Speeches

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS, URBANA CHAMPAIGN
ILLINI LECTURE BOARD LECTURE SERIES
7 MARCH, 2007

Thank you for that very kind introduction. And thanks to all of you for that very warm welcome.

There’s a lot of ground I’d like to try to cover tonight…but before we get underway, it just isn’t in me, as we gather together in comfort, not to pause for a moment to give a thought to the many thousands of our men and women in uniform on lonely, dangerous duty tonight in Iraq and Afghanistan. I wonder if I could ask you to join me in just a brief moment of silence to recognize their contribution and their sacrifice on our behalf. Thank you.

It’s always good to be on a university campus, to get a chance to talk to the people who will be inheriting our country and our world. And I certainly appreciate the Union Board’s foresight in not scheduling this talk opposite tomorrow night’s Big Ten Tourney game.

You are fortunate to attend what is, by any measure, a world-class institution of higher learning. My own college experience was somewhat different: I attended Sam Houston State Teachers College—known today as Sam Houston State University—in Huntsville, Texas.

I’m aware that some folks this far north may not have heard of the place, and it had about as much ivy on it as your average Burger King, but those of us who went there considered it to be the Harvard or Yale or University of Illinois of our part of the world.

And Sam Houston State, in the years I was there, gave me a tremendous start on the craft that has become my life’s work…and provided me with just about all the education I was capable of absorbing at the time. For that I will forever be grateful to the school and I can honestly say that, if I had the chance to do it all over again, I would still choose to begin my reporter’s education by walking into Professor Hugh Cunningham’s Journalism 101 class, as I did for the first time well over a half a century ago.

I don’t really know when it was, exactly, that I decided that I wanted to be a reporter—I just know that, for as long as I can remember, that was what I wanted to do “when I grew up.”

And let me just pause for a moment and say that, for those of you who may be out there nodding along with that thought—for those who know what it’s like to want to do one thing above any other, whether it’s journalism, or business, or politics, or the arts—whatever that one thing is—please, give yourself a chance to follow that inspiration, as far as you can take it. Dream your dream—follow your dream, fight for it—and never, ever let it die. Because it is by doing your heart’s bidding that you will find the way to burn with the white-hot flame that can make the difference between having a job, and having a career—a life’s work filled with joy and meaning.

Not to belabor the point, but I suspect that you will find that keeping your eyes on your dream, and doing what it takes to make it reality, ultimately mean more than the kind of school you went to, or the first job you land after graduation.

As for me, the dream to become a reporter took hold in a number of ways. I think one thing that contributed to my sense of the news as important was the fact that my father was a tireless, inveterate, and unusually passionate reader of newspapers.

Newspapers were always around the house, surrounding dad’s chair like ammunition around a foxhole. And sometimes they would, quite literally, become projectiles. Because, for my father, reading a newspaper was often a physical as well as a mental act. If he didn’t like what he found himself reading in a paper—even if that paper was just reporting the facts, sir—he’d just give it a big heave across the room and shout out “Byrl!”—that was my mother’s name—“Byrl! Cancel our subscription to the Houston Chronicle!”…or the Post, or the Press, or whatever the offending paper happened to be—because my father went through a lot of them over the years.

Eventually he went through the journalistic output of the whole state of Texas, and he was down to the Christian Science Monitor and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. In my father’s view, it was OK to get the news a week late, if it meant getting it in a form that wouldn’t upset him.
It’s a kind of funny story, I know, but it’s true, and it made a strong impression on me that the news was important—it could even be worth getting upset over.

As for reporters, to me they symbolized adventure. They represented a kind of cool, knowing, understanding of the larger world outside my neighborhood in Houston. I remember watching a reporter in action when I was still very much a young boy, after a boy had drowned in a nearby bayou—and just something about the way he went about his work, asking questions, jotting down notes with economy and precision in his reporter’s notebook, touched in me an understanding that this was the kind of adult I wanted to be, in the same way that some young boys want to be astronauts or football stars or firemen. Of course, I wanted to be all THOSE things too—but most of all I wanted to be a reporter.

