to fraud, tax dodging and enables political corruption. Explain that.

GERARD RYLE: Well, the very secrecy of this world allows you to misuse it.

I mean, this world is, for the most part, you imagine -- we can't prove it -- legitimate. And there's nothing illegal with using, buying an offshore company. There is nothing illegal with setting up a secret bank account. It's only if you don't report that to the authorities if you need to report it where it becomes illegal.

But because it's so secret, I mean, rogue nations can use this. We came across a company that was the front for the Iranian shipping line, you know, which has since been outlawed by the European Union, by the U.S. authorities. You know, so, basically, the way that they use it is because they can get away with anything they want.

HARI SREENIVASAN: And so included in this list of names that you have access to is 4,000 American names. Were there any surprises there? Or how are we going to find out about that reporting?

GERARD RYLE: Well, again, it was very difficult for us to work out whether or not any of these people were breaking any laws.

And our first duty as reporters was to, you know, look after the public interest. And where the -- a lot of these people are not public figures, so, therefore, it didn't jump that barrier for us, which was there has to be some there form of public interest. They have to be public figures in some way.

HARI SREENIVASAN: And you also outline that the scope or scale of this, the $21 trillion to $30 trillion dollars that are floating around in this almost second banking network?

GERARD RYLE: Well, the Tax Justice Network, which is an advocacy group, has got the best figures on what they think is the size of this offshore world. And they say that half of all world trade and a third of all world wealth now resides in the offshore world.

And this is the first time that anyone has been able to really see into that world. And I'm not saying that we have got it all comprehensively covered here. We're only looking at a very small slice of a very large world. But it's a very deep slice of that world.

HARI SREENIVASAN: So what are people using this for? Just to try to buy art without telling the IRS about it? Or how are they moving money around? What do they do with it?

GERARD RYLE: Well, some people are using it to hide money from their spouses during divorce proceedings, for instance.

You have got some super-wealthy people who like to own yachts, and they like to have companies that own those yachts for privacy reasons, in some cases. You have to assume that some of it isn't just for privacy reasons, that it's to try to hide it from authorities, not just the U.S. authorities, of course.

I mean, we're talking about data from and names from 170 countries-plus.

HARI SREENIVASAN: What do you think some of the consequences are going to be from the release of this information?

When we saw WikiLeaks, initially, we didn't really know what to make sense of it, and then eventually it had huge political consequences around the world.

GERARD RYLE: It's hard to know what is going to happen here. But the first, I guess, consequence is that a secret world is no longer secret. And it's going to send shivers through this world.

We discovered that there is a whole service industry out there of providers who, you know, are used by big banks and other, you know, everyday institutions. And they provide, you know, the means to set up offshore accounts, the means to set up offshore companies, the means to -- you know, to basically conduct your business through secrecy.

HARI SREENIVASAN: And I got to ask a question on the journalism side of it. How do you keep 80 different newspapers and everybody together and sort of keep a secret as they are developing this process? This idea of distributed reporting is pretty novel.

GERARD RYLE: Yes, but we were able to convince everybody that if they shared information and if they shared resources, that we would all end up with a better product.

And because this world has no borders, and it doesn't have any borders, the reporting took people through one country and into another. And they were able to able to share information that helped each other. And that became apparent very quickly.

And, of course, we grew the number of reporters over time. So it was a -- by the time it got to 86 reporters, the reporters who started with us were able to tell the others that it was worth their while.

HARI SREENIVASAN: So you would show them a name, a list of names and say, are these people significant or not?

So how are we going to see these reports come out? Is it the next few weeks or the next few months?

GERARD RYLE: Well, our plan is to do probably another two weeks of reporting on it and then to go back in.

We think we have only skimmed about 20 percent of the data, even after 15 months of looking at it, because there is so much in there that it is kind of impenetrable. There are even files that we haven't yet to look at because we just can't read them. It took an awful lot of technical know-how to be able to reassemble it all, to use special software to read.

And so we think there are a lot more stories in there. But this is our first attempt, basically, at breaking it open.

HARI SREENIVASAN: All right, Gerard Ryle, thanks so much for joining us.

GERARD RYLE: Thank you.

JEFFREY BROWN: And you can find a link to the reporting by the group of journalists. That's on our home page. 

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JUDY WOODRUFF: As the Supreme Court took up arguments last week in two high-profile cases looking at same-sex marriage, many users of Facebook, Twitter and other forms of social media took to changing their profile pictures. What was behind that viral online campaign?

We ask two journalists from the website Daily Download.

Lauren Ashburn is the site's editor in chief. Howard Kurtz is Newsweek's Washington bureau chief and host of CNN's "Reliable Sources."

Welcome back to you both.

HOWARD KURTZ, Newsweek/CNN: Thanks.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So, Howard, what was behind this? How did all this get started?

HOWARD KURTZ: The Human Rights Campaign, which of course lobbies for same-sex marriage, put out this logo against a red background, punk equals sign, and Facebook itself says that 2.7 million more people changed their profile picture to adopt some form of this logo, and people were pretty creative, than usual. And this amounted to 120 percent increase.

And you won't be surprised to know that the most active people were around 30 years old.

LAUREN ASHBURN, Daily-Download.com: And what's interesting also about this, Judy, is that this logo, the person who created this logo said it exceeded her wildest expectations of being shared across the Web.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So, this started as the Supreme Court was having these arguments last Tuesday and Wednesday. Who was doing this?

LAUREN ASHBURN: Most of it, you know, it was -- most of it was the younger generation, 30-year-olds. And, you know, 80 percent of 30-year-olds are on Facebook.

But, in addition to that, there was some really high-profile people who did it, including Martha Stewart. Martha Stewart, there was one that was put up.

HOWARD KURTZ: Here we go.

LAUREN ASHBURN: A red velvet cake. And you can see that the icing on that is the equal signs. And there was also George Takei, the "Star Trek" -- of "Star Trek" fame, now soon-to-be-"Star Wars" fame -- wrote for those opposed to marriage equality. And instead of the two lines, he made it into a division symbol.

HOWARD KURTZ: And other corporations are getting involved as well. I think the next one was Bud Light and going to the creative aspect. There we see two beer cans. And you will like the next one.

