Remarks to the Canadian Journalism Foundation
Last night I was honored with the Tribute at the Canadian Journalism Foundation awards in Toronto, Canada. Below are my prepared remarks; I deviated from the text slightly and tried to make edits below to better reflect what I said.
I want to thank the CJF and more specifically the Gala Committee - David Walmsley, Maureen Shaughnessy Kitts and Natalie Turvey - for selecting me for this tribute.
I would also like to thank Peter Mansbridge for those lovely remarks and more importantly for his decades at the CBC, serving as a beacon for anchors across the continent, speaking truth to power, and calm to panic. I know this nation has come to depend on you to guide it through times of difficulty and joy, and I know she will miss your nightly presence.
It is such an honor to receive this award, especially as someone who isnât Canadian, someone born in New York and raised in Philadelphia. I was seven during the American Bicentennial in Philadelphia, the heart of American democracy, so it was interesting when a few years ago i began doing some genealogical research and discovered that many of my ancestors, the Huffs, fought in the Revolutionary War. The surprise was that they fought for the British and then fled to Canada. They continued to fight on your side in the war of 1812. This was of course something of a rude awakening for a Philly boy.
Of course i knew of my Canadian roots â My mother was born in Ottawa, and came to the U.S. with her family when she was 7. My grandfather Everett Palmatier fought with the Royal Canadian Navy during World War II serving on the HMCS Cobalt, a Flower-class corvette that participated in escorting convoys in the Atlantic. My grandmother Helen worked as a confidential secretary for the Canadian government. My great uncle Edwin Palmatier, a tailgunner, was shot down and killed by the Luftwaffe in that war. There is a lake named after him in this country. In January 1917, one hundred years ago, my great great grandfather David Dyson, a pickle and vinegar merchant was the mayor of Winnipeg â for four days. He lost the recount.
Now, if I were Tom I would make a joke about how Peter Mansbridge covered that recount. But I am not so I will not.
Grammie and Grampie and Uncle Edwin and David Dyson are no longer with us, but i brought my mother here tonight and I want to take a moment to honor her for not only having been a loving and selfless mother but for having instilled in me concepts of compassion and decency that i hope have shaped the way i live and also how i perceive my responsibility as a journalist. Thank you, Mom. I love you.
I would also be remiss if i did not take a moment to thank another great son of Canada, a mentor to so many of us who had the pleasure of working with him, my former boss at ABC news, the late great Peter Jennings. Peter was a tireless and fearless and obstinate boss. And he taught me so much and the world, and the world of journalism, is lesser for his passing.
As for this awardâŚjust looking at the list of prior honorees â Tina Brown and Sir Harold Evans, Malcolm Gladwell, Robert MacNeill, Morley Safer and Graydon Carter â that is pretty august company. Though the ones who mean the most to me are the 2012 posthumous tribute to Jennings and the man who did more to make me a journalist than anyone else, the late great David Carr, honored in 2013. I like to think somewhere David and Peter are watching this presentation, frustrated that they canât break through and criticize me and make sure that iâm not letting anything go to my head. Donât worry guys, I got the lesson. You taught me well.
And of course as well all know, people like Peter and myself get the attention, but journalism is truly a team effort. From the lowest level intern to the highest executive, I couldnât do what I do without everyone at CNN. Everyone in this room knows what a team effort journalism is. Three from my team are here â Jessica Stanton, John Robinson, and Lauren Pratapas â and without them and without the leadership of my boss Jeff Zucker, as well as John Martin and Jeff Bewkes, none of this would be possible.
In three days Iâll be giving my first commencement address ever, at my alma mater, Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, and Ive been thinking a lot about what then President Eisenhower told students in the 1953 commencement:
He said: âDonât join the book burners. Donât think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. ⌠How will we defeat communism unless we know what it is, and what it teaches, and why does it have such an appeal for men, why are so many people swearing allegiance to it?âŚAnd we have got to fight it with something better, not try to conceal the thinking of our own people. They are part of America. And even if they think ideas that are contrary to ours, their right to say them, their right to record them, and their right to have them at places where they are accessible to others is unquestioned, or it isnât America.â
This was Eisenhower talking about communism during the Cold War and the Red Scare â and he was arguing that the Communists should come out and engage in the battle place of ideas and we should welcome them
That battleplace of ideas is something I think about a lot
Especially when liberals tell me not to put Republicans or Trump supporters on my shows. Using Ikeâs words, I ask them, How will you win an election against Trump and Trumpism unless you know what it is, and what it teaches, to paraphrase Ike, and why does it have such an appeal for men, why are so many people swearing allegiance to it?
And for those in journalism who do not understand the appeal of President Trump to 62,979,636 Americans, it is also important to try to understand the phenomenon so many of us failed to see coming. If you strip away the falsehoods and the bigotry and the occasional indecencies â more on them later â but if you strip those away there are propositions that are completely legitimate â fixing a broken system in Washington, making sure the elites and the government do more to protect American jobs and lives and livelihoods. We in the media need to rise to the moment and allow these disrupting debates to happen, and let the best ideas win.
But all that said, I am concerned about the weapons being deployed by the president and forces allegiant to him in this battlefield. I am concerned about the lies and smears, I am concerned about the moments of indecency, and for this audience especially I am referring of course to his calling stories he doesnât like â ones that are entirely 100% accurate â âfake news,â and thus successfully undermining the 4th estate with a large segment of the population.
On January 12, a team of reporters including me, Jim Sciutto, Evan Perez, and Carl Bernstein reported the following: âClassified documents presented last week to President Obama and President-elect Trump included allegations that Russian operatives claim to have compromising personal and financial information about Mr. Trump, multiple US officials with direct knowledge of the briefings tell CNN. The allegations were presented in a two-page synopsis that was appended to a report on Russian interference in the 2016 election.â It went on from there.
