PBS NewsHour; September 7, 2016 3:00pm-4:00pm PDT

or seven-piece of mind. Exfinity home, connected, protected, home. Good evening, I'm Judy Woodruff, Gwen Eiffel's on Assignment. On the news hour tonight, the tightening presidential race. We break down the latest poll numbers and delve into where the candidates stand on the issue of climate change. Then as Chicago mourns its 500th homicide in this year alone, residents desperately search for solutions to the rise in gun violence. It's gonna take a lot of people all doing something, not saying something, but doing something to fix that problem. And 15 years after 9-11, a new battlefront for fighting terrorism. How much responsibility do social media networks have to stop the spread of extremism online? It seems appealing to say, oh, just have the major social media companies take a hardline approach

to anything having to do with ISIS. But the fact is that we'll end up blocking a lot of speech, that will end up deactivating the accounts of many users. All that and more on tonight's PBS NewsHour. Major funding for the PBS NewsHour has been provided by... We can like many, but we can love only a precious few, because it is for those precious few that you have to be willing to do so very much, but you don't have to do it alone. Lincoln Financial helps you provide for and protect your financial future, because this is what you do for people you love. Lincoln Financial, you're in charge. VNSF Railway.

XQ Institute. Supporting social entrepreneurs and their solutions to the world's most pressing problems. Schoolfoundation.org. Supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, committed to building a more just, more important and peaceful world. More information at Macfound.org. And with the ongoing support of these institutions. This program was made possible by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you. Thank you. It's an emerging question in the presidential campaign who would be the better commander in chief. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton will both make their cases

tonight on a television special. Trump was out this morning with an early peak at his argument. Three crucial words that should be at the center always of our foreign policy. Peace through strength. Donald Trump's visit to Philadelphia today was all about military policy. He called for big increases in defense spending to beef up the army, Navy, and Air Force after years of congressionally mandated spending limits. As soon as I take office, I will ask Congress to fully eliminate the defense sequester and will submit a new budget to rebuild our military. It is so depleted. Tonight, Trump and Hillary Clinton appear separately in a televised forum on national security. Meanwhile, Clinton's campaign unveiled a list of 95 retired generals and admirals backing her. That came a day after Trump's team

touted a list of 88 endorsing him. Meanwhile, former president Clinton stumped in Orlando, Florida and called out Trump's attacks on his wife and on the family foundation. I mean, I saw where her opponent attacked my foundation. I think that's causing new there about to report that he uses foundation to give money to your attorney general, but which is not legal. Trump has denied that his donation of $25,000 to support Florida's Republican attorney general, Pam Bondy, in 2013, was meant to influence her office as possible review of Trump University. I want to thank you. Meanwhile, there is fallout from Trump's meeting in Mexico last week with President Penignetto. It's drawn wide criticism in Mexico, and today the Treasury Minister resigned. Amid reports, he arranged the Trump visit. We'll turn to the changing shape of the presidential race

as reflected in the polls after the news summary. In the days other news, President Obama urged Americans to learn more about the world and to reject isolationism. He was in Laos when he toured a centuries old Buddhist temple and then held a town hall with youth leaders from across Southeast Asia. I believe that the United States is and can be a great force for good in the world. But, you know, if you're in the United States, sometimes you can feel lazy and think, you know, we're so big, we don't have to really know anything about other people. And that's part of what I'm trying to change. Later, at a regional summit, the president met informally with Philippines leader, Rodrigo Duterte. The White House called off a formal meeting when Duterte referred to Mr. Obama using foul language. The Philippines also used the summit to highlight China's expansionism in the South China Sea. The Latino officials released images

said to show an increased number of Chinese ships near a contested island. The summit issued a vaguely worded statement, but did not mention China by name. The United Nations report intense new fighting in Western Syria has put at least 100,000 people to flight. They're fleeing homes in Hama province where Islamist rebels launched an offensive last week, triggering government airstrikes. And estimated 11 million Syrians have fled since the war began in 2011. Many of those migrants have gone to Europe and Germany alone took in one million people last year. That's caused a political backlash. But today, German Chancellor Angela Merkel went before Parliament and insisted the country can handle the influx. The situation today is many times better than a year ago for everyone, but there remains a lot to do. Change is not a bad thing. And we especially, and I can speak for myself,

who experience to German unification have seen how change can be a very positive thing. That will not change. Germany will remain Germany with everything that we love and treasure. Also today, Britain said that it's building a wall at the French seaport of Calais to stop illegal arrivals of migrants through the English Channel Tunnel. Back in this country, the president has nominated a man who could become the first Muslim-American federal judge. Abid Riyaz Kureshi is a Washington, D.C. lawyer. He would need Senate confirmation. And it's not clear if he can get it before Congress goes home next month. On Wall Street, the Dow Jones industrial average lost nearly 12 points to close at 18,526. The Nasdaq rose, eight points, and the S&P 500 slipped a fraction. And a woman who flew non-combat missions in World War II and died just last year was finally laid to rest today in Arlington National Cemetery. Elaine Harmon served with the Wasps,

Women Air Force Service Pilots. But last year, the Secretary of the Army ruled them ineligible for Arlington, citing limited space. It took an act of Congress to revoke that ruling. Still to come on the news hour, the newest poll showing Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in a dead heat. The two candidates views on climate change. Chicago's struggle to stand its growing gun violence and much more. Now we return to politics and a tightening race for president, both across the nation and in key battleground states. New polls indicate Hillary Clinton has a small advantage. But Donald Trump is closing the gap in a few places. Lisa Desjardins has our report. There's a theme in this week's political headlines. Different polls with one conclusion.

