{"id":192306,"date":"2026-06-11T09:43:31","date_gmt":"2026-06-11T17:43:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=192306"},"modified":"2026-06-11T15:12:38","modified_gmt":"2026-06-11T23:12:38","slug":"the-citizens-briefing-ian-masters-and-the-construction-of-an-independent-foreign-policy-forum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=192306","title":{"rendered":"The Citizen’s Briefing: Ian Masters and the Construction of an Independent Foreign-Policy Forum"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ian Masters<\/a> (b. 1947) is an Australian-born American broadcaster, BBC-trained journalist, author, screenwriter, and documentary filmmaker. He created and hosts Background Briefing<\/a>, a public-affairs radio program and podcast devoted to foreign policy, national security, intelligence, and American politics. Over more than four decades on the air, he built the most durable franchise in American public-interest broadcasting, and he did it from outside the institutional structures of network television, major newspapers, and the think tank world. His career shows how an independent broadcaster can sustain serious coverage of international affairs across the end of the Cold War, the September 11 attacks, the Iraq War, and the return of great-power rivalry, all while the commercial radio industry around him moved toward ideological entertainment.<\/p>\n

Masters comes from one of the most productive media families Australia has produced. His mother, Olga Masters<\/a> (1919-1986), worked for decades as a country and suburban newspaper journalist before publishing her first book of fiction at age 63. In the four years before her death she became one of Australia’s most acclaimed writers, with The Home Girls<\/a>, Loving Daughters<\/a>, and Amy’s Children<\/a> securing her a permanent place in Australian letters. His father, Charles Masters, taught school. The couple raised seven children, and six of them made careers in media and the arts. Roy Masters<\/a> (b. 1941), the eldest, coached rugby league at the top professional level before becoming a sports columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald<\/a>. Quentin Masters<\/a> (b. 1946) directed and produced films from London. Chris Masters<\/a> (b. 1948) became the most decorated investigative reporter in Australian television; his Four Corners<\/a> report “The Moonlight State” triggered the Fitzgerald Inquiry<\/a> and brought down the government of Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen<\/a> in Queensland. Sue Masters<\/a> produced landmark Australian television drama, including Brides of Christ<\/a> and SeaChange<\/a>, for the ABC<\/a> and Channel Ten<\/a>. Deb Masters also worked as a producer. The family constitutes a dynasty, with influence running across journalism, literature, sport, film, and television drama.<\/p>\n

Within this family, Ian Masters took a path none of his siblings chose. He trained at the BBC<\/a>, absorbed the British public-service broadcasting tradition, and then left both Australia and Britain for the United States. He settled in Los Angeles in the late 1970s, arriving in a media market dominated by entertainment but home to KPFK-FM<\/a>, the Pacifica Radio<\/a> outlet that had served as a platform for dissenting and noncommercial voices since 1959. In 1980 he launched Background Briefing<\/a> on KPFK as a weekly Sunday program. The title borrowed the vocabulary of the diplomatic and intelligence worlds, and the borrowing was deliberate. Masters conceived the program as something like an open-source intelligence briefing for citizens, a weekly hour in which the people who knew the most about international security would explain what they knew to anyone who cared to listen.<\/p>\n

The timing favored him. The program began as the Cold War<\/a> entered its final and most dangerous decade. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan<\/a>, the collapse of d\u00e9tente<\/a>, the Euromissile crisis<\/a>, the Reagan defense buildup, and the nuclear freeze movement<\/a> all generated public appetite for informed discussion of strategy and arms control. Much of the activist broadcasting on the left treated these subjects through the lens of protest. Masters treated them through the lens of expertise. He brought diplomats, defectors, military analysts, scholars, and former intelligence officers to a Pacifica audience more accustomed to movement voices, and he asked them about throw-weights, verification regimes, Soviet succession politics, and the internal logic of deterrence. He covered subjects that fell into the gap between commercial media, which found them too technical, and activist media, which found them too compromising. Strategic nuclear doctrine, intelligence failure<\/a>, and the inner workings of authoritarian states became his recurring terrain.<\/p>\n