My idea of just what, exactly, a reporter was and does, though, was still pretty fuzzy. It wasn’t until a couple of years later, when I was about nine or 10 years old, that I began to get more of a sense of what great reporting was all about. It was, like now, a time of war and of great tension all around the world. The United States had not yet formally entered World War II but we were on the cusp, as day and night Adolph Hitler’s air force bombed London in what would become known as the London Blitz.

As chance would have it, I was sick for much of this time—the fall of 1940 and into the spring of 1941—stuck in bed with rheumatic fever, which at that time was an incurable malady. Lying there with nothing to do, the radio became my best friend. Radio back then was a lot more interesting then it is today, with not only music but also all kinds of adventure stories and variety shows, but there was one program that none of the others could touch for pure, can’t-turn-it-off excitement. It was called “THIS…is London” and it was real life, featuring a reporter named Edward R. Murrow.

I don’t how many of you here may have seen the movie “Good Night and Good Luck,” but if you have, this was the same Edward R. Murrow as in the movie, about 15 years earlier, near the start of his storied news career.

His reports from the London Blitz became legendary not only for their immense news value but also for their immediacy, for the way they took the listener right into the heart of what was happening. Murrow, among other things, helped pioneer the use of ambient—live, natural—sound in broadcasting. Those among you who have taken writing courses, will know that one of the first things you learn is “Show—don’t tell.” That’s what Murrow did.

As the poet Archibald MacLeish once told Murrow, “You burned the city of London in our houses and we felt the flames that burned it.”
As a pesky academic side note, let me just add that if you are not familiar with the name Archibald MacLeish, I suggest you Google it when you get back to your dorm tonight, because the description “poet” only begins to describe his extraordinary life and career—he was one of the most influential people of he mid-20th century and a name that I believe every American should know.

MacLeish also told Murrow, and I think this is important, because it has a great deal of relevance for the world we’re living in today, “Without rhetoric, without dramatics, without more emotion than needed be, you destroyed the superstition of distance and of time”—the sense that events happening 3,000 miles and an ocean away didn’t really matter.

I want to return to that thought in a little bit—the idea that, with the world becoming an ever-smaller place, we cannot afford to indulge in the superstition that faraway events aren’t really important to our own lives.

As for Edward R. Murrow, I make a point of speaking about him because he has been tremendously influential to my idea of what a journalist is and should be, and though I wasn’t fully aware of it at the time (except maybe in my gut), he was inventing modern broadcast journalism with his reporting from World War II and from the London Blitz in particular. I had the good fortune to be exposed early on to the work of the absolute master of the craft.

What’s more, that reporting that I had the opportunity to hear firsthand mattered. It made a difference—a huge difference. At the time—not unlike our own—fighting another war in a faraway place was just about the last thing most Americans wanted. It had only been about 20 years since American fighting men had gone to Europe to die in the trenches of the First World War, we were only just beginning to pull out of the Great Depression, and there was a strong strain of thought in America that we shouldn’t be sending our young men to do in another, quote, “European war.”

By making England’s suffering real to Americans, Edward R. Murrow may well have played a hand in changing the course of history. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill—both men who truly understood and appreciated the power of words, and ideas—certainly thought he did.
So journalism was powerful stuff to me—powerful in the sense of what it could accomplish, and powerful in its hold over me. And it was a good thing that I did want so badly to be a reporter because my beginnings in the journalism craft weren’t exactly auspicious.
I was determined to go to college and my mother was, if anything, even more determined to see me go. She took the trip with me up to Sam Houston State on a bus, and cashed in a U.S. Savings Bond to pay the initial fees and tuition. Good enough for a start, but as for how I would find a way to CONTINUE paying for my room and board, I had hardly a clue.

I had a vague idea of getting a football scholarship but, as it turned out, the football coach at Sam Houston had other ideas on the matter. Luckily, my journalism professor—the professor Cunningham I mentioned earlier—took pity on me, and found me a job at a local radio station. This was my journalism professor, Professor Cunningham’s teaching philosophy all the way—he believed that the best way to learn how to become a reporter was to BE a reporter: to get out there, find stories, and write about them. “Hang around the courthouse,” he’d say, or “go ride with the police.”