Nationally, the race between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton is getting closer. The big picture, Clinton leads by three points according to the real clear politics polling average that's half of her lead a month ago. In other words, her convention bounds is almost gone. She still has some key advantages, leading in states with a bonanza of electoral votes like California and New York. Clinton also has narrow leads in pivotal battleground states like Colorado and Virginia. Also in Clinton's favor, some demographics. She's now far in front with a much watch group, white college educated women, that according to the Washington Post. That's a reverse from 2012, when Republican Mitt Romney won with that group. But Trump, he's got strengths too. He's leading in the Midwest overall, and he's in striking distance in Michigan and Wisconsin, which typically vote Democratic at the presidential level. Trump's also widened his lead among older white voters,

and among those without college degrees, he now leads Clinton in at least 43 states. What might be most important here is the timing. These dynamics are in play 60 days out from the election. In the past four elections, this is exactly when breakaway shifts began in the polls. For the PBS NewsHour, I'm Lisa Desjardins. So, what do all these polls tell us about what's driving voters and nine weeks out from election day? What do the candidates need to do to drive their message home? We take a deeper look now with Dan Balls, chief correspondent for the Washington Post, and Carol Doherty. He's the Director for Political Research for the Pew Research Center. And we welcome both of you back to the program. Dan, I'm going to start with you and your newspapers, 50 state poll out today. What do these numbers tell you about where the race stands today? Judy, they tell us several important things. First, that the race has tightened from where it was after the conventions.

Hillary Clinton got a bigger bounce out of the Democratic convention than Donald Trump got from the Republican convention. And that moved the polls in early and mid-August. But what we've seen since then is a tightening. We've seen a different Donald Trump on the campaign trail. I can't say what reason it is that it's tightened, but it has tightened. So, that's the first point. The second point is that our 50 state poll underscores the degree to which Hillary Clinton still has an easier path to 270 electoral votes than Donald Trump does. Our numbers show that all she would need to do at this point is add Florida and she would have 270 or more electoral votes. Donald Trump has a long, long way to go to get there. He has very few options. He has to thread the needle. And she has many choices and many options. Both in an effort to block him in the states he has to win, but also to open up the map in some areas where she might be able to expand. And Carol Doherty, looking at the polls, you look at,

which are a lot of them, including your own Pew poll. What do you see there in terms of Hillary Clinton's path? Well, I mean, we look at the national picture and what you see is two candidates who just are viewed in extraordinarily negative ways, in different ways, but in negative ways. In our poll in August, only about three and ten voters said that Hillary Clinton would make a good or great president. And 27% said Donald Trump would make a good or great president. There's more voting, more people voting against than for these candidates in some ways. And so, negativity is really driving a motivating factor in this election. So, Dan, given that, and we've been hearing about this negativity for some time, given that, how do you explain Hillary Clinton's advantage? Well, I think that at this point, she has become less unacceptable than Donald Trump is. You know, we have to, as Carol said, we have to keep this in negative terms. I mean, one of the things we looked at is that we asked a question of, do you think Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, would, if they became president, would threaten the well-being of the United States?

95% of the people across the country, when you aggregate it up, believe that one or both would be a threat to the well-being. So, there is great concern about these two candidates. But because of many of the things that Donald Trump has said up to now, the record he has established as a candidate, has raised more questions about him than Hillary Clinton. And Carol Doherty, it is the case that questions are out there about Donald Trump, but there are also some opportunities for him which show up in the polls. Absolutely. I mean, the 43% say he would make not just a bad but a terrible president. I mean, there is probably an opportunity to move some of these numbers a little more in his direction. And some of these key groups, such as White's, White's with college degrees, importantly, who have been trending Republican recent years. I think there is an opportunity for him there, possibly to bring some of those voters back. But we've already, Dan, we've already seen some movement on his part. As you mentioned, just since the conventions.

Well, we have it. I mean, in the polling that we did, which we did online polling with the firm Survey Monkey, I mean, one of the things we notice is that he does have strength in the Midwest. There are a number of Midwestern states, some of which have gone democratic for five or six elections in a row, where he's doing reasonably well and is within striking distance. So there's opportunity in those areas where the electorate is older and whiter. And as Carol said, I mean, one of the problems he has at this point, not certainly it will be the case on election day, but right now, is with White College educated voters and particularly White women who have college degrees. Mitt Romney won whites with college educations with 56% of the vote, and Hillary Clinton is winning that group at this point. Donald Trump needs to do that, and the other thing he needs to do, which you would expect over time, he will have some success on, and that is consolidating the Republican vote in the way that Hillary Clinton has already consolidated, the Democratic vote.