While the conventional host poses as a stand-in for the uninformed listener and asks the guest to start from zero, Masters approaches the guest as an informed interlocutor. His questions often run a minute or longer, synthesizing the history of an issue and the competing interpretations of it, before he asks the guest to confirm, refine, or dispute his account. Critics of the method note that it can crowd the guest. Its defenders note what it makes possible: conversations that begin where most broadcast interviews end, with specialists pushed past their talking points into the disputed territory of their fields. The method presumes a listener willing to work, and over four decades Masters found enough of them to sustain the program.<\/p>\n

The history of Background Briefing<\/a> also tracks the history of American alternative media and its troubles. Pacifica Radio passed through repeated financial crises, governance wars, and purges from the 1990s onward, and KPFK suffered with the rest of the network. The program expanded from weekly to daily distribution in 2009, reaching more than forty stations and a national podcast audience. Masters later resigned from KPFK amid the station’s turmoil and produced the program from his home in Santa Monica<\/a>, distributing it as an independent podcast and through KPFA<\/a> in Berkeley and other affiliates. He returned the program to KPFK at the beginning of 2025 after the station instituted reforms under interim management. Through all of it he kept editorial control, financing the program through listener support and independent syndication rather than institutional patronage. The arrangement cost him reach and money. It bought him autonomy, and autonomy was the asset he refused to sell.<\/p>\n

In 2022 the Los Angeles chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists<\/a> honored Masters with its Distinguished Journalist Award for Audio, a recognition of more than forty years of sustained public-affairs work. In 2005 he married the British-American actress Christina Pickles<\/a> (b. 1935), known for St. Elsewhere<\/a> and Friends<\/a>, a union that placed the most determined anti-entertainment broadcaster in Los Angeles inside the entertainment world’s family circle.<\/p>\n

The comparison with his brother Chris clarifies what Ian Masters is and is not. Chris Masters broke stories. He gathered evidence, named names, and brought down a state government. Ian Masters broke almost nothing. His contribution lies elsewhere, in curation and interpretation: the construction of a forum where expert knowledge reaches a general audience before it hardens into conventional wisdom, and where the listener hears the argument inside the expert community rather than its press release. In this he resembles Brian Lamb<\/a> (b. 1941), the founder of C-SPAN<\/a>, another broadcaster who bet that an audience existed for substance delivered without theater. Masters made the same bet with a sharper focus on intelligence, diplomacy, and war, and from a far more precarious institutional perch.<\/p>\n

His career also poses a question about the American media system he joined. Masters arrived from a public broadcasting tradition, the BBC’s, that treated international affairs as a core obligation. He found an American system in which that obligation had no secure home. Commercial radio would not carry it. Public radio carried it in fragments. The Pacifica network, his refuge, lurched from crisis to crisis. So he built the institution, one program, one listener pledge at a time, and kept it running for more than forty-five years. The achievement is partly journalistic and partly architectural. He constructed an independent platform for informed political discussion outside the universities, the networks, and the think tanks, and he proved it could survive on the loyalty of an audience that wanted history, evidence, and competing interpretation rather than speed and outrage. Whether such platforms can outlive their founders remains an open question. That one man sustained this one for so long, from a rented frequency on the left edge of the dial in Los Angeles, stands as a singular fact in the recent history of American broadcasting.<\/p>\n

‘A quarter-century of levelheaded talk’<\/strong><\/p>\n

Sean Mitchel writes for The Los Angeles Times May 7, 2007<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\nON a Sunday morning like any other, when so many Southern Californians are sleeping in or heading to the beach, Ian Masters, Australian expatriate, former BBC journalist, Hollywood dropout and indefatigable student of American foreign policy, has arrived at his post behind a live microphone in the political free-fire zone of KPFK-FM (90.7) on Cahuenga Boulevard.<\/p>\n

Looking a bit bleary-eyed, Masters nevertheless has an air of authority about him. Dressed in a smart sports coat and pressed jeans, with a healthy shag of white hair and overseas accent, he reminds you of a former road manager for the Rolling Stones. \u201cI didn\u2019t get much sleep last night, my girlfriend was up sick,\u201d he tells me moments before the clock in the studio reads 11 a.m. straight up, and he bends into the microphone to introduce today\u2019s edition of \u201cBackground Briefing,\u201d his brainy show about current events and geopolitics that he has been doing for 26 years.<\/p>\n