LAUREN ASHBURN: My favorite is this of the two corgis. It's such a cute picture. It was just done by an average -- an average person.

And then Beyonce weighed in. And she has a lot of heft in social media. She has 44 million followers. And what she did, instead of changing or making a symbol, she wrote, if you like it, you should be able to put a ring on it. And that is, of course, a play ...

JUDY WOODRUFF: Playing off of her song.

LAUREN ASHBURN: ... of her popular song.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So, Howard, how often does something like this happen, where an organization, an advocacy organization gets something going and -- it was an issue getting a lot of news coverage last week. But how unusual was it that it just took off like this?

HOWARD KURTZ: The way it spread like wildfire is pretty unusual, but in this age of social media, everyone is trying to do some version of this. What I think is interesting here is rather than just create a page and you get a certain number of likes, the fact that people could adopt this and put their own twist on it, make it their own, do it and make it a little funny is what contributed to its popularity.

LAUREN ASHBURN: In previous times, you have breast cancer and people turn things pink, right?

You had Arab spring and everybody would turn their profile picture -- there was a piece that you could put over it that was green. And so everybody who was supporting what was happening there would turn their Facebook profile green.

HOWARD KURTZ: Although there was such a tide of this that some people started to find it a little bit annoying or perhaps feel like it was trivializing the issue. But as a galvanizing tool, boy, it's hard to match these kinds of results.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Trivializing because some of them were silly or didn't -- made you take it not as seriously.

LAUREN ASHBURN: Right, yes.

I think there are people who said -- that we're reporting on who said, why would you put corgis there lying upside-down as something to talk about gay marriage rights? And so there were people who just thought it did, it minimalized this very important issue.

JUDY WOODRUFF: What does something like this accomplish? I mean, when that many people are saying they agree, yes, it's kind of a referendum on what some in the public are thinking, Howard. But what does it do for the movement? I mean, do we know?

HOWARD KURTZ: Well, since the issue that galvanized this is the Supreme Court taking this pair of cases, I don't know that it's going to change any five justices' opinions.

LAUREN ASHBURN: Although there was a very funny cartoon that said -- of Justice Kennedy saying, can we rule yet? Well, have we checked in with Facebook?

JUDY WOODRUFF: I saw that.

HOWARD KURTZ: Right. Right.

LAUREN ASHBURN: We have to check in and see who worked ...

HOWARD KURTZ: And it does have the potential, I think, to turn off or alienate people who are on the other side of this issue who don't support same-sex marriage.

And there's -- even though the polls show now 58 percent in a Washington Post survey supporting same-sex marriage, there's still a lot of people in a lot of states that are opposed to it. But it raises the visibility I think in a way that we haven't seen and probably energizes those who feel like this is the moment that gay marriage is finally getting cultural acceptance.

JUDY WOODRUFF: What about those on the other side of this issue who are not -- who don't think that same-sex marriage should be legalized?

LAUREN ASHBURN: We did some research into that. And the comparisons are vast.

The amount of momentum that gay rights advocates have on social media is 10 times that of anti-gay.

HOWARD KURTZ: There was one page.

LAUREN ASHBURN: There was one page that really we found on Facebook was a million stand for anti ...

HOWARD KURTZ: Traditional marriage.

LAUREN ASHBURN: Right, anti-gay marriage. And it had only 3,000 likes. JUDY WOODRUFF: That's reflective of the age of those who are using, which you both have been talking about.

LAUREN ASHBURN: Right. 80 percent of 30-year-olds are on social media. So, that's a very logical conclusion.

HOWARD KURTZ: It could also reflect the fact that even Republicans who have been opposed to same-sex marriage have been pulling back or muting their opposition as it surges in popularity, which is in part because many younger people grew up thinking there's no problem with this.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And, meanwhile, as Facebook is being used more and more as a political tool, we find the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, has announced that he's going to himself get more involved in political issues. I heard his name connected with immigration in the last week.

LAUREN ASHBURN: Immigration and education.

He's forming a new political group. He has already hired lobbyists, both Republican- and Democrat-leaning lobbyists. And he is interested in championing causes that benefit him, obviously. He would like more visas for skilled workers. So, he has an incentive to really get involved in issues like this.

HOWARD KURTZ: But Zuckerberg, who is a wealthy guy, is entitled to use his money any way he wants, to push for any position that will help him or his company, but I do think there's a danger here if he becomes associated with one side of divisive political issues.

People who just want to use Facebook to check in with their friends and post pictures of their children might be turned off if it seems excessively political.

LAUREN ASHBURN: I don't know. CEO of Starbucks, Howard Schultz, came after an investor during a meeting. The investor didn't like the fact that he had supported gay rights. And he said to the investor, I don't care.

And I think people are still going to Starbucks.

JUDY WOODRUFF: It's an interesting question, though, because so many people are using Facebook, and then Zuckerberg is clearly associated with an issue on one side or the other. It will be interesting to see what the reaction is.

HOWARD KURTZ: Exactly.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Howard Kurtz, Lauren Ashburn, thank you both.

LAUREN ASHBURN: Thank you.

HOWARD KURTZ: Thank you.

JUDY WOODRUFF: You can weigh in online. Do you think these types of social media campaigns can influence change? Go to our website to be part of that conversation. 

Google announced its "Google Nose" search function that would give people the chance to search the smells of the world since "smelling is believing." Alas, it was too good to be true.

Your guard is up. You trust no one. It's April Fool's Day, the day of the year when making fools of people is celebrated ... unless the joke's on you.

Chances are by this point, you've been duped. If not from your friends or coworkers, then by one of these pieces of tom-foolery:

YouTube said that after eight years it was finally ready to pick a winner for "best video" and that over the next 10 years, the website would shut down to take time to judge each "submission."

The official White House YouTube channel released a video Monday morning with a message from the president. But instead of President Obama at the podium, it was nine-year-old Robby "Kid President" Novak reminding us to "be awesome."

Twitter announced that they would start charging tweeters for using vowels in an effort to "encourage a more efficient and 'dense' form of communication." Following this new rule, the site would change its name back to the original, Twttr.