Why has he had a hard time with the White more educated voter and Republicans? Well, and Republicans, a better primary. People forget that he won a very divided field and didn't win a majority of all Republican votes in the primary. So some of this is normal consolidation, and then some of that is self-inflicted in terms of some of the things he's said and done since then. Just quickly, Carol Doherty, how undecided are our voters? How many voters out there are undecided? How malleable is voters thinking of this? As a broadest range, we've been able to estimate maybe one in five. It's probably down from where it's been. Then you have to factor in the third and fourth party factor this time, and where they might go as well, the Gary Johnson and Jill Stein, but about one in five or so, and that's less than in prior elections at this stage. Dan, how do you see this question of how malleable, how many voters are there out there who still might make up their minds, might change their minds, go in another direction?

It's very hard to estimate, and I think polling doesn't help us a lot on this. As Carol said, there's a sizable number who say they haven't quite made up their mind, or might change their mind. But as we've said, this is such an unhappy electorate. You have to think that most people kind of know where they're going to end up, but they're just so conflicted about the choice that they're not really ready to say for any certainty that they will definitely do that. I think it leaves some uncertainty out there in where these polls might move over the next 60 days. And quick final question to Carol Doherty about these third party candidates, Gary Johnson and Jill Stein. Can you say at this point how much of a factor they can... History suggests that August measures the third party support that we'd decline over time, perhaps, but this is a very unusual election. We had Gary Johnson at 10% in our most recent national poll. His profile vote is very young. Very young profile voters for Gary Johnson at this point. But as you say, typically, and Dan, I'll come back to you very quickly on this.

Typically, the third party candidates lose ground in the final weeks of an election. That's usually true, but I think that the issue is if Gary Johnson were able to qualify and hit that 15% threshold to get into the presidential debates, that would change that, because he would then have national visibility that he doesn't have at this point. But at this so far, he's not quite at that level. Well, it's an election like we've never seen in so many ways. Thank you both, Dan Ball, Carol Doherty. Thank you. Thank you. Next, we turn to our periodic look at the major issues facing the country, and where the presidential candidates stand on them. Tonight, the focus is climate change. It is a subject that has gotten very little attention so far during the campaign. Even as it highlights one of the starkest differences between the candidates, William Brangham has our report. This past weekend, the US and China officially ratified the so-called Paris Climate Accords. They're the most substantial move by the world's nations to put some limits

on the greenhouse gas emissions that are driving global temperatures upwards, and upwards they keep going. 2016 is on pace to be the hottest year in recorded history, breaking the record set by 2015 and 2014 before that. As many climate models predicted, a warming planet has coincided with increased heat waves and droughts as well as more intense storms. Glaciers and ice sheets continue to shrink, sending sea levels upwards and threatening coastal communities all over the world with potentially catastrophic, costly flooding. Michael Oppenheimer is a climate scientist at Princeton University. If we don't start with rapid emissions reductions and substantial emissions reductions that will pass a danger point beyond which the consequences for many people and countries on Earth will simply become unacceptable and eventually disastrous. But the Paris Accords only set voluntary caps on carbon emissions. So how seriously the United States follows through on these commitments, as well as its other efforts to curtail carbon, will fall largely on the next president.

And while there are plenty of policies where Clinton and Trump have different views, there's probably no greater divergence between them than on the issue of climate change. One thinks it's real and poses a grave threat, the other thinks it's a fantasy. I think it's a big scam for a lot of people to make a lot of money. Donald Trump has repeatedly called climate change a hoax. He claims the planet is freezing and that scientists are, quote, stuck in ice. Trump argues that environmental regulation is an enormous anti-competitive tax on US industry which also threatens American jobs, especially in the coal industry. The federal government, the regulations that they have, they put the coal miners out of business. The coal mines are shut. He says a Trump administration will undo as many regulations as possible, starting with President Obama's Clean Power Plan, which has put limits on coal emissions. Trump has also promised to rip up or cancel the Paris Accords and block any funding for international climate change efforts. He supports the expansion of coal and oil and natural gas as main energy sources for the United States. Climate change is such a consequential crisis to everybody in the world.

Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, has repeatedly called climate change an urgent threat and one that's driven in large part by human activity, namely the burning of fossil fuels. Clinton supports cutting carbon emissions, supports the goals of the Paris Accords, as well as President Obama's Clean Energy Plan. Clinton acknowledges these plans will cost coal industry jobs, and she's proposed a multi-billion dollar renewable energy plan that she says will attempt to replace some of those lost jobs. To help understand what a Clinton or Trump administration might mean with regards to climate change, I'm joined now by Coral Davenport, who is an environmental reporter for The New York Times, and Chris Mooney, who covers science and the environment for The Washington Post. Thank you both very much for being here. Chris, I'd like to start with you. Before we get to the candidates, let's talk for a moment about what is the current science tell us about the current impacts of climate change? Well, 2016 is a very, very hot year. We're probably going to have three hottest year records in a row. 2014, 2015, 2016 topping them all.