There is not one word of this story that is not accurate. And yet this is the story President Trump used to first attack CNN as âfake news.â A term that used to refer to actual fake stories â The Daily Show with Jon Stewart or more recently the such as the nonsense that there was a Satanic pedophilia ring linked to a pizzeria in Washington, D.C. with ties to the Hillary Clinton campaign. Now it stands for stories the president does not like.
And he does not like a lot of them. And while yes there have been some minor media missteps almost all of the stories heâs called fake news have been proven to be true.
Every politician lies. Hillary Clinton falsely claimed FBI âDirector Comey said my answers were truthful.â Barack Obama claimed if you like your doctor you can keep your doctor.
But the sheer number of falsehoods and factual flip-flops coming from this White House is staggering. NATO is obsolete, now it isnât. Jobless numbers are bogus, now theyâre real.
And whatâs worse we have a situation now where prevarications are not only supported by the administration and its allies in the media but by an entire dark Army of twitter trolls and meme creators here and abroad who work to undermine the work and reputations of those who either oppose the president and his policies within the party or Congress or those of us in the media who are attempting to provide basic non partisan guidance on what is going on while trying to uphold basic facts and decency.
The great discomfort here for Americans is we want our leaders to be credible. The great discomfort for journalists is that if a president declares war on truth, those who try to stand by truth and defend her are then labeled partisans, or biased.
We are not supposed to be fighters on the battlefield. We are not the opposition to President Trump, we are not the resistance.
We all are trying to figure out the way to cover this new world where fact and decency often seems to mean so little. And I do think that we as journalists need to defend truth and decency.
But I also think that too many journalists sometimes allow themselves to get swept up and we cannot have that, we cannot have a world where we act like the opposition. We in the 4th estate must rise to the occasion of this challenge. And by that I donât only mean that we work harder than ever to avoid the kinds of mistakes that undermine our profession by avoiding stories that get key facts wrong, but that we also refrain from sharing every emotion the moment we experience it on twitter. And that we consider the low regard many members of the public have for us, and that we work hard to be fair to all points of view â even the side whose members are attacking us and attempting to undermine us â the policies they advocate, not the attacks.
And let me say a word about those attempts to undermine. Tom Friedman writes in his new book Thank You For Being Late about the advances of technology compared to the human ability to adapt to these changes. The chart of technology looks like thisâŚ..the chart of our ability to adapt to technology looks like this. We are way behind as a society where technology is â i recently read that the average smartphone is millions of times more powerful than all of NASAâs combined computing in 1969
So what does that mean? It means that when your Uncle shared a website called the Denver Guardian â and a story headlined âFBI Agent Suspected in Hillary Email Leaks Found Deadâ â and spreads the story using on Facebook â he has no idea whatâs going on. His sophistication is here on the chart. The technology is here.
I have seen US Senators and US Members of the House â and I know no one would do this in your Parliament â but members of the U.S. House and Senate have invoked websites I do not consider to be credible â not just on the right but on the left. Recently after Republican Congressman Jason Chaffetz of Utah announced he would be leaving Congress, Congresswoman Maxine Waters â a Democrat of California recently lionized by the left â went on MSNBC and said of him âThere are those who think that he in some ways, have some connections to what is going on in theâŚUkraine and perhaps in Russia itself, and knows something about all of this. I donât really know. I canât say, but heâs strange in the way that heâs conducting himselfâŚMaybe [Chaffetz] thinks that if he rolls out and points to the fact that something is going on with Flynn ⌠that somehow this will raise [Chaffetz] above maybe what connections he may have with the Kremlin, we need to keep an eye on him.â
This is crazy; itâs madness. And to point out that this is going on on the Left is not to promote a false equivalence with the fact that it is going on at a much greater scale from a much larger platform on the right.Â
But lies are lies. Irresponsible fact-free speculation does not become less irresponsible because of a conspiracy peddlerâs political affiliation or gender or anything else.
I did not become a journalist to be a fact-checker or a truth-squadder, i became a journalist to hold people in power accountable, to try to tell stories other journalists werenât telling, and to try to have serious discussions about the way policies impact peopleâs lives. Probably why a lot of people in this room became journalists.
I did not become a journalist to become a meme or to watch a younger far better looking man portray me on Saturday Night Live, although thanks for that. Â But there is a lot of attention on us today as the fourth estate finds itself trying to stand up for basic standards of decency and truth.
And while it is important that we not take the bait and become the opposition that Trump and Bannon would like to cast us as â thus de-legitimizing ourselves â it is also important that we not sway the other direction. We cannot pretend that lies donât need to be called out. We cannot shrug and talk about how a politicianâs supporters donât care about behavior that empirically is offensive. We cannot lower the standards that we as a society hold just for access to big name interviews. We have to be able to look our children in the eyes. We cannot not lower our standards because of attrition and exhaustion or because colleagues are making other decisions, or because Fox, Breitbart and online trolls will lie about us otherwise.Â
This is a time for all of us in the 4th estate and indeed all of us in North America s to stand up for what we know is right. Objectivity. Truth. Decency. Facts.
My late grandmother, Helen McDowell Palmatier, born 101 years ago in Winnipeg, was an expert on Sir Winston Churchill, so with your permission I would like to end these remarks by quoting him.
Churchill once said: âA free press is the unsleeping guardian of every other right that free men prize; it is the most dangerous foe of tyranny⌠Under dictatorship the press is bound to languishâŚBut where free institutions are indigenous to the soil and men have the habit of liberty, the press will continue to be the Fourth Estate, the vigilant guardian of the rights of the ordinary citizen.â
Thank you for this honor.
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