Twyttyr? Why byy vywyls whyn yyy gyt "Y" fyr fryy? Syckyrs! #nvwls

— Joan Rivers (@Joan_Rivers) April 1, 2013

And last week, Scope launched a bacon-flavored mouthwash ad campaign that claimed their latest mouthwash would taste like bacon while swishing, but leave you with a minty-fresh aftertaste. Sounds ridiculous? Maybe. But their advanced preparation caught many off-guard.

Surprisingly, the TGI Friday's "No cheese" ad campaign is not in fact an April Fool's Day prank.

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JUDY WOODRUFF: Now we explore the so-called digital divide, the gap in access to the Internet and the challenges posed by how we use it even when we're wired in.

It's been a concern for the Federal Communications Commission. Today, that agency's head, Julius Genachowski, announced that he will be stepping down soon.

Hari Sreenivasan has the story, the last in our series on broadband and how it's changing our habits, our work, and our communities.

JULIUS GENACHOWSKI, Chairman, Federal Communications Commission: If you have connectivity, but you don't know how to use the programs and the software, it doesn't really help.

HARI SREENIVASAN: That's outgoing FCC Chairman Genachowski last month on a new effort to close the so-called digital divide.

JULIUS GENACHOWSKI: If you don't have the digital literacy, you can't even apply for a job and increasingly you're not eligible for a lot of the jobs being that are created in our economy.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Approximately 100 million Americans still don't have broadband access. A disproportionate number are people of color, lower income or with less education.

LEE RAINIE, Pew Research Center: In the broadband world, we still see digital divides.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Lee Rainie runs Internet studies for the Pew Research Center.

LEE RAINIE: When it comes to age, older people are less likely to be online than younger people. Education -- the more education you have, the more likely it is to have broadband at home. Income still matters a lot. The higher you have, the more likely you are to use the Internet. In the rural areas, there are still concerns about access to broadband.

HARI SREENIVASAN: And there's increasing concern over the way broadband is being used among different groups, whether spending more time on social networks, streaming television programs and movies and playing games is at the expense of educational advancement, managing finances and pursuing job opportunities.

This week, the Ad Council launched the website EveryoneOn.org, part of a nationwide campaign from to increase digital literacy.

For more on the digital divide, we turn to Vicky Rideout. She is the author of several studies about children and media. She currently runs VJR Consulting and is an editor at The Journal of Children and Media. And Ambassador Karen Kornbluh, who stepped down recently as the U.S. representative to the OECD, or Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. She also served as assistant chief at the FCC, where she worked on broadband access.

So, Karen Kornbluh, let me start with you. Where do you see the divide? How do you see it playing out?

KAREN KORNBLUH, Former FCC Official: Well, Hari, this is such a technical issue, it's a good idea to step back and remember why we care.

And the reason we care is because the Internet has become the innovation platform. It's where we all come together to collaborate and innovate. And we all know we need more growth. If we don't have equal access, then we can't have equal access to jobs and growth.

And I think there are really three kinds of divides, and you heard that in the intro. There's a divide in access to today's technology. And there, we see that a third of Americans don't have access to the Internet, and it's much higher levels for African-Americans, Hispanics, lower-income Americans.

Then there's access to tomorrow's technology. And what we're talking about there is the very high speeds. And mobile can help ray great deal, but we're facing a spectrum crunch. So the FCC is doing what it can to get more spectrum available through auctions.

The third kind of divide we were talking about in the~ preceding segment where we talked about education, the divide in terms of digital literacy and access to skills and education. And technology, the Internet should be used to close the divide that we have in this country in education. What we don't want is unequal access to increase the divide.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Vicky Rideout, you're still studying these. How do you see it?

VICKY RIDEOUT, VJR Consulting: Well, I think that what Ambassador Kornbluh says is exactly right.

We do still have a digital divide. And I think sometimes there's a temptation to say, well, the fact that we have mobile access now has kind of solved the digital divide. All schools are connected, so we have solved the digital divide.

But, really, there is a very big difference in the quality of online access between the haves and have-notes. And when it comes to children, which is what I study in particular and I'm most concerned with, lower-income kids are still at a very real disadvantage, if you're looking at kids who are trying to research their homework online, or who are wanting to apply to colleges or financial aid online or looking for jobs online.

That's not something that is very easily done on a smartphone, if you happen to be one of the lower-income kids who has a smartphone.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Karen Kornbluh, let's talk a little bit about that seeming literacy gap, where if I have access and if I have the means and the education, maybe I'm taking an online course, whereas maybe if I don't have that, I'm playing an online game.

KAREN KORNBLUH: Exactly.

There's that difference where you're a passive consumer of the Internet vs. an active participant and you're really learning how to do self-guided education. One of the great success stories we have had in this country is the E-Rate. It's a very little known program, but it's been hugely successful.

In 1996, if you were a teacher in a classroom, you didn't have access to a phone. A kid got sick, you would have to go to the principal's office and leave your kids alone because there was no phone. Now over 90 percent of classrooms have an Internet connection because of this program. But it's not yet that high-speed ubiquitous kind of connection.

If we look at where the South Koreans are, they show us where we need to go. What they're talking about is a real ubiquitous education using technology, where there is going to be great access at home, great access in the school, the teachers are going to be trained, and you're really going to be able to completely upgrade people's education using that technology.

HARI SREENIVASAN: So, Vicky Rideout, I also wanted to touch base a little bit on not just the literacy gap, but that gap that's physically still present. As Karen just mentioned, some of those classrooms don't have access yet or perhaps in rural areas, as Lee Rainie was mentioning, right?

VICKY RIDEOUT: Well, what we have seen is there have been some great successes as far as public policy goes. And that's thanks to folks at the FCC.

And that's why the fact that the chairman of the FCC has just stepped down, and his replacement will be a very important pick for this president, because we do need somebody who will put the public interest first. We have had some successes, so that you find that low-income and high-income kids are just as likely to use the Internet at school.

But it's at home that you see the biggest gaps in terms of the quality of their access. And you were talking before about the difference in terms of the types of things that people do with the Internet, whether it's used mostly for entertainment or whether folks are taking the best possible advantage of some of the educational content there.