We've seen some really striking climate-related effects on the world. Most starkly this year, I think the bleaching of coral reefs. Big disaster at the Great Barrier Reef. It's something that climate science has been predicting for a long time. And now it's happening. But there's all kinds of impacts all around the world. We're losing more and more ice from the polar regions. Caesar rising. Of course, temperature records have been broken. Anything you would add to that, Coral? I would just say the specific sort of marker that a lot of scientists and scientific institutions have put forth is the warming of the atmosphere beyond 3.7 degrees Fahrenheit on average. That's kind of the point at which a lot of scientists say we will be irrevocably locked into a future of these climate impacts. And we're at the point right now where scientists say a lot of that is already baked in. There was a point. There's no way we're going to stop hitting that marker. There was a point in the climate debate where it was about how do we keep from getting there? At this point, in terms of the emissions that are already out in the air,

and already in the atmosphere and the rate of emissions now being produced today, scientists are saying we're probably set to go past that tipping point. And the debate is really about how do you keep it from getting far, far worse? How do you keep the planet inhabitable by humans? Okay, staying with you, I'm going to put the crystal ball in your hands now. It's January 2017. Donald Trump is inaugurated president. What does US Energy Policy and Climate Change Policy look like? Well, the most significant climate policy that Donald Trump has talked about is he calls it cancelling the Paris Agreement. The Paris Agreement was a landmark accord reached last year in Paris, which for the first time joined almost every country on Earth, over 195 countries, into committing to taking actions to reducing their carbon emissions. It was key for the US to be a centerpiece of that. The US and China are the world's two largest emitters of carbon emissions,

the US that historically the largest. If the US actually were to pull out of the Paris Agreement, the deal could potentially unravel. And so the question now is what happened in a Trump administration the rest of the world led by UN Secretary General Bon Kimu and is trying to figure out how do we keep the Paris Accord intact if there were to be a President Trump? Well, Chris, take on that question. Does the president have the ability? Do they have the levers to rip up the Paris Accords? It depends on what happens during this administration before the next president comes in. There is a sort of rapid push right now by the Obama administration and many nations of the world to bring it into force. And once it actually enters into force, then you have to have 55 countries representing 55% of global emissions in order to achieve that. Once that happens, there is language in the agreement saying that you need three years

before you can withdraw again, and then there's a year waiting period. So it sounds like from that language the hands of the next president could be tied if this thing enters into force. And we're going to have to see, you know, right now only about 40% of global emissions, 39% have signed on. And that's because U.S. and China just did. So you need India, you need Canada, you need Great Britain. You know, you can do the math, right? But you have to get to 55 and you have to do it this year. Then it would be more difficult to withdraw. But a president Trump, if he didn't want to comply, but couldn't, you know, make it go away, could just not cooperate. Or it would happen then. All right, Crystal Ball is in your hands now. Okay. January 2017, Hillary Clinton is inaugurated. What does energy policy look like? I think it looks like a pretty strong continuation of Obama climate policy. I think absolutely. You would be fulfilling the Paris Climate Agreement and trying to reduce U.S. emissions and the goals to get them 26 to 28% below 2005 levels by 2025. And then there's going to be a process where we ratchet up and try to make it even more ambitious.

I'm sure President Clinton would be very much on board with that. I think domestically, one of the most interesting things that you would see under President Clinton is going to be the big energy infrastructure transition. How much solar can we install? How do we integrate it onto the grid? How much of a role is natural gas still playing? It's cold dwindles. Those are going to be the kinds of real issues during the Clinton years. They're going to determine how much the United States puts into the atmosphere. Coral, I know you've been following this somewhat. Hillary Clinton got into some trouble when she said, as we make this push to renewables, cold jobs are going to be lost. Now she's put out a big proposal to say, I'm going to beef up renewables. We're going to try to save some of those jobs. How realistic is that? It's interesting to see Hillary Clinton, even if it didn't come out quite the way she meant it to, openly acknowledge that climate policy really does take direct aim at coal. Burning coal for electricity is the largest source of planet warming emissions in the U.S. So if you're trying to stop global warming, you're going to take aim at coal.

That means eventually the coal community, coal miners, coal fire power plants are going to get hurt. Chris, last question to you. The ability of a president to really make meaningful contributions to this debate. I mean, if you were to go forward 50, 100, 150 years, would we be able to tell the difference between a Clinton administration and a Trump administration? Meaning, how much influence do presidents really have on this policy when we're talking about a global problem? Some significant influence, but I agree with you that there's so many other things going on. For instance, one of the reasons the United States has actually been reducing its emissions in recent years is actually that there's been a boom in natural gas. It's displacing coal. It emits less carbon dioxide when you burn it. This is not really an Obama policy. It's just something that happened because of technology in the free market. And globally, you're seeing a big, big trend towards large installations of renewable energy across the world. You're going to see huge installations of wind and solar and places like Africa.