He also gave me just about the most valuable piece of advice any would-be reporter can get, and I hope you’ll pardon my reporter’s French, “Don’t let the bastards scare you.”

You might wonder, as I did when I heard that, just who the, quote, “bastards” are, in that not especially delicate turn of phrase. I suppose we all find out, soon enough, no matter what line of work we decide to pursue. They might be the people who tell you you’ll never make it, or that your way of doing things won’t work—you’ll have to do it their way.

But in reporting, you find out pretty quickly who “they” are. They are the people who, if you do your job the way you should, stand to lose something. They are the people who don’t want to let the truth get out and will try to stop you from reporting the truth. Some of them have such a stake in keeping the truth hidden that they’ll threaten you, or attack you verbally, sometimes even physically.

A reporter can meet these people anywhere and everywhere. You can meet them in any small town, and you can and will meet them in big cities like Washington, DC and New York and Chicago. When I started out at CBS, I met them in the form of those who violently and virulently opposed the struggle for black civil rights, one of the most inspiring and dramatic—and important—stories I’ve ever covered, and one that left me changed. When later I reported on the Vietnam War and Watergate, I met plenty of “them” on these stories, too.

“They” are never the so-called small guys, the powerless people or foot soldiers of this world. They’re the people who stand to profit from injustice—and from people not pointing it out or calling them to account for it. And “they” are not a myth. They exist.

But the fact that they exist should not discourage us. The fact that they will try to intimidate the press, whether directly or by innuendo, is a sign that they are afraid—afraid of the power of the people. And here in the United States of America, here in this constitutional republic founded on ideals of freedom and democracy, it is a sign that they know that citizens, if armed with the truth, can overcome whatever power “they” may wield.

This, to me, gets to the very essence of why the news is so important: The news is the raw material of democracy, the mother’s milk of remaining a free people. In a nation where the people are empowered to effect change, the news isn’t just interesting, or a curiousity—it can be these things, of course, but that isn’t its real value. No, the news is the best and sometimes only way for a citizen to assess whether our elected leaders, our institutions, our laws, and our policies are serving our interests or not.

And if We, the People decide that these things are not serving our interest, we are armed with the means to change them. There is the vote, sure. And there are also the other means spelled out in the First Amendment to the Constitution: The rights to speak out, to peaceably assemble, to petition our government.

This country’s Founders put freedom of the press alongside these rights, in the very first amendment to the Constitution, not because they loved reporters—in fact, most of them, like a lot of politicians then and now, couldn’t stand ‘em.

No, they put freedom of the press right at the beginning of the Bill of Rights, just after freedom of religion, because they understood that, without the free flow of information, the democratic experiment didn’t have a chance. How could the people run the country if the people didn’t have an accurate picture of what was going on in that country?
Unfortunately, the small minority of people who have something to lose if the truth is told often understand this better than the great majority of people who stand to gain from the truth being known. And that’s why they have, will, and continue to go to such great lengths to try to manipulate the news—by intimidating reporters, by planting news stories, by hiding behind words such as “national security” and “executive privilege,” and even by controlling some of the major sources of news.

You can travel through the United States today and find a newspaper in just about every town, and you can turn on your television and find channel upon channel carrying news, or at least something that might pass for news. It looks like we have more choices of where to get our news than ever before. But that’s largely an illusion. The great majority of newspapers in this country are now owned by two or three large corporations. Same goes for radio and television, where a small handful of companies own the major networks and the big names in cable news.

Some of these corporations are huge conglomerates, where news is far from their primary business. And it might not be in the best interest of their other businesses to have the truth—the full truth—of any given story be known. They might, for example, have important legislation before the Congress—they might want a law to be passed (or not passed) that could make or lose them many millions, even billions of dollars. The often need some regulatory agency to act for the profit of their non-news and news businesses. They might seek government contracts for the products they manufacture.