Like many programmers in public radio, Masters gets no money — zero — for all the hours that go into producing a program that is considerably more ambitious and frequently more illuminating than such Sunday morning television fare as NBC\u2019s \u201cMeet the Press\u201d and ABC\u2019s \u201cThis Week With George Stephanopoulos.\u201d<\/p>\n

…He will cross this expanse of intellectual and political terrain armed with smart questions drawn from a store of knowledge and reasoned opinion that he does not hesitate to share. His interviews tend to be more conversational and more probing than most — a rare mix that eschews the kind of formal objectivity familiar to American broadcast journalism without lapsing into pure advocacy or rant. With his clear, understated voice set at an unwavering pitch, Masters seems to be pushing ever onward toward the heart of the matter…<\/p>\n

\u201cHe has the ability to ask questions and provide a point of view that inspires people to go deeper into subjects,\u201d says Andrew Davis, the Hollywood director of \u201cThe Fugitive\u201d and \u201cCollateral Damage\u201d and a longtime friend who has used Masters as a consultant. \u201cHe sees linkages that other people don\u2019t see.\u201d<\/p>\n

…The seeds of the program were sown in 1978, when Masters, then a film editor, was enlisted by cinematographer Haskell Wexler to help make the anti-nukes documentary \u201cWar Without Winners,\u201d produced by a group of retired generals and admirals. The TV documentary was a response to \u201cThe Price of Peace and Freedom,\u201d a 30-minute Pentagon-friendly film made by the hawkish Committee on the Present Danger, a group that included Paul Wolfowitz and George H.W. Bush.<\/p>\n

To gather material, Masters went on an extensive fact-finding tour of Washington, D.C., and the Pentagon to find a justification for the U.S. to amass more nuclear weapons. If he was going to make an advocacy film, he wanted to know the arguments on the other side.<\/p>\n

The experience left him with \u201call this knowledge and nowhere to go,\u201d he says, until he got a call from someone at KPFK with the offer of a Sunday morning show. \u201cReagan was coming on,\u201d Masters remembers. \u201cAnd there was a genuine concern that we were moving toward Armageddon.\u201d<\/p>\n

The contacts he had made in government, the military and the intelligence agencies were the start of his compiling what he calls a great Rolodex, but those same official sources have made him an object of suspicion among some KPFK supporters who have accused him of being a government apologist and CIA stooge.<\/p>\n

The fact that he is a white male, says one station insider, does not help Masters win support internally at multicultural KPFK — or at the Pacifica network, which does not distribute the program to the other four Pacifica stations.<\/p>\n

Masters — who is 63, has been married twice, to an English and an American actress, and has a 22-year-old daughter — recently graduated from UCLA. While he has missed out on getting rich like many of his peers, he has kept interesting company along the way, sharing flats in London with Monty Python\u2019s Eric Idle and Australian director Bruce Beresford, and working alongside Jonathan Miller and Lindsay Anderson at the BBC. He got to know Mick Jagger while working as an editor for Tony Richardson on the 1970 movie \u201cNed Kelly.\u201d<\/p>\n

…After attending the University of Sydney, he won a scholarship to film school in Paris during the New Wave but didn\u2019t stay long. \u201cIt was a waste of time, very academic.\u201d He quit and started shooting film for news agencies, including the BBC, where he became an editor.<\/p>\n

He moved to Los Angeles in the early \u201870s, met Wexler and got work editing documentaries, including \u201cThe Secret Life of Plants.\u201d He tried his hand at screenwriting and wrote one feature for 20th Century Fox, an adaptation of the Robert Ludlum espionage thriller \u201cThe Osterman Weekend\u201d (1983), the last film directed by Sam Peckinpah. \u201cThat was a very unpleasant experience,\u201d he says…<\/p>\n

