Journalists are not the enemy
The news industry seeks to answer larger questions
Judy Woodruff is anchor of PBS NewsHour. She, along with the late Gwen Ifill, who co-anchored the newscast, received this year’s Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism given annually by Arizona State University. These are her remarks at the awards; they have been edited for space.
To be recognized alongside my friend and anchor partner, Gwen (Ifill), who was a treasure — journalist’s journalist, honest, fearless, funny. She had it all. And of course, she was a pioneer, trailblazing from the moment she became a reporter.
She was larger than life at the “NewsHour,” taken far too early, and we miss her every day. But her legacy lives on in the work we do, and in the recognitions like this one that remind young journalists of who she was and what she believed in.
All of us know, this award comes at a particularly fraught moment for journalists in this country. We were already in a time of transition, undergoing enough business change, technological change...
Newspapers have been closing down. Reporters by the hundreds and even thousands have been laid off. It’s affect-
ed every aspect of our industry.
Too many state capitols, city halls, boards of education are going un-covered around this country today because there simply aren’t enough reporters to cover them.
Once Americans found they could get their news for free, they didn’t need to buy a newspaper. And with newspapers for so long having set the pace for reporting in communities across the nation, that has been a blow to the public’s ability to know what’s going on.
And of course, this wonderful technology that’s changed the news, and taken reporters away, has also given us new sources of news. Not just broadcast, but cable, channels by the hundreds, an explosion of online sites, news in our Facebook feeds, wherever we check Google, Yahoo, there’s news everywhere.
It’s good news. It’s reported news. It’s sloppy news. It’s credible news. It’s made-up news and everything in-between. There’s news from the far right. There’s news from the far left and every point on the political spectrum and in-between.
And there’s a lot of anger and emotion in the news, more than we’ve ever seen in this country before.
Now that news is coming to us from every conceivable source, from places who never thought they were going to be in the news business, like Facebook and like Twitter, who thought they were there to do something else.
We now are watching a transformation as these organizations try to understand what their role is. They’ve made some big mistakes, and they’re trying to figure out how to fix that.
But we are watching not just social media out there that entertains us, we’re watching entire political movements and cultural movements grow out, spring out of social media — “Black lives matter,” all the way to white nationalists — finding a home, finding a way to communicate on social media.
Just this week, the #MeToo” hashtag empowered women to say, they too were victims of sexual harassment and even abuse in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein horrible revelations. And, by the way, for which we can thank the fine reporting at The New York Times and the New Yorker. Mainstream journalist organizations that took months and months of work to nail it down. That’s the mainstream media working for you.
The days when I was growing up and watching Walter Cronkite on television couldn’t be more different from the warp-speed, 24/7, always-at-a-boil news environment that we live in now.
And into this moment of transition and even turmoil-ish change, came a presidential election and a new leader with a unique background. Impatient with the ways of Washington and the rest of American politics, ready to declare war on his own political party when he needs to, and determined to leave the Trump mark in both the domestic and world stage. Rather than shying away from controversy and conflict, he relishes it.
Add to that, he’s spent his adult life dealing with the New York City tabloids and the entertainment press, so he’s comfortable talking to and taking on reporters and entire news organizations.
He built a campaign, and now an administration by calling most news “fake” and most journalists “enemies of the American people.”
I am not an enemy of the American people. That is not true.
I love this country. I love this country. I’ve lived overseas. I grew up as an Army brat. I’ve lived in Europe. I’ve lived in
For all the young people studying here at the Cronkite School, who think about their future as journalists, I believe they need to be focused always on the larger questions — always thinking what matters.
Asia and Germany and Taiwan. And I love traveling around the world, but I love this country. And I always will, and most every journalist I know feels the same way.
But this is a president who is master of getting attention. And Twitter and other tools have given him a way to do what he wants in a way that no president before him had even thought about.
And because we’re used to paying a lot of attention to our president — and we should in many ways, they have a lot of power — he has gotten oversized attention.
It is very easy for us journalists in Washington to spend our time focused on those conflicts the president focuses on and on his controversial statements. And we have been doing that. Conflict is the order of the day.
From the NFL, and a state of emergency today in Florida, entire state, because a white nationalist is speaking at a state university to the latest statement today this morning from the North Korean government that “a nuclear war could break out at any moment.” Because of what they have witnessed in U.S-Korean relations. It’s enough to make us all hide under our beds and never leave our house...
For all the young people studying here at the Cronkite School, who think about their future as journalists, I believe they need to be focused always on the larger questions — always thinking what matters.
Are all Americans getting access to a good education? To job opportunities that will allow them to advance and provide for their families? To good and affordable health care?
What are the science and medical discoveries that are changing the world our children will grow up in? How is the climate changing? What’s the human role in that?
Are women and minorities represented and respected in the corridors of power?
Why are so many American today turning to alcohol and drugs, opioids, to dull the pain and lack of hope they have for their own futures?
Beyond our lives, what are the forces at work globally that will affect American lives and opportunities in years to come? And what are the responsibilities of the United State on the world stage?
Questions like these and so many others matter, and we need journalists to help us find the answers day after day after day.
We need journalists to tell us the story of the human race as it unfolds, in all its complexities and wonders.
Yes, politics, the economy, but also our culture, how we treat each other, how race and how religion are either dividing us or bringing us together, the arts, music, literature that opens our eyes and fulfills as people. How we raise our children, and so much more.
And, yes, we need to cover those controversies that keep popping up in Washington, but we need to keep them in context.
And remember these are the questions for journalists to try to answer.