So when this becomes the case, whom can you trust to give you the news straight, no filter?

Luckily, reporters—good reporters—tend to be stubborn. If you want to see a good reporter’s neck swell, try telling him or her what he should write or say. And though it’s not unheard of, it remains, to my knowledge, a rare thing for even the biggest corporations to actively dictate the news from above.

But what does happen is many reporters begin to engage in self-censorship. One starts to say to oneself, “You know, if I report this story in this way, I’m probably going to catch hell…why do I need the trouble? I’ve got kids to feed, a mortgage to pay, car payments to make.” And so, little by little, the truth gets diluted—and the country suffers for it. Our freedoms and our country are put at risk.

The reality is, good news reporting—news of integrity—often begins and ends with news owners who have guts—owners who will protect their reporters and stand up for their right to report the news without fear or favoritism, even if they themselves might not like the story. I know, because I’ve experienced one of the great examples of an owner who fits this mold, a gentleman named William Paley who owned CBS throughout much of my early career there.

In fact I only found out years later that, in my work as White House correspondent during the widespread criminal conspiracy known for short as Watergate, the White House of President Nixon tried to put pressure on my reporting through Mr. Paley. To his great and everlasting credit, he didn’t budge.

A reporter has to decide very early on whether he or she is going to go along to get along, or whether he or she is going to follow a story wherever it may lead, and air the facts as they come out. And to enter CBS News in the early 1960s was to step into a world where, it was well understood, the latter approach was the way to go. And though that institution may have been the best example, in TV, of that creed, it was far from alone in its era.

Unfortunately, the decades since have seen this belief fade, while ever-more entertainment creeps into news. The next time you’re watching an evening news program, ask yourself: Do these stories, do these 20-odd minutes (after commercials) represent the most important things in the world for me to know today? Or are some of these things just here because they’re meant to attract viewers looking for entertainment—or because they’re trying to sell something, whether it’s a product or a politician; a partisan line or a governmental policy?

And regarding entertainment—don’t get me wrong: I don’t think the news should be dull. I just think it should be news!
One definition of news that I love and to which I heartily subscribe is: News is something that you, the public, needs to know, which someone, somewhere doesn’t want you to know…and all the rest is just advertising.

Now, I’ve been in news for more than 50 years now, and I’ve witnessed these trends in news firsthand. I should point out that to level criticisms of what has happened to news does not mean that I except myself from these criticisms.

And I have gone on at such length—perhaps too much length—about the value of and threats to quality news because I don’t think it’s any great secret that we live in very serious times. Times that demand serious and considered responses from our democracy—that means you and me, folks.

I mentioned earlier that I wanted to return to what Archibald MacLeish said of Edward R. Murrow, that he destroyed the superstition that events that happened thousands of miles away don’t really matter.
We live in an age now when these events not only matter but matter acutely—and immediately.

We have more than 140,000 men and women in uniform serving in Iraq, where they stand in harm’s way every day; when they leave, how they leave, may determine whether or not the Middle East faces the prospect of a larger, regional war of Sunni Muslims against Shiite Muslims, involving (but not necessarily limited to) Saudi Arabia and Iran. Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Iraq are no less than numbers one, three, and four on the world list of nations with the largest oil reserves. The focus always rightly belongs with the human toll in war, but one must also reckon the economic consequences of armed conflict, as they have the potential to be devastating in their own right.

We have nearly 70,000 men and women in uniform in the Pacific Rim, stationed primarily in Japan and South Korea, in a region made extremely volatile by tremendous competition for scarce resources and threatened now by the prospect of a nuclear and conventional arms race. The United States is bound by treaty to defend Japan or South Korea, or Taiwan in the event that any of these nations is attacked. And when considering the Pacific Rim, consider this, too: China holds more than $450 billion in U.S. Treasury debt, in addition to massive U.S. dollar reserves. It could be argued that they hold the health of our economy in their hands.

If you’ve been following financial news you’ve seen some of the truth of this, and how tightly interdependent this world has become. Last week Asia’s stock markets plunged for a number of possible reasons, including a well-qualified statement by former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan that the U.S. economy could—not would, could—fall into recession by the end of this year.

