The Center for Public Integrity is the real thing. A group of dedicated people who remember that great journalism is about grit and guts and stamina and razor-sharp instincts. They are, thank heaven, here to stay.
Interpretation
Great journalism requires dedication, instincts, and perseverance.
Diane Sawyer emphasizes the importance of commitment and resilience in journalism, highlighting the qualities that make a group like the Center for Public Integrity vital. She celebrates their existence as a beacon of integrity amidst a challenging landscape, suggesting that without such dedicated individuals, the quality of journalism would suffer.
In practice
In a speech about media ethics, I could quote Diane Sawyer to highlight the importance of integrity in journalism.
I read once, which I loved so much, that this great physicist who won a Nobel Prize said that every day when he got home, his dad asked him not what he learned in school but his dad said, 'Did you ask any great questions today?' And I always thought, what a beautiful way to educate kids that we're excited by their questions, not by our answers and whether they can repeat our answers.
I think the one lesson I have learned is that there is no substitute for paying attention.
If you're curious, you'll probably be a good journalist because we follow our curiosity like cats.
People assume you can't be shy and be on television. They're wrong.
I'm always fascinated by the way memory diffuses fact.
Follow what you are genuinely passionate about and let that guide you to your destination.
If youre a reporter, the easiest thing in the world is to get a story. The hardest thing is to verify. The old sins were about getting something wrong, that was a cardinal sin. The new sin is to be boring.
The difference between Rappler and other newsgroups in the Philippines is that journalists control Rappler both editorially and commercially. We make decisions that are bad for business but protect the public sphere.
My function is, as objectively and accurately as I can, to present reality to people out there, and doing that as quickly as we do is quite difficult enough, thank you.
We journalists are a bit like vultures, feasting on war, scandal and disaster. Turn on the news, and you see Syrian refugees, Volkswagen corruption, dysfunctional government. Yet that reflects a selection bias in how we report the news: We cover planes that crash, not planes that take off.
I violated, apparently, an unspoken rule that we are supposed to take care of our own. Frankly, if that invites discomfort, I welcome it. I don't think there's enough discomfort in journalism, especially in Washington.
The biggest problem I have in journalism is being quoted or misquoted and then being asked to defend something I haven't said.
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