Gems from Amanpour speech Filipino journalists can identify with

CNN’s chief international correspondent Christiane Amanpour has been awarded the Committee to Project Journalists’ Burton Benjamin Memorial Award for “extraordinary and sustained achievement in the cause of press freedom.” In her acceptance speech Tuesday night, she urged media to hold firm to the basic values of journalism: “As a profession, let’s fight for what is right. Let’s fight for our values. Bad things do happen when good people do nothing.”

Here are some more of the gems from her speech which Filipino journalists can identify with:

Stop banalizing the Truth

“I believe in being truthful, not neutral. And I believe we must stop banalizing the truth.
And we have to be prepared to fight especially hard for the truth in a world where the Oxford English Dictionary just announced its word of 2016: “post-truth.”

Fake news sites in social Media

“We have to accept that we’ve had our lunch handed to us by the very same social media that we’ve so slavishly been devoted to.

“The winning candidate did a savvy end run around us and used it to go straight to the people. Combined with the most incredible development ever — the tsunami of fake news sites — aka lies — that somehow people could not, would not, recognize, fact check, or disregard.

“One of the main writers of these false articles — these lies — says people are getting dumber, just passing fake reports around, without fact checking. We need to ask whether technology has finally outpaced our human ability to keep up. Facebook needs to step up. Advertisers need to boycott the lying sites.”

Media being accused as terrorists

As all the international journalists we honor in this room tonight and every year know only too well: First the media is accused of inciting, then sympathizing, then associating — until they suddenly find themselves accused of being full-fledged terrorists and subversives. Then they end up in handcuffs, in cages, in kangaroo courts, in prison — and then who knows?

We, the media, can either contribute to a more functional system or to deepening the political dysfunction. Which world do we want to leave our children?

Journalists being accused as enemies of the State

Like it has in Egypt and Turkey and Russia, where journalists have been pushed into political partisan corners as we see here tonight — delegitimized, accused of being enemies of the state.

Journalism itself has become weaponized. We have to stop it. We all have a huge amount of work to do, investigating wrongdoing, holding power accountable, enabling decent government, defending basic rights, actually covering the world — Russia, Syria, North Korean nukes.

Can’t we have differences without killing each other off?