Why would such a statement so spook China and other Asian markets? Because we in the United States are the biggest market for Asian manufactured goods, quite by far. And with such heavy Chinese investment in America (such as all those Treasury bills, used to fund the Iraq war, among other things), a dive in the Chinese markets was bound to have a reciprocal effect here. One of the places you could see that reciprocal effect was on the commodities markets, in the U.S. and in Europe. The reason? You guessed it: Traders on these markets, where the Chinese are some of the biggest customers, feared that the Chinese economy may be slowing down...when this whole market meltdown started with Chinese fears that the U.S. economy might be slowing down.

I mentioned Europe a moment ago. We don’t think about it much, but we still have approximately 100,000 men and women in uniform in Europe—a region that has seen two continent-wide wars in the past century and which gets more than 25 percent of its natural gas from Russia—a nation that has shown a willingness to cut this supply off, and a nation that is headed by President Vladimir Putin, who many believe has been directly or indirectly responsible for killing and at the least jailing his political rivals.

And finally we have 28,000 of our fellow citizens in uniform in Afghanistan, where I was just a few weeks ago. You may have heard news of recent fighting there, as our soldiers there try to seize the initiative in what they believe will be a major spring offensive by the Taliban. In many ways Afghanistan has become the “forgotten war,” but indications are that it will continue to re-emerge in the headlines again—and the fate of that country may well hang in the balance.
So make no mistake—these are serious times, for our country and for our world. Deadly and potentially deadly rivalries are playing out across the globe, driven by two of the mightiest engines of history—religious identity and the quest for scarce resources, in this case energy resources. And our armed forces, if they are not involved in these fights already, would inevitably become involved in some of the regions where the greatest tensions lie.

And this says nothing of the potential threat posed by global climate change, not to mention the daunting challenges facing us here at home, as we try to come to grips with the issues of healthcare, and immigration, of income distribution, opportunity inequality, and the embattled American middle economic class.

With correct and complete information at our disposal, I believe there is always cause for optimism. Especially in this country, where our history is filled with examples of terrific obstacles and adversity overcome. Without correct and complete information, however, the solutions are much more difficult to find, and a lot slower to come by.
Just because these are serious times doesn’t mean we can’t have fun, doesn’t mean we can’t pursue our dreams and live our lives. In fact, so much depends on young people, such as you students, doing these very things.

But serious times do require us—all of us—to remain engaged in public life. To do our duty as citizens. To pay attention to the news—because even if you think that you are not interested in current events, current events are interested in you. You don’t have to be a member of America’s armed forces to feel the tidal shocks of events half a world away. The planet has become far too small for us to believe that we are in any way insulated from what happens in seemingly faraway places, just because we are surrounded by two big oceans and two friendly neighbors.

We cannot live by the illusion that what happens in distant places doesn’t matter In fact, today, the idea of “distance” may be an illusion, itself.

We have an election season already underway in this country, and we will soon be fully embarked on the search for a new president to occupy the White House. So as these great issues facing America and the world are debated and discussed in the months and years ahead, I ask you to remember to consider your news sources with care, while asking yourself—who stands to gain from any particular point of view you might hear advanced, and why. In what figures to be a billion-dollar presidential election campaign, what do the big-money donors expect in return from the candidates—Democratic and Republican—to whom they have given their cash?

I ask you also to demand accuracy and truth from your news and from your elected leaders. Don’t be afraid, as too many of us journalists have become, of asking the tough questions. And keep asking—until your questions have been answered or it has been made clear that no answers are coming.

And finally, I ask you to consider that, in a democracy, questioning authority may be the purest form of patriotism. It is the form of patriotism to which the good reporter dedicates himself. For it is not the individuals who we as citizens temporarily raise to elected office to whom we owe our allegiance, but rather our country. And it is only through inquiry and reason that we can take proper action on our country’s behalf.

You’ve all been very patient with me, and I want to thank you for your time. I’ll be more than happy to try and answer any questions you may have for me.