And I think that's really another question for policy-makers and educators is whether we are making the most of that technology. Whether it's for low-income kids or high-income kids, are we really making sure that the technology is reaching its highest promise as far as providing high-quality educational content for kids who need it?

And I think that's more the question than what the individual kids are doing with it, because low-income kids and high-income kids, kids from lower-educated parents and kids from parents with higher educations are all mainly using computers and new technologies for things like playing games and social networking and watching YouTube videos.

So we have to make sure that there's the good-quality content and services for them as well.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Sure.

Karen, I also want to talk a little bit about -- you said earlier tomorrow's technology, and one of the ways that the digital divide to access has decreased is through mobile. So, where do you see that fitting in?

KAREN KORNBLUH: So, that's a tremendous opportunity.

But, as Vicky said, too often kids are using it to waste time. They talked about the time-wasting gap, because the lower-income kids are using it to do passive things like watch videos or play games. And so what we need to do is get great content online.

And that's one of the things the South Koreans are showing us how to do and other countries. They're getting great content online. And I have heard about some experiments here where some of the game companies are actually teaming up with educators to try to develop some new technologies.

But that's a real role I think for public policy, both in terms of getting greater broadband into the schools with this E-Rate, solving the spectrum crunch with these new incentive auctions, and then also getting really good content online that is educational and fun and engaging.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Vicky Rideout, how is mobile reshaping this landscape?

VICKY RIDEOUT: Well, it has certainly expanded access a lot, and that's very important.

But, as I say, it's the quality of that access that is still -- where there's still a gap. In my family, we have got a couple of high school kids who are applying for colleges and applying for financial aid. That's not something you can do with a mobile device. We have got another family member who is unemployed looking for work, not something you can do very effectively with a mobile device.

So it's important in helping to bridge that gap, but it doesn't do it alone. And I think this is a perfect example of where we have to consciously use public policy, as Ambassador Kornbluh said, to make sure these technologies are helping to reduce inequalities and don't end up exacerbating them.

HARI SREENIVASAN: All right, Vicky Rideout, Karen Kornbluh, thanks so much.

KAREN KORNBLUH: Thank you.

VICKY RIDEOUT: Thank you.

JEFFREY BROWN: And you can watch our previous stories about high-speed broadband. All that is on our website.

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HARI SREENIVASAN: Now our series on broadband and how it's changing our habits, our work, our communities.

Tonight, we focus on why some cities are opting for even faster access and whether it will make sense for other places to follow suit.

New York, Boston, Silicon Valley, those are the kind of innovation hubs that may come to mind when it comes to high-speed Internet. But the city, home to the country's fastest broadband, is nestled below Lookout Mountain along the Tennessee River, Chattanooga.

NARRATOR: In 2010, Chattanooga became America's first Gig City.

HARI SREENIVASAN: In 2008, using a bond issue and more than $110 million dollars in federal stimulus funds, the city's utility began laying 6,000 miles of fiberoptic cables. Today, with speeds of up to one gigabyte per second, Chattanooga's 170,000 residents enjoy broadband that's 200-times faster than the country's average.

The network ties together public services like traffic lights, a smart power grid and gives emergency responders access to more information on the go. City leaders credit it with bring new high-tech businesses and jobs to the area. Out in Kansas City, last fall, Google began rolling out its own network to rival Chattanooga's.

NARRATOR: Introducing Google Fiber.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Part of a project to illustrate the benefits of high-speed broadband.

In 2010, Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, told Jeffrey Brown he agreed the U.S. must do more.

JULIUS GENACHOWSKI, Federal Communications Commission: We will need to get those speeds up dramatically. We set a goal of 100 megabits to 100 megabits to 100 million households by 2020.

HARI SREENIVASAN: So, 100, that's like 25-fold over what -- you're saying over where ...

JULIUS GENACHOWSKI: A very significant increase over where we are -- where we are now.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Yet questions about cost remain for such services.

In Chattanooga, most don't pay the $350 dollars for a month for the one gigabyte of speed, instead opting for a 50-megabit-per-second connection that's still 10 times faster than the national average.

So, is Chattanooga a model for the rest of the country when it comes to broadband?

We explore that with Sheldon Grizzle, founder of The Company Lab, which works to promote innovation and entrepreneurship in Chattanooga, and Richard Bennett, senior research fellow for the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. He's worked for 30 years on Internet network engineering and standards.

Thanks, both, for joining us.

Sheldon, I want to ask you, for those folks not in Chattanooga and the rest of the country that are watching, give us some concrete examples of an economic impact.

SHELDON GRIZZLE, The Company Lab: Yes.

Well, it's very simple, and it's been very recent, too. About a year ago, we launched a program at The Company Lab called GIGTANK. And the GIGTANK, we basically started around the idea that we need to create these new business models around what the next-generation networks are going to look like.

And so we brought in eight teams from around the world, 15 really highly talented students from around the world to talk about, what do you do with a gig? What does the world look like when you do this? One of the teams that came out of that was a team called Banyan. And what Banyan is trying to do is literally cure cancer.

And the way they're doing that is through a software platform that helps match up researchers that are doing this kind of high, very intense data research around like things like bioinformatics and things like that. And so that team launched in Chattanooga. They're doing real-time collaborative research and version control, very data-intensive stuff, where they're moving massive data sets back and forth in real time.

HARI SREENIVASAN: How is this helping with, say, for example, the number of jobs in Chattanooga? Are there new jobs coming in because of the fact that you have this broadband network?

SHELDON GRIZZLE: Absolutely.

And it's early. It's early in the game. I think people are just starting to catch on with this. But we do have early signs that there are new jobs coming into the area. And we're really excited about that.

But, specifically, they're more around startups. And it will take us a couple years to fully realize that. But we're definitely seeing some early traction with new jobs being created.

HARI SREENIVASAN: All right, Richard Bennett, if this is working in Chattanooga or if it's still taking time, why are there so few communities in the country that have made this kind of an investment?

RICHARD BENNETT, Information Technology and Innovation Foundation: I don't think it's really time to say that it's completely working for Chattanooga.

They're doing some exciting things in terms of developing the incubator, trying to attract talent to the city that's probably a more important element than building staff networks. But Chattanooga isn't especially unique in terms of the overall trend toward faster networks across the United States.