These things are going to happen no matter what. They're going to happen for largely non-policy, free market reasons even in the United States. So I think that there are forces moving that are not really at the presidential level. But at the same time, the Obama administration kind of shows how you can use diplomacy to bring the most important countries together and get the whole world on board. So I wouldn't discount that either. So I think that the world will continue trying to grapple with the climate problem, no matter who's U.S. President. But I think that, depending on who that President is, it can have a significant influence on the trajectory. All right. Chris Mooney, Coral Davenport. Thank you both very much. Stay with us coming up on the NewsHour. The woman who revitalized the traditional textile industry in Laos. And what social media networks should do to combat terrorism online. But first, a bloody year in Chicago.

And residents, police and community leaders are asking why the violence is getting worse instead of better. It is already the deadliest year in more than two decades, 500 homicides so far, 90 in August alone. The killings were mostly clustered in the city's south and west sides. John Yang went to Chicago to try to find out why, despite calls for new action, the violence there is so hard to rein in. On this busy street corner in Englewood, one of the hardest hit neighborhoods on Chicago's troubled south side, it looks like a party. Kids are playing. The drill is fired up. In the past, though, 75th in Stewart has felt like a war zone. This corner is a corner where a man was killed, well, several men. A woman was killed and a child was killed. A nine-year-old girl was killed right across the street over there washing her dog in broad daylight. But for two summers, a group called mothers against senseless killings,

or mask, led by Tamar Manasa, has been out on this corner and there hasn't been a single shooting. Volunteer Laura Lambert comes from nearby Hyde Park, and 91-year-old Ed Wiener night crosses the street every day from the house she's lived in for 57 years. Just show up. That's all you have to do. Show up, grab a lawn chair and a pair of sunglasses and you can do this. You can change the world with that. But the moms of masks are only on one corner in a city of 2.7 million people. Killings have spiked this summer. Chicago has already recorded more homicides this year than it did in all of last year. This is also very typical of all epidemics. You can see the high density of shootings. University of Illinois at Chicago Physician Gary Slutkin says epidemic is exactly the right word. He argues that violence is a contagious disease. For example, you're exposed to flu, you're more likely to get flu.

You don't actually get flu without being exposed. Same thing for TB, cholera, and violence. I mean, why does someone who was exposed to child abuse abuse their own kids? That would be the person who you'd think would be least likely to do it? Because he knows how bad it was. But in fact, he's picked up this contagious set of behaviors. So Dr. Slutkin treats gun violence as a contagious disease. He founded Cure Violence, now an international effort that trains former gang members and felons to stop violence in its tracks, violence interruptors. They are always in the community aware of what's going on and asking families and people, you know, who's upset? You know, who is somebody's slip of someone's girlfriend? Someone was disrespected. Someone owes somebody money. And we can reach those people with these health workers. They may not look like health workers to everybody. They know how to cool people down, know how to buy time, but Chicago Violence Interruptor, Chico Tillman knows how to cool people down.

He drove us around the South Side last week where much of the violence is concentrated. In early January, two clicks were arguing. So one click went into another click neighborhood and got on Facebook live and was like, F.Y.I, we're your neighborhood, we're your gas station within 30 minutes on that walk from the gas station. Back to the house. Two were dead, one was wounded. It's not like this is a gang war over turf. This is just sort of interpersonal. I said something you didn't agree with. You responded negatively. It ended up in John Violence. Violence Interruptor, Ulysses, U.S. Floyd was a leader in one of Chicago's most notorious gangs, The Gangster Disciples. I know I helped start this mess, so I wanted to help clean it up. He told us the gangs are very different now than they were in his day. One or two men control everything.

Now you got a lot of different little, you know, gangs split all over. They all springs in a major gang, but they call clicks. And they just do what they want to do. And nobody really in control, no structure, no rules. The number of neighborhoods where Chicago's branch of cure violence operates varies based on funding. But a Justice Department study found that at one point the group helped reduce violence by 40 to 70% in some of the areas where they were operating. Today, they're only in five of the city's 77 neighborhoods. On our drive through the south side, we saw children walking home from school. What do you think when you look at kids at age? I'm praying that they survive through this, through this epidemic that's going on in the city. It's not a woodland problem. It's not a south shore problem. It's everybody's problem. And we don't understand that until the disease hits home. To one of our loved ones that's killed by gun violence,

then we want to get involved. Police have seized 6,000 illegal guns this year. That's one every hour, many from nearby Indiana where laws aren't as tough. Chicago cops are feeling the heat. A federal probe of the use of deadly force and public trust at a breaking point after last year's release of dash cam video showing a white officer fatally shooting a black teenager 16 times. After another deadly weekend, superintendent Eddie Johnson virtually threw up his hands. It's not a police issue. It's a society issue. You know, impoverished neighborhoods, people without hope do these kinds of things. You show me a man that doesn't have hope. I show you one that's willing to pick up a gun and do anything with it. I really see this problem as a cultural problem. Lance Williams is an associate professor of urban affairs at Northeastern Illinois University and an inner city youth advocate. This is not a law enforcement problem.