\u201cWe all know he\u2019s always in money trouble,\u201d says Wexler. \u201cHe lives very frugally.\u201d When he is not preparing for the program, Masters gives lectures, moderates panels and develops movie projects. He also wants to become an American citizen after more than three decades living as a legal resident alien. \u201cI want to vote,\u201d he says.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Voice<\/strong><\/p>\n

His voice is the first thing a listener notices. The Australian accent survives under fifty years of Los Angeles, broad vowels flattened but not erased, and the effect is a kind of placelessness that suits the material. He sounds like neither American radio nor the BBC, though the BBC formed him. The register sits low, the pace unhurried, the volume even. He almost never raises his voice. When he wants emphasis he slows down or lets a pause do the work.
\nThe signature of his speaking manner is the question that is not a question. A Masters question runs sixty to ninety seconds, sometimes longer. It opens with history, moves through the relevant actors with names and dates attached, summarizes the competing interpretations, tips his own hand about which interpretation he favors, and then lands on a terse invitation: “your assessment,” “speak to that,” “your thoughts.” The guest receives less a question than a position paper to mark up. This inverts the grammar of broadcast interviewing. Most hosts ask short questions and get long answers. Masters gives long questions and often gets short confirmations, which he then builds on with the next long question. The interview becomes a collaborative essay with the guest as fact-checker.
\nHis diction draws from three registers at once. The first is the vocabulary of the intelligence and diplomatic worlds: assets, tradecraft, blowback, kompromat, the interagency. He uses these terms without glossing them, which flatters the listener and filters the audience. The second is the literate vocabulary of a man raised in a writing family: he reaches for words like “feckless,” “venal,” “supine,” and “craven” as routine descriptors. The third is the epithet. Masters attaches sardonic labels to figures he holds in contempt and repeats them until they become fixtures. In the Trump years this tendency hardened into a house style of mockery, with stock phrases recurring week after week. The repetition costs him something. A listener can predict the adjective before he reaches the noun.
\nHe scripts his openings, and it shows. Each segment begins with a compressed essay, read rather than improvised, written in full sentences with subordinate clauses that spoken English rarely sustains. He reads well, a skill the BBC drilled into him, and the scripted openings give the program a formality that distinguishes it from the conversational drift of most podcasts. The seams appear when he departs from the script. His improvised speech keeps the same syntax, long periodic sentences that he almost always brings home, though sometimes a clause too late.
\nHis rhetoric works through accumulation. He persuades by piling up names, dates, precedents, and prior statements until the conclusion appears to assemble itself. He rarely argues from principle. He argues from the record, and his command of the record across forty years of national-security politics is the real foundation of his authority. A guest who contradicts him learns that Masters remembers what the guest’s institution said in 1987.
\nThe weaknesses follow from the strengths. The leading question makes for substance but invites the charge that guests serve as ornaments for conclusions he reached before the interview began. He selects guests who share his broad orientation, so the confirmations come easier than they should. The contempt, however earned, runs in one direction, and the sarcasm can curdle into rote. His tone darkened after 2016 from mordant to alarmed, and alarm sustained at weekly intervals loses its power to alarm.
\nWhat holds it together is the absence of performance. He does not do voices, does not banter, does not perform surprise, does not pad. The manner says the material is the show. That severity, maintained for forty-five years in the entertainment capital of the world, is its own rhetorical statement, and it may be the most Australian thing about him: the flat refusal to be impressed.<\/p>\n

The Set<\/strong><\/p>\n

The world around Ian Masters<\/a> sits at the intersection of three smaller worlds: the Pacifica<\/a> left, the Westside Los Angeles liberal intelligentsia, and the national-security commentariat that supplies his guests. Each has its own membership and manners, and Masters spent four decades as the broker among them. Picture the room. It might be a Hammer Museum<\/a> forum in Westwood, a fundraiser in a Santa Monica<\/a> living room, or a Zoom screen connecting a Santa Monica home studio to a retired colonel in Virginia. The people in that room share assumptions deep enough that no one needs to state them, and the portrait of those assumptions is the portrait of the set.<\/p>\n