In fact, the actual speeds that consumers in Chattanooga get today are below the national average. But we're installing something like 20 million miles of optical fiber cable in the United States every year and investing more per capita in broadband networks than any other country. So this is an example of an kind of an innovation focus that we're seeing in many communities in the United States, including San Francisco.

HARI SREENIVASAN: So, Sheldon, is everyone there in that city using this gigabyte that's coming to their door?

SHELDON GRIZZLE: No, no, not yet.

The local company that ran the fiber to the home is just like any other service provider. You have to sign up for their service in order to receive -- in order to receive that service. So, a lot of people are still on some of the more traditional service providers, like AT&T and Comcast and people like that.

So you do have to subscribe to that service. And the minimum that you subscribe to is 50 megs a second, which is still really fast.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Right.

So, Richard, why is this parallel that we all -- we always have a tendency to lump in infrastructure when it comes to roadways and when it comes to building the sort of digital superhighway. Why is that not an accurate analogy?

RICHARD BENNETT: I think it is an accurate analogy with broadband as far as analogies go.

The thing that's important to emphasize, though, is the challenge that communities like Chattanooga have is not actually the speed of what we call the last mile connection, which is the fiber to the home or the cable to the home, which would be sort of like your streets in your residential neighborhood.

Their problem is that they're an isolated community in terms of the major switching centers that comprise the Internet in the United States. There are 24 -- basically, your NFL cities are where the large firms get together and meet and interconnect their networks.

And so what you need is more investment in the -- what would be the equivalent of the interstate highway system to connect communities like Chattanooga to probably Atlanta where they go to actually become part of the Internet. And so the tendency among these sort of populist initiatives to -- is to overinvest in the last mile and underinvest in what we call the middle mile that would, say, connect them to Atlanta.

So that's why -- that's where most of the 20 million miles of fiber are going in the United States are in the parts of the broadband network or the Internet that you don't actually see, that don't connect to your home. But they are where the traffic jams are that prevent communities like Chattanooga from really enjoying the speeds that their last mile networks, the cable networks and phone company networks are capable of providing.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Sheldon, what about that notion that perhaps the last mile today of fiber isn't going to be the fastest network around five years or 10 years from now? Could it be wireless?

For other communities, would they be better off investing in some other type of infrastructure?

SHELDON GRIZZLE: Today, we do have an asset that is at our disposal.

And whether the last mile is covered by fiber to the home or wireless, either way, we know that more broadband is coming to people's homes and to people's businesses. And it's important for us to be thinking about innovation, about when that broadband comes into people's homes. How does that change the way that we live our lives?

HARI SREENIVASAN: Richard, your organization just did a paper on how the U.S. compares to other countries. Help put us in perspective.

RICHARD BENNETT: In the late 2000s, especially during the economic collapse, the United States was actually in a fairly dire position relative to other countries in terms of the speed of our broadband networks and the rate at which people were signing up for the advanced services.

We were 22nd in the world in late 2009 and falling. But since then, we have risen to eighth place in the average speed of Internet connections to the home and to the business compared to the rest of the world. And we're rising every year. It wouldn't surprise me if next year we're close to the top five.

HARI SREENIVASAN: All right, Richard Bennett and Sheldon Grizzle, thanks much for joining us.

SHELDON GRIZZLE: Thank you. My pleasure.

RICHARD BENNETT: Thank you. 

Happy birthday, Twitter!

The micro-blogging website turned seven Thursday -- the anniversary of when co-founder Jack Dorsey sent out the first tweet, ever (back when Twitter was called twttr and it looked like this).

just setting up my twttr

— Jack Dorsey (@jack) March 21, 2006

The company posted this video late Wednesday night, chronicling its development as a social-networking site -- from its 140-character start in 2006 to the invention of hashtags and retweets in 2007 ...

To this Twitpic, documenting the U.S. Airways plane crash on the Hudson.

Twitter became a focal point of coverage in June of 2009 in the wake of the disputed presidential election in Iran, as users organized demonstrations and shared on-the-ground knowledge.

In 2011, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told the NewsHour's Spencer Michels that the site was not only a medium for breaking news, but also one for relaying context.

Today, the company reports it has well over 200 million active users creating over 400 million tweets each day.

"As we've grown, Twitter has become a true global town square -- a public place to hear the latest news, exchange ideas and connect with people all in real time," writes Twitter editorial director Karen Wickre.

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NewsHour first tweeted in April 2008 amid a closely-watched Democratic primary season (back when we were called The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and our homepage looked like this).

Planning a PA roadtrip to cover the Democratic primary... many more updates to come.

— NewsHour (@NewsHour) April 18, 2008

More than 41,000 tweets later, we say happy birthday, Twitter! (can we get a RT, please?)

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JEFFREY BROWN: And finally tonight: the start of a series about the growing impact of broadband and the way it's changing our habits, our work and our communities. 

High-speed access to the Internet at home has risen steadily in recent years. Studies show that some 66 percent of Americans now have broadband connections. 

We begin with a focus on how all this is playing out in the entertainment industry. 

And again to Hari, who has that story. 

HARI SREENIVASAN: Traditional Hollywood studios have long produced the movies and television programs we love to watch, but in the era of high-speed broadband, companies like Netflix, Amazon, YouTube, and Hulu are some of the new power players. 

All of them stream movies, TV and video. Increasingly, they're creating their own unique content as well. For the moment, Netflix has raised the stakes most prominently. Last month, it debuted all at once 13 episodes of its original $100 million dollar series "House of Cards" all at once. It stars Kevin Spacey as a cynical U.S. House majority whip. Its success turned up the heat on its competitor, Amazon Prime, which is spending millions on new content. 

Amazon in turn announced an exclusive deal with PBS to stream its hit show "Downton Abbey." Cable providers like Xfinity and Time Warner are making more of their content available for their online customers, an audience that is growing.

According to comScore, a company that tracks digital media, every day, 75 million people in America watch videos online. 

We take a closer look at this now with Brian Stelter, who covers the space for the New York Times, and Lisa Donovan, a producer and co-founder of Maker Studios, an online video production company responsible for hundreds of millions of video views. 

