Philanthropy Mag features Intelligence Squared U.S. founder Robert Rosenkranz

Philanthropy Magazine recently interviewed Robert Rosenkranz, founder of Intelligence Squared U.S. debates, on the success of the five-year strong series that has counted everyone from Arianna Huffington and Howard Dean, to Karl Rove and Christopher Hitchens among its panelists. Founded by The Rosenkranz Foundation in 2006, the Intelligence Squared U.S. debates at NYU's Skirball Center broadcast nationwide on over 220 NPR stations, webcast on Slate, air on PBS channel Thirteen in NYC, and are a popular iTunes podcast with over 120,000 monthly subscribers.

Read Philanthropy's story on Rosenkranz here: http://bit.ly/uFRjeM

Here are some key excerpts from the story:

“People get so caught up in their ideologies that they don’t really look at the facts,” observes Rosenkranz. “The idea behind the debates is to compel people to engage the facts, to be open to reason, to argument, and to persuasion. The panelists need to be able to defend their views. They can’t just pontificate. They need to be persuasive. They don’t have the luxury of basking in the approval of people who already agree with them.”

"Rosenkranz recognizes the scale of the problem. He worries that the market fragmentation of the media has played a large role in keeping Americans from hearing the other side of arguments. “When there were three networks, what was your business strategy?” he asks. “To try to include as many people as you can and to try to offend as few as you can. Your incentive was to be centrist. But when there are 100 cable channels, your incentive changes. Now you want to identify a narrow audience that you can get passionately committed to your side. It’s now possible—much more than it used to be—for people to live in an environment where their ideas are entirely reinforced by the media that they consume.”

"Rosenkranz’s favorite debaters so far have included the historian Niall Ferguson, who argued for the proposition that Washington is more to blame for the financial crisis than is Wall Street. (“The British just seem to have rhetorical skills in their DNA,” Rosenkranz chuckles.) He was likewise impressed with Karl Rove, who argued against the proposition that “Bush 43 is the worst president in the past 50 years.” Rove is not known as a particularly powerful public speaker—more of an operator behind the scenes. But, Rosenkranz says, Rove was “so factual. He had so much data at his fingertips that he was able to refute the vague generalities of his opponents.” Perhaps unsurprisingly for a crowd on the Upper West Side, the motion carried anyway—but, Rosenkranz notes, of the people who called themselves “undecided” at the beginning of the debate and were swung by the arguments to one side or the other, almost 80 percent were persuaded by Rove."

http://intelligencesquaredus.org/