Start with the local lineage. The Westside liberal intelligentsia descends from the salon that Stanley Sheinbaum<\/a> (1920-2016) ran out of his Brentwood<\/a> home for decades, where economists, Israeli generals, ACLU<\/a> lawyers, and movie producers argued over dinner. Robert Scheer<\/a> (b. 1936), the former Ramparts editor who became a Los Angeles Times<\/a> reporter and then an independent left publisher, belongs to this lineage. So did Tom Hayden<\/a> (1939-2016), who carried sixties radicalism into the state legislature, and Mike Davis<\/a> (1946-2022), who gave the city its dark social theory, and Harold Meyerson<\/a> (b. 1950), who chronicled its labor politics. Norman Lear<\/a> (1922-2023) and his People for the American Way<\/a> represented the Hollywood money wing. Warren Olney<\/a> (b. 1937) at KCRW<\/a> and Larry Mantle at KPCC<\/a> held down the respectable public-radio center of the same conversation, while Kevin Roderick tracked all of them at LA Observed. Masters operated on the left edge of this world but drew guests, donors, and listeners from all of it. The Pacific Council on International Policy<\/a> and the Los Angeles World Affairs Council<\/a> gave it institutional form; the UCLA Burkle Center gave it an academic address.<\/p>\n

Then the Pacifica wing. KPFK<\/a> supplied Masters his platform and his most committed listeners, and its culture shaped the set’s idea of virtue. Amy Goodman<\/a> (b. 1957) in New York stands as the network’s national face. Lila Garrett<\/a> (1925-2020), the sitcom writer turned KPFK host, typified the local type: entertainment-industry success converted in late life into left activism. Sonali Kolhatkar<\/a> and Marc Cooper<\/a>, in different eras and different directions, worked the same building. Masters always sat at an angle to this wing. He shared its anti-imperialism and its contempt for corporate media, but he trusted expertise and state experience in a way the movement left did not, and the station’s purges and governance wars treated him as warily as he treated them.<\/p>\n

The third world is the guest list, which over time became a community of its own. Lawrence Wilkerson<\/a> (b. 1945), Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, embodies the type Masters prizes most: the insider who broke with the institution and now testifies against it. Malcolm Nance<\/a> (b. 1961) brought intelligence-world credentials to cable-era alarm. Joe Cirincione<\/a> (b. 1949) covered the nuclear file, David Cay Johnston<\/a> (b. 1948) the financial one, Juan Cole<\/a> (b. 1952) the Middle East, Marcy Wheeler<\/a> the documents, John Nichols<\/a> (b. 1959) the electoral left, David Rothkopf<\/a> the foreign-policy establishment in exile from itself, and the historians of authoritarianism, Timothy Snyder<\/a> (b. 1969) and Ruth Ben-Ghiat<\/a>, supplied the dark interpretive ceiling after 2016. These people appear on each other’s podcasts, blurb each other’s books, and cite each other’s threads. They form a guild of credentialed dissenters, and Masters runs one of the guild halls.<\/p>\n

What do they value? Knowledge first, but a particular kind: command of the record. The set prizes the man who remembers what the Pentagon said in 1986 and can quote it against what the Pentagon says now. It values documents over impressions, history over hot takes, and the long interview over the soundbite. It values apostasy when the apostate moves in their direction; the converted insider outranks the lifelong activist because he brings stolen goods, knowledge from inside the machine. It values stamina and institutional independence. Doing the work for forty years without a corporate paycheck counts as a moral credential, not just a professional one. And it values seriousness as a temperament. Jokes are permitted; entertainment is suspect.<\/p>\n

The hero system follows. The highest heroes are the truth-tellers who paid: Daniel Ellsberg<\/a> (1931-2023) stands at the top of the pantheon, the insider who sacrificed career and risked prison to expose the war. Below him rank the honest analysts ignored in their time, the inspectors who said there were no weapons, the ambassadors who warned against the invasion, the case officers who objected to the torture. The murdered and silenced journalists hold a martyrology of their own. The everyday hero is humbler: the listener-supporter, the retired schoolteacher who pledges during the fund drive, cast as a citizen doing the unglamorous work of self-government. The villains complete the system, and the set needs them as much as the heroes. The war criminal who failed upward, the television general on a defense-contractor board, the access journalist who traded truth for proximity, the think tank scholar whose funding explains his conclusions. Henry Kissinger<\/a> (1923-2023) served for fifty years as the fixed pole of villainy, the man whose unpunished prosperity proved the indictment of the whole system.<\/p>\n