Thanks for joining us. 

Brian, I want to start with you. 

If broadband is ushering a new era of what we would consider networks, how are these different? 

BRIAN STELTER, The New York Times: Well, there are a couple of distinguishing factors about what Netflix and Amazon are producing and what other companies in the space could produce. 

For one thing, these shows don't have to be a half-hour or an hour long. They can be various lengths. For the most part, they don't have advertising in the traditional sense. They could add advertising in the future, but right now they don't have it. And they can also be on demand pretty much forever. They could be at the click of a button. They're not confined to a traditional television schedule. 

HARI SREENIVASAN: And, so, Lisa, you work with more than 10,000 producers. What are some of the advantages that you have that sort of traditional media or traditional networks don't? 

LISA DONOVAN, Maker Studios: Well, I think we're able to move very quickly. 

The producers, the content creators are really able to do and produce what they want without having to ask, you know, permission to do it. So, if something happens in pop culture, they can make a video immediately and get it out to their fan base. They're able to communicate directly with their audience and have, like, a very, very engaged audience connection. 

And I think that's an advantage that you don't get to see in mainstream entertainment. 

HARI SREENIVASAN: Brian, on the business side of things, you have reported that Netflix is essentially buying up shows without even having seen a pilot. 

BRIAN STELTER: Right. 

HARI SREENIVASAN: So, in this land grab, explain to me what the return on investment is, or how they measure success when Amazon and Netflix are going out and buying so much content? 

BRIAN STELTER: It's pretty hard for to us measure success, especially for Netflix because they won't release ratings. We don't know how many viewers are watching these shows.

But, for Netflix, this is all about getting people not to unsubscribe. If they can just hold on to their subscribers, that's a win. And if they can convince new people to sign up because they have heard about "House of Cards" or they have heard about "Arrested Development" and they need to see it for themselves, that's an even bigger win for Netflix. 

And it's true for Amazon as well. Amazon is in the business of keeping you subscribed to Amazon Prime. For something like YouTube, the model is a little different, because YouTube is only advertiser-driven. It's not producing $100 million or $50 million dollar shows. But it is seeding the environment with lots of little investments. And over time, some of those could be subscriber services as well. 

You could imagine a future where some YouTube channels are behind the subscription wall and they're going to be in the same business as Netflix, trying to convince you that it's worth paying a few dollars a month to watch their programming. 

HARI SREENIVASAN: So, Lisa, let's talk about the economics on that YouTube platform. Are the Madison Avenue advertisers convinced? Do you have a predictable, steady revenue stream? 

LISA DONOVAN: Well, I started on YouTube in 2005, before it was even monetized, so it's come such a long way. 

In 2007, I think, we became a partner and we started monetizing. And the CPMs keep rising. And I think that's the future, hopefully, is that the ad dollars will move over to online. And I think you're already starting to see that. And I think it's -- it's starring to become more and more predictable. I think we have a little ways to go before it's completely predictable.

But we're getting there, and you're seeing a lot of content creators being able to make a living doing this and some very -- a very good living. 

HARI SREENIVASAN: So, Lisa, when you say CPM, explain that briefly. 

But, also, are advertisers expecting the same kind of hit like when I, say, buy an advertisement on the Super Bowl? I know x-number of million people have watched it. 

LISA DONOVAN: Right. It's different. It's different online. 

I think that's the thing. The value of a view online, I think that's what we need advertisers to really understand. I obviously believe that it's incredibly valuable and it's as valuable as a TV ad, even more so, because we're talking about people who are making videos with such an engaged audience that just love this person that is making the content, and that ad I think or if they're doing a branded integration I think is so incredibly valuable. 

And I think, over time, advertisers are starting to really understand the value of that. And, hopefully, they will be willing to pay as much as you would see on a network television show. And it's not there yet, but that is the goal is to hopefully have a lot of those ad dollars head over to online. 

And, as you see, you know, things are merging. We see a lot of things, mainstream moving to online, and the connected TVs, and I think that's where it's headed. 

HARI SREENIVASAN: Brian, when you look at the cost of production here, for a standard TV episode, maybe $1 million, $2 million dollars. For a small content creator that has their own YouTube channel, maybe they can make a show for $10,000, $15,000 dollars. Do you see networks going out and scouting for this and making lots of bets on these smaller experiments? 

BRIAN STELTER: I do. 

I think of a spectrum where shows exist, and I think what we're seeing is a lot blurring happening, where traditional television looks more like the Web. And the Web can look more like traditional television. Recently, FOX Broadcasting took one of the YouTube channels that its parent company had invested in, called WIGS, brought it in-house, and said they're going to start taking some of these short YouTube shows which most viewers probably never heard of and start to turn them into television shows, big, blockbuster television shows. 

That's an example of the cross-pollination that I think we are going to see more and more of going forward.

HARI SREENIVASAN: And, Lisa, so, this is an odd question, but are you seeing any aspirational shift, in the sense that it used to be the goal was to get yourself on TV? Are you seeing content creators coming specifically to stay online? 

LISA DONOVAN: Yes.

That was -- when we found Maker, too, we wanted to be working with content creators who really didn't see it as a stepping-stone, but saw it more as a place to really find a home and really build an engaged, long-term audience. And, essentially, they're building their own distribution, and that's a very powerful thing that we want the content creators to take very seriously. 

So, I think we work with a lot of people that really do value what they're creating online, and not that they won't be doing traditional things or can, but it's something where you don't want to give up on your audience, and you want to make sure that you keep building that. 

And I think we're starting to see a lot of mainstream celebrities or talent want to come online and start building their online presence. We signed Snoop Dogg last year, and that's been really an exciting partnership with him. So ...

HARI SREENIVASAN: So, Brian, are there enough Snoop Doggs of the world that are going to go on the YouTube platforms that will make the networks sit up and take notice? 

BRIAN STELTER: I think there is. I think we're beginning to see it.

It's a great time to be an actor or a producer or a writer because there are more outlets than ever. Jeffrey Tambor, who is best known for "Arrested Development" on FOX, this year, he's on "Arrested Development" on Netflix, and he's also on a pilot program for Amazon. And he has got more options than he used to have. 

