Christiane Amanpour, Journalist

Good Night, and Good Luck was a great movie. But for many years I've been a student of the 1930s and 1940s. It's impossible to know much about that era without running into Edward R. Murrow. This is the man who held the nation spellbound during the London Blitz. Even before the bombing, he was famous for his roundups, turning to other reporters covering the major capitals as the lights of Europe were going out. This was still early radio, particularly for the news. One of Murrow's most famous moments was one where he didn't say a word; he introduced that moment by saying he was at the entrance to a bomb shelter. You could hear the air raid sirens in the background. He simply held the microphone almost to the ground. The audience could hear the rushing footsteps of scores of people rushing down the stairs to the shelter. It was a powerful moment. It was journalism. Edward R. Murrow earned his credibility.

There are people whose journalism should be respected because they stand so far above a kind of nonsense that passes for journalism. Rush Limbaugh tries to pass himself off as a journalist and he cannot even tell the truth about his own arrest and legal problems. Colbert, last weekend, did a better job of telling the truth, and he has the decency to merely call himself a comedian. I'm not a fan of commencement speeches but this one by Christiane Amanpour caught my attention; here's an extended excerpt of why she still believes journalism matters:

So I want to tell you why I continue. Because even though my profession is awash in a sea of sensationalism and shortage of seriousness, I do it because I remain convinced that good journalism still matters. And, as a good colleague put it, "Our historic role is to report the world, not to over-enrich our shareholders."

I do it by saying to myself that a strong and robust democracy, yes, even this one here in the United States, needs strong, independent journalists of integrity who are committed to reporting without fear nor favor and who report the good and the bad, never exaggerating, but never shying away from it.

I do it because I respect the American people and their right and their need to know.

I do because I am convinced that we can be a strong and a positive force in our world and that good journalism most definitely can make a difference.

I do it because I believe we must always speak the truth, whether it is in vogue or not. And how I wish there were more voices raised earlier on on the Iraq issue earlier in defense of the facts and truth, rather than politics and ideology.

I do it because I wish that we had been that honest and that forthright back then as America faces its biggest challenge in decades now in Iraq.

I do it also because we need to remind ourselves "Never be afraid to disagree. Never be confused into mistaking dissent for disloyalty," as the great Edward R. Murrow once said.

Never let anyone browbeat us into believing that they have a monopoly on the truth and never be afraid of power but always hold it accountable. I do it because I believe that those of us who have a voice must use it carefully. We must always weigh or words because words do have consequences. I was taught that in my first war zone. A much more experienced colleague said to me when we were covering the first Gulf war in 1990...16 years ago...you graduates were probably about six years old then...he said to me, "Christiane, you have to find your voice."

I didn't really understand what he meant then, but two years ago I found my voice in Bosnia. I had landed in the middle of the worst bloodletting in Europe since World War Two, and in the age of "never again," in cities like Sarajevo and Srebrenica, slaughter was committed in broad daylight for all of us to see. The carnage could have left me speechless. Instead, that is where I found my voice and so did many of my colleagues, not only as reporters, but as citizens of the world.

When our world leaders wanted to shrug away and call it a terrible civil war for which all sides were equally guilty, we said, "No." Genocide against Muslims in Europe was being committed and this had to be stopped.

For me, to this day, it remains the proudest achievement of my generation of journalists and I know my colleagues at the time feel the same way...that we played a small part in making our leaders confront the reality of what happened there...

Christiane Amanpour is one of the few real journalists left at CNN. Around the country, there are signs finally that some journalists are beginning to worry less about that possible six or seven figure salary than they are about doing their job: holding a bright shining light on how the world really works and sometimes pricking the conscience of a nation.


UPDATE: Hat tip to mousemusings for the link to the Amanpour speech.