The status games are subtle because the set officially disdains status. Money confers little standing and can subtract it; the Hollywood donor buys a seat at the table but not a voice at it. Standing comes from four currencies. The first is credential plus defection: rank earned inside the establishment and then spent against it, which is why a retired colonel outranks a tenured professor and a former CIA officer outranks both. The second is prescience, the most jealously tracked currency of all. Members keep score on who opposed the Iraq War in 2002, who called the 2008 crash, who saw the authoritarian turn coming, and the phrase “as I said at the time” functions as a status move the way a stock tip functions at a different kind of party. The third is proximity to suppression: having been fired, blacklisted, sued, or surveilled certifies that one’s work threatened power, and members narrate their cancellations as veterans narrate campaigns. The fourth is endurance, the gray hair of the cause. Within the games run the usual hierarchies the set would deny: national exposure beats local, MSNBC<\/a> and the Times confer reach that members court while disclaiming, and the guest who graduates to a bestseller and a cable contract draws both pride and the murmur that he has softened.<\/p>\n

The normative claims. Citizens owe the republic informed attention, and ignorance is a civic failure, not a private choice. Journalism exists to check power, and a journalist who serves power has committed not bad work but betrayal. Expertise creates obligation: the man who knows must speak, and silence in the credentialed is complicity. War requires extraordinary justification and almost never receives it honestly. Secrecy is presumptively illegitimate; the burden falls on the classifier, not the leaker. Media should be judged by what it does to the citizen who consumes it, which makes corporate media a public-health problem and listener-supported media a civic good. And the past must be kept; amnesia is the establishment’s favorite weapon, so memory is resistance.<\/p>\n

The essentialist claims. Power lies; that is its nature, not its lapse. Institutions protect themselves first, whatever their charters say. Empires behave as empires regardless of their self-description, and America is one. Money does not merely influence policy; ownership is control, and to find the truth of any institution you find who pays for it. The public is sound but drugged: ordinary citizens would choose justice if the information system permitted them to see, which locates evil in the filter rather than the audience. Authoritarianism is a recurring human type rather than a foreign aberration, recognizable by fixed marks the historians of fascism are qualified to read. And character is destiny in public life; the corrupt man produces corrupt policy, which is why the set’s analysis so often runs through biography.<\/p>\n

The moral grammar, the unspoken rules of accusation and excuse, completes the picture. Intent matters less than service: the journalist who launders a false official claim has sinned even if he believed it, because the sin lies in serving power, not in lying. Errors in the direction of skepticism toward the state are venial; errors in the direction of credulity are mortal, which is why no one lost standing for overpredicting authoritarian collapse but Iraq War endorsements followed men to their obituaries. Hypocrisy is the master charge, and the gap between an institution’s stated mission and its conduct is the set’s native subject. Forgiveness exists but requires public confession; the rehabilitated hawk must narrate his conversion, and the narration itself becomes a credential. Guilt scales with knowledge, so the expert who misled ranks below the ignorant man who repeated him. And the gravest local offense, the one that ends membership rather than merely damaging it, is selling out: trading the audience’s trust for money or access. The set polices this border constantly, because everyone in it lives close enough to the entertainment and media economy to feel the pull, and the vigilance is the tell. A community guards hardest the sin its members are most tempted to commit.<\/p>\n

Masters models the resolution. He married into the entertainment world, holds court a few miles from the studios, drew his fellows’ appointments from a research university, and spent his career within reach of the establishment he indicts. The set forgave all of it for one reason. He never changed the show.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ian Masters (b. 1947) is an Australian-born American broadcaster, BBC-trained journalist, author, screenwriter, and documentary filmmaker. He created and hosts Background Briefing, a public-affairs radio program and podcast devoted to foreign policy, national security, intelligence, and American politics. Over more … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1220],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-192306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-radio"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t