It's not going to replace TV. TV is not going away. But it is going to add to TV. And it's going to add up to a better experience for consumers, I think. 

HARI SREENIVASAN: All right, Brian Stelter from the New York Times, Lisa Donovan from Maker Studios, thanks so much for your time. 

BRIAN STELTER: Thanks.

LISA DONOVAN: Thank you.

JEFFREY BROWN: Our next report looks at the city with the fastest Internet in the Western Hemisphere: Chattanooga, Tenn. 

Photo by Bloomberg

As audiences spend more time watching television online and as websites such as Netflix develop shows like "House of Cards" streamed only to the Internet, one thing is clear: Broadband is redefining the landscape for how people are consuming -- and producing -- entertainment.

Wednesday on the NewsHour, correspondent Hari Sreenivasan kicks off a three-part series, looking at the implications high-speed broadband will have over time.

In part one, Hari speaks with New York Times reporter Brian Stelter -- whose recent article compared made-for-the-net television and network programs -- and Maker Studio co-founder Lisa Donavan, a star in her own right on YouTube, about the evolving format of content creation and distribution.

We're asking: How is broadband reshaping your entertainment time? Do you view T.V. shows, films and video games online or on television? Consider this an open thread and tell us in the comments below.

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On Wednesday's NewsHour:

President Obama kicked off a four-day trip to the Middle East, reaffirming U.S. support for Israel

Were chemical weapons used in the Syrian war?

An update on gun-control legislation

An E.R. doctor's stories of health and poverty

Plus, the shift to video online

While the above promo is written for the radio in the morning, it is a tentative snapshot of what we're covering on the show. With the ebb and flow of news headlines, chances are segments will be added, scrapped or moved to another night.

Tune in to the broadcast at 6 p.m. ET, online and on-air.

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On Monday's NewsHour:

Supreme Court justices consider an Arizona law requiring proof of citizenship for voter registration

Then, the banking crisis in Cyprus as European Union leaders call for a tax on saving accounts

Israel's new governing coalition sworn in today

From our Making Sen$e series, older workers in academic institutions

And, a new grand plan for the GOP's revival in 2016 and beyond

While the above promo is written for the radio in the morning, it is a tentative snapshot of what we're covering on the show. With the ebb and flow of news headlines, chances are segments will be added, scrapped or moved to another night.

Tune in to the broadcast at 6 p.m. ET, online and on-air.

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JEFFREY BROWN: And finally tonight, to our Daily Download segment.

During the campaign, it was called Obama for America, President Obama's online effort to galvanize support. In his second term, it's morphed into Organizing for Action, again reaching out for support, this time on particular issues and again using social media.

This week, the president addresses the group for the first time.

And I talked to our Daily Download team, Lauren Ashburn and Howard Kurtz, about it and more when we sat down together yesterday.

Lauren Ashburn and Howard Kurtz, welcome back.

LAUREN ASHBURN, Daily-Download.com: Thank you.

HOWARD KURTZ, Newsweek/CNN: Thank you.

JEFFREY BROWN: All right, so we talked a lot during the campaign about this notion of using social -- social media for the president and Mitt Romney, for that matter, to reach out.

Lauren, what are they doing now with this new morphed organization?

LAUREN ASHBURN: Well, this OFA, which is essentially all of the campaign's social media, Facebook, Twitter, all of that apparatus, is now going to be used for issues, for immigration ...

HOWARD KURTZ: Gun control.

LAUREN ASHBURN: ... for gun control, for a variety of issues that the Obama administration is trying to push.

HOWARD KURTZ: But the question is, Lauren, can -- even though the OFA has got the 33 million Facebook friends of the president, 22 million Twitter followers and so on, can it galvanize the kind of grassroots support that it did during a campaign when you had a definite opponent in Mitt Romney, and not just ...

JEFFREY BROWN: Well, exactly, the question, what are they asking people to do? Because, during a campaign, right, it's vote for me and get your friends to vote for me.

LAUREN ASHBURN: Right.

JEFFREY BROWN: What do they ask now?

LAUREN ASHBURN: It's also, give me $5 dollars and give me your e-mail.

JEFFREY BROWN: Yes. Right.

LAUREN ASHBURN: And when they posted an article, they posted an article on BarackObama.com. And it was by Jim Messina, who is the former campaign manager who is now running OFA; 47 people Tweeted it.

So, for President Obama and his group to have that kind of article sitting on Barack Obama and only have 47 people tweet it shows that they're not getting the groundswell of support that they did during the presidential election.

HOWARD KURTZ: But they may be getting the groundswell support from very well-heeled donors, which The New York Times reports they're paying $50,000 dollars apiece to come to this meeting that the president is going to address. So, maybe aiming at a slightly different audience there.

JEFFREY BROWN: Do you have a sense of who they -- what they're asking people to do? I mean, to stay -- you mentioned gun control. You mentioned, well, various things that are coming up. What do they ask people to do?

HOWARD KURTZ: Call their congressman, do all the things they use digital tools to do in order to get a sense of people backing the president's legislative agenda, especially in the Republican House.

LAUREN ASHBURN: It's online grassroots action.

JEFFREY BROWN: OK.

Next -- next agenda item for us that also came out this week is the Pew Research Center, a new study, and we talk a lot about Twitter. So, this one suggests that there is a disconnect between Twitter and public opinion.

Describe for us what comes out here.

HOWARD KURTZ: Well, it's hardly surprising, because although all journalists are on Twitter, only three percent of the public is actively tweeting. We're talking about not a snapshot of the general public.

We're talking about people who are much younger, many of them under 30; 57 percent of them self-identify as either Democrats or Democratic-leaning. And so, not shockingly, you get a different kind of public opinion when you just look at the tweets.

LAUREN ASHBURN: So, let's take a look.

JEFFREY BROWN: All right. Give us an example. We have got one.

LAUREN ASHBURN: We have some information for you.

President Obama's reelection, according to this Pew poll, the public opinion poll said 52 percent of the people were happy with the reelection. On Twitter, 77 percent were positive, had a positive feeling about that.

HOWARD KURTZ: They were ecstatic.