I mean, you can hire all of the police that you want. You're not going to solve this problem because these young men are acting in an alignment with their cultural value system. They need a cultural retooling process. Williams says it's a culture that's developed in the absence of working institutions and in the midst of crushing poverty. One big cause of much frustration. Nearly half of black men in Chicago aged 20 to 24 are not in school and out of work. Far higher than the national rate of 32%. There's a lot of rage. There's a lot of anger. They just see their lives, you know, just passing them by. They haven't been to school. They're not qualified for jobs. There are no viable businesses in that neighborhood. So they're really depressed and then they're self-medicating through drinking and drugging and the only individuals around them are other young African-American males like themselves who have these same forms of depression.

Another structural factor playing into the violence. Chicago is one of the nation's most segregated cities. All of the poor blacks live way, way, way, way away from affluent people, from the business district, from the tourist district. You know, you have some kids in these neighborhoods far south that have never been downtown, right? And you have folks in a white community and you have never been to the south side. So what happens is you have an out of sight, out of mind, kind of deal. I was 23 when I went to prison. For Chico Tillman, who spent 16 years and three months in federal prison, violence is never out of sight or mind. Turning other people's lives around after turning his own around. Being able to see all the violence and chaos in the community that I once was a part of and that I once helped produce, push me or gave me an obligation to make a change. Since you got out of prison.

Yeah. You got your bachelor's degree. Yes, sir. You got your master's degree. Yes, sir. You're working on your PhD. Yes, sir. How long, how many years are we talking about here? Five years. Pretty determined. Yeah. Pretty motivated. Yes, sir. I got out with a purpose and I got out trying to not only do something that was beyond what I believed I could do, but to inspire hope within all the people that I left behind in prison. Back on the corner of 75th and Stort, Tamara Manassah is also determined that change will happen. It's going to take a lot of people all doing something, not saying something, but doing something to fix that problem. And the doing something is the sitting here. It's the sitting here, having a conversation. I live on this block with you. I live in this city with you. I live in this city with you. I live in this country with you. And we're all affected by the same things. And sometimes we don't talk to each other. We don't interact. We miss that. On one corner, a small effort in response to a big problem.

For the PBS NewsHour, I'm John Yang in Chicago. And online, you can take a closer look at Chicago's history of violence. We go back 50 years to count all of the city's homicide victims. That's at pbs.org slash NewsHour. Now, how the U.S. government is trying to stem the tide of terrorism messages online. And the role played by social media. The story is part of our coverage of the 15th anniversary of the 9-11 attacks. It was produced, partnership, with tonight's PBS Nova Special, 15 years of terror, reported by Miles O'Brien. And it is our weekly segment about the leading edge of technology. They called it, think again, turn away.

The concept? Use sarcasm as a way to turn Islamic state images into an argument against their grim techniques of terror. The creator and producer? The U.S. State Department. Today, everyone agrees the message was worse than ineffective. It played right into the hands of the terrorists. You know, part of it is that I don't think the government should do snark or sarcasm. I don't think we're good at it. Richard Stengel is the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs. He realized he was the one who needed to think again. So one of the things that we realized is that we're not the best messenger for the message that we want to get out there. In fact, when we're a messenger at all, they use that against us. So they stopped trying to do it themselves and hired some marketing pros. I think that they would just, you know, was out of their league. Tony Scro is an advertising and marketing veteran

who is spearheading a novel competition for college students to create a counter or alternative narrative to the Islamic State propaganda campaign. The government is not the most capable person to develop a counter narrative for a 21-year-old. There's no credibility factor there. The competition is called peer-to-peer. Undergraduates at two dozen schools all over the world have participated. In Afghanistan, they created a campaign that included a talk show that focused on understanding the real message of the Quran against extremism. They reached more than five million people. The horror university produced a plea from students to turn apathy into empathy. I mean, as a Muslim, I feel sorry for anyone. The winner of the competition was the Rochester Institute of Technology. Students there came up with this multi-platform campaign. Join the campaign.

Because it's time to ex-out. It's beyond bombs, bullets, and drones. It really is. I mean, we need that stuff. But really, how are you going to win the hearts and minds? That's communications. It's a marketing communications issue. Countering the messages is one thing. Trying to stop them from spreading in the first place is another. For years, the social networking platforms took a laissez-faire approach to this problem. And it only got worse. But in 2013, things started to change. During a horrifying assault on a shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya, attackers with the Al Qaeda affiliate Al Shabab live tweeted for hours as they shot more than 175 people killing 67. That was the first time where Twitter was actively removing the content that they were posting. Jeff Wiers is a police officer and terrorism analyst based in Ontario, Canada. They were actively tweeting their attack online. And that was the first time we really saw that.