LAUREN ASHBURN: Which goes right to Howie's point, which says that there are more Democrats than Republicans on Twitter.

The second one, President Obama's second inaugural, the public, 48 percent positive, but here, very interesting, on Twitter, only 13 percent positive. So it really skews ...

JEFFREY BROWN: So, that's an example of the second one, where the public was more positive than Twitter.

LAUREN ASHBURN: Right. Well, and that's often the case. I find the public is much more positive than Twitter. I have had a death threat on Twitter. It can be a very nasty place.

JEFFREY BROWN: Well, there's a couple of issues here. One is the political issue, partisanship. And there's the sort of general negativity, right, of social media.

But on the partisanship one, o, this sort of suggests in some cases Twitter is more liberal or more Democratic-leaning, but in other cases perhaps not?

HOWARD KURTZ: Perhaps more conservative. That was exactly the conclusion reached by the Pew researchers.

But when you look at, for example, the president's second inaugural address, was that because people thought it wasn't liberal enough, or was it because people just like to snark on Twitter, particularly the percentage? I think it's half the people on Twitter are under 30. Yes.

And so maybe they're just more negative toward everyone. And that's an experience anyone who has been on Twitter has personally experienced.

LAUREN ASHBURN: I don't think that's true. I don't think it's just young people who are negative.

I think that Twitter is this big megaphone. And if you have an opinion and you want your opinion to be heard, it has to be more negative in tone than positive in order for people to listen to it.

HOWARD KURTZ: Or at least sharper and louder to break through the static. I mean, after all, people wouldn't go on Twitter -- they want to go on to read what others are writing, but they wouldn't broadcast on Twitter

unless they really felt they had something to say. Sometimes, that slides into negative ...

JEFFREY BROWN: Well, so, this, of course, goes to something we have talked about in the past, which is, what in the world does Twitter tell us?

You know? What is it useful for when you see this kind of differences between it and public opinion?

HOWARD KURTZ: It's a way of measuring passion.

It is not a snapshot like a public opinion poll. It is not a perfectly -- perfect sample of United States' opinion. It is a way of seeing what is getting the most traction, what is trending, what people feel strongest about.

LAUREN ASHBURN: And it's also a way of sharing information. We saw this during the election.

The Obama campaign would share all of its information over Facebook, over Twitter. And it's the same thing for journalists. When we're finished here, I will share this link so that everybody can see it on Twitter. They can become more informed.

JEFFREY BROWN: So, in that sense, it's interesting that it differs sometimes from public opinion. But it doesn't -- it's not supposed to in some ways, I guess.

HOWARD KURTZ: It's like listening to talk radio. We shouldn't fall into the trap of thinking that it's like a public opinion survey. But it certainly tells you what people are chattering about and what they feel strongly about.

LAUREN ASHBURN: Well, public opinion surveys also don't convey tone. Right? So, you're asked, yes, no? You answer.

HOWARD KURTZ: Approve, disapprove.

LAUREN ASHBURN: Yes, right. And on this, you get to say, yes, no and, boy, is he a jerk.

JEFFREY BROWN: Lauren Ashburn -- that's not a good note to end on, but ...

LAUREN ASHBURN: I'm sorry.

JEFFREY BROWN: Lauren Ashburn, Howard Kurtz, thanks so much. 

Watch Video PBS NewsHour spoke with Ricky Rash about his struggle to gain access to his son's online accounts after the 15-year-old's death in 2011.

Eric Rash had a bright future, so when he committed suicide at 15 years old, his family went in search for a reason. They requested access to their son's Facebook account after his death, but Facebook refused citing issues regarding users' right to privacy. Photo courtesy of Ricky Rash.

The era of keeping cherished letters, photos and diaries in a shoe box under the bed is rapidly coming to an end. Today, we increasingly live our lives online. From email to social media, the record of our thoughts, interactions with friends, photos and videos of the poignant to the mundane moments of our lives are now digital.

It's clear our lives have changed as a result of this technological revolution. What's not clear is what happens to our digital lives when we die.

"The average person has 20 to 25 different accounts," Naomi Cahn, a law professor at George Washington University, said. Cahn is working with the Uniform Law Commission to craft a nationwide, consistent legal landscape for digital assets. "Most people have not thought what happens to those accounts once they die."

"The important thing for us to think about these memories is we want to make sure that they are able to get to the next generation," Evan Carroll said, founder of The Digital Beyond, a blog about our posthumous digital existence. "Sometimes they are behind a password or controlled by terms of service we don't understand."

Five states currently have laws that govern digital assets, but they vary widely. Some, like Indiana, Idaho and Oklahoma cover social media and blogging accounts, while Connecticut and Rhode Island's legislation only cover email.

The Virginia General Assembly just passed legislation that will provide a parent or guardian access to a minor's digital accounts. That law was championed by Ricky Rash, a dairy farmer, whose 15-year-old son Eric committed suicide in 2011. Eric was an accomplished honor student that had appeared to be a well-adjusted teen with a bright future ahead of him. His family wanted access to his Facebook account in order to understand what possible causes might have led to his suicide.

But the Rash family discovered that current state and federal law made that impossible. The Stored Communications Act, the federal law that governs the protection of a person's electronic data, was crafted in 1986. The prospect for change on the law is unlikely in the near future.

"Everybody wants to do the right thing, but the hard legal reality is the federal communications act," Jim Hawley, vice president at TechNet, an industry group that represents tech companies like Google told The Associated Press.

Despite the emotional pleas from family members such as Ricky Rash, companies stress their commitment to the privacy of their users and the service agreements and company policies we click on when we create new accounts.

It's estimated that three Facebook users die every minute. Those accounts used to be deleted, but now the company offers the option to memorialize those pages. That allows friends and family to use the page to share stories, photos and videos as they grieve. Even with this new option, nobody is given access to log in or edit the account.

"I don't know what the first legal showdown of these laws will be, but it could be a huge case," said Kristina Sherry, a law student who recently published an extensive paper of the legal landscape governing our digital lives in the Pepperdine Law Review.

NewsHour wants to hear from you:

What do you think about your digital life after death? Should loved ones have access to your accounts? Or should your privacy remain protected?

Please respond in the comments section below.

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