ISIS completely blew that out of the water, right? They took that concept and magnified it by a million. Today, Twitter claims it aggressively goes after accounts linked to terrorists. The company says it closed 360,000 of them in the past year. They were very much pushed into it as opposed to warning to go down that road. And now, I have no doubt that they're spending millions of dollars just countering that message. Facebook is the largest social networking platform on the planet. It says it has a zero tolerance policy for extremists. But it must contend with a tsunami of content. Facebook has more than a billion users actively posting every day. The company says about one half of one percent of flagged items are linked to terrorism. But that's still a lot of material. Monica Bickert is Facebook's head of global policy management. We use photo matching technology to identify when somebody is trying to upload to Facebook an image that we've already removed for violating our policies.

Of course, the image may or may not violate our policies when it's uploaded again because it could be somebody who's sharing a terrorist image as part of a news story or to condemn violence. So we use automation to flag content that we will then have our team's review. But are there more advanced ways to stop the extremist messages from spreading? Is there a better technological solution? We have the technology to disrupt, not eliminate, but to disrupt the global transmission of extremism-related content. Honey Fareed is a computer scientist at Dartmouth College. He has developed a technique to permanently attach unique digital signatures to images, making it possible for the social networking companies to identify and stop the spread of videos made by of and for terror. So here is the actual raw frame that you're seeing, processing one frame at a time. And in a frame we actually analyze multiple blocks within it.

The yellow crosshairs that you're seeing are enumerating the various blocks of the video that we're analyzing. This yellow histogram is a distribution of measurements that we're making from each individual block. And then that gets translated into an actual digital signature which I visualize here with the stem plot. The sheer volume of the problem is daunting. Billions of uploads a day, each of them with millions of pixels. Can a computer possibly be trained to sort through it all and find the images that inspire new recruits, insight, new violence, and terrify us all? Fareed has already proven the technology works. He got the idea 10 years ago. The internet had become a platform for child pornographers. Applying digital signatures to those images has greatly reduced child pornography on the big social networking platforms. So if there's just one image in an upload of yours that has child pornography,

the account can be frozen, the contents of that account can be assessed, and new content can be discovered. But extremist content is much harder to clearly define. The director of the free expression project at the Center for Democracy and Technology is Emma Lanzo. The challenge with having a hard and fast rule against any kind of content is that it really does shut down the opportunity for discussion around that sort of material. In June 2016, David Thompson, a French journalist who reports on Islamic extremism, found his Facebook page suspended for three days. The offense, a photo he had posted in 2013 as part of a story he was doing, included a partial depiction of the Islamic State flag, a cautionary tale of the unintended consequences of targeting terrorism online. It seems appealing to say, oh, just have the major social media companies take a hardline approach to anything having to do with ISIS.

But the fact is that will end up blocking a lot of speech that will end up deactivating the accounts of many users. I mean, some of the platforms have had issues with just deactivating the accounts of women whose first name is ISIS. This is a difficult kind of censorship to enact. It is no longer just a war of bullets, drones, and bombs. Technology has created a new battlefield online, and civil society is still grasping for strategies to engage in a virtual battle. Miles O'Brien, the PBS NewsHour, Washington. And you can watch Miles' full report, 15 years of terror, tonight on NOVA, on most PBS stations. Now, we return to Laos, a country of rich and deep history, scarred by American bombing during the Vietnam War.

Special correspondent Mike Saray reports now from the Capitol, VNTN, on how one American woman helped heal frayed ties between the U.S. and Laos by preserving tradition there, one thread at a time. The first American president to address the Laos people from a podium decorated with traditional Laos textiles made by the first American company allowed to do business here since the end of the war. They actually arrived in Laos, found us, and found something that we had in the colors that were appropriate, red, white, and blue. How this American weaver from Connecticut, and her Ethiopian American husband, helped save an endangered traditional craft country ravaged by a secret war in the U.S. wage here during the Vietnam War. This is stuff of Southeast Asia lore. I don't want to get over there and have them be increased. Like Jim Thompson, the legendary former CIA agent who launched the Thai silk industry after World War II

before he mysteriously disappeared, Carol Cassidy helped resurrect the traditional Laos textile trade after their war. He had a great idea which was to build a business based on traditional skills. That's something that here in Laos at Laos textiles we have done as well. One of the important distinctions is I am a weaver. I have devoted my entire life since the age of 17 to weaving and designing. When she and her husband came here nearly 30 years ago as UN development advisors, full diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Laos had yet to be restored. Americans were still viewed somewhat suspiciously by the Communist Lao government. The U.S. having been on the losing side of the Laos Civil War and communist takeover. So it was really this rebuilding of Lao American relations that we have felt that. And my husband and I who we built the business together, he is much more diplomatic than I am.

And I think it's been very helpful navigating the complexities. They eventually set up a textile business of their own with a core staff of weavers from the North. Many of them, the wives and mothers of the path at Laos communist forces who had been living and working out of caves during the nearly 10 years of U.S. bombing. So our technology is very simple. It's portable. When they fled the bombing, they were able to take with them simple technology and be able to keep their family traditions. The work is incredibly painstaking from the hand dying of the silk to spinning the silk yarn and reproducing traditional designs from memory using traditional Lao looms. Many consider to be the inspiration for the first computers and binary code. The important part is this vertical head-on because that's the storage system and that is the floppy drive. This is the program

and the strings below every string down there represents one row of program. Carol produces world-renowned textiles for top interior designers and architects around the globe. This is part of the dying art which is the creation of complex pattern. And this is the skill and can both learn from their grandmother and their mother. Her real passion and commitment has been using her weaving expertise to help empower local women, which she first started doing as a UN advisor in Africa. Most of the artisans are Indigenous people, rural people. They are not the most visible and they don't have a voice. And that's really what I've been trying to do. Working with these communities Carol Cassie may have started her career as a globe-trotting weaver. But over the years that she's been here in Laos she's become more of a cultural ambassador and evangelist for the role that traditional arts and crafts can play in the economic development of the country. I feel that an important part of who you are is through your heritage

and it's through your past. In Laos and in Southeast Asian general textiles are among the most important parts of their past. So your uniqueness is expressed what you wear, how you wear it, what you weave. The director of the IMF Christine Lagarde was here earlier this year, which was a very important visit because we have the opportunity to show her that stability, ethnic identity, employment, women, empowerment, culture is all interwoven in what we're doing here at Laos Textiles. Carol lives and works out of a French colonial home in the center of Yencian where she also raised two children. Her husband and business partner, Dawit Sayum, takes care of the operational side of the business. It's run more like an extended family co-op with many of the original weavers and their children still working with them. Because we've been able to retain our staff for more than 25 years, through our pension plan, through our health plan,

we've been able to then weave these extraordinary projects. When she has experienced firsthand, the many changes Laos has undergone since coming here, in 1989, when the only way to cross the Maycong River into Thailand was by boat. Viencian, the capital, had no traffic lights, or buildings taller than a palm tree, and everyone in her neighborhood knew each other. You go away for a month, and this was all old buildings that came down, and I guess it's going to be a hotel. As successful as her business has become, both as an enterprise and a model for maintaining traditional textiles, her biggest concerns are with the latest assaults on traditional weaving, from the modern reality of mass production of textiles throughout the region. Oh, no, this was not made in Laos. We don't have the industrial capacity. The extraordinary part of Laos is that we still handcraft high quality, excellent textiles. Having embraced the Laos culture as completely as she has over the years,

she has faith that traditional weaving will somehow withstand yet another challenge to its legacy. Where your spirit goes in life, in marriage, and death are all interwoven into the story of the textile. For the PBS NewsHour, Mike Saray in Viencian, Laos. And that is the NewsHour for tonight. Tomorrow our Making Sense series catches a wave, and looks at how trade with China affects the economic and political landscape here at home. I'm Judy Woodruff, join us online, and again right here tomorrow evening for all of us at the PBS NewsHour. Major funding for the PBS NewsHour has been provided by... ...

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from viewers like you. Thank you. Election 2016 on PBS. This summer, we're going on a road trip across the U.S. We're interviewing people who are successful and their minorities as well. We're underrepresented in computer science. You can follow the traditional routes and you can get traditional responses. Or you can be bold, you can be brave, and you can be brilliant. Listen to what speaks to you. Road Trip Nation tonight at 730. 9-11. Attackers in hijacked planes. Now there's a new weapon.

Social media. Social media. Crowdsource. Terrorism. Radicalizing a homegrown army of lone wolves. Conscience get into their heads. Fight fire with fire. Turn their digital weapons against them. Deploy this on extremist networks. Even predict the next attack. Join KQED on September 9th and 10th for KQED member days at the Contemporary Jewish Museum. See Stanley Kubrick, the exhibition, and explore the breadth of Kubrick's work beginning with his photographs taken in the 1940s and continuing through his directorial achievements of the 1950s through the 1990s. Admission is free to KQED member card holders on September 9th and 10th. Details at KQED.org slash member day. Captivating stories. Sunday nights on KQED. Next time on the Inspector Linley Mysteries,

as Havers loses her position on the force, demoted. Linley investigates the murder of two campers. Repeated blows. Possibly a friend's attack. And when he calls Havers for help. Your job's in here. A rookie could do this. She can't help overstepping her new boundaries. We are missing something. You are now officially off this case. The Inspector Linley Mysteries. This is BBC World News America. Funding of this presentation is made possible by the Freeman Foundation, Newman Zone Foundation, giving all profits from Newman Zone to charity in pursuing the common good. Covert Foundation pursuing solutions for America's neglected needs

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