"The way to happiness is to risk it..."

Jim Lehrer delivered the keynote address at Tufts University's
2001 Commencement ceremonies on Sunday, May 20, 2001

Medford/Somerville, Mass. [05.20.01] -- It is a supreme honor and pleasure to be here this morning, in the Massachusetts sunshine. I am most particularly pleased to be honored in the same breath with Helen Vendler, David McCullough, George McGovern and all you, our sister and fellow classmates in the Class of 2001. If we really are known by the company we keep, I know I will never do any better than this. So please, one and all, feel free to know me from this day forward for the company I kept today.

   Boston once played an important, if a bit unusual part in my life. For nearly two years, I yelled out the word "Boston" into a microphone several times a day. That was in the 1950's in the south Texas town of Victoria. I was going to a small junior college and at night working as a ticket agent at the Continental Trailways bus depot.

   And, among other things, I did this: "May I have your attention please. This is your last call for Continental Trailways Silversides air-conditioned thru liner to Houston and Dallas. Now leaving from Lane One next to the building for Inez, Edna, Ganado, Louise, El Camps, Pierce, Wharton, Kendleton, Beasley, Rosenberg, Richmond, Sugarland, Stafford, Missouri City, Houston, Huntsville, Buffalo, Corsicana and Dallas..."

    "Connecting in Dallas for Tulsa, Joplin, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Columbus, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, New York and Boston." "All aboard. Don't forget your baggage please."

   Proving you learn something early and it's totally irrelevant and you never forget it. And I'm willing to bet there aren't many commencement speakers who can do that.

   And speaking of commencement speakers, please be assured that I am well aware that the least relevant person involved in this enterprise this day is the commencement speaker. I have attended many graduations -- hundreds, maybe thousands... millions, it sometimes seems. I have been there as an undergraduate, a graduate, as a parent, an uncle, a neighbor, as a friend, a reporter, and I can say with all honest that not only can I not remember what any of the commencement speakers said, I can't even recall what any of them looked like.

   I fully understand that you're here to graduate or to witness the graduation of a loved or cherished one, not to hear me. I promise not to keep you long.

   I have been honored today mostly for my work in journalism. So I think it's only right and proper that I say a few things about the practice of journalism in America today. Those few things, I regret to say, are mostly not very good.

   In fact, I have in recent years made a small point of knocking some of the trends and practices in my line of work. Going from commencement speech to commencement speech, street corner to street corner, door to door, sometimes it seems, spreading words of alarm, explaining why I believe journalists have fallen in the public esteem opinion polls down there with the congress, child pornographers, and lawyers. No offense to any member of those groups present today.

   I wish that I could change the tune a bit today for you, and report that journalism has been born again and all is well. But I can not do that.

   It continues at times to embarrass me, to annoy me, anger me even occasionally. The causes of my concern are out there for all to see, of course -- a tendency of journalism to be something akin to professional wrestling, something to watch rather than to believe.

   The savagery of some of the so-called new journalism, marked by predatory stake-outs, coarse invasions of privacy, talk show shouting, no-source reporting and other techniques, the stunning new blurring of the old lines between straight news, analysis, and opinion.

   A most unjustified arrogance that seems to have afflicted some of my colleagues. It can be seen in a stench of contempt in their approach, words, sneers, and body language that say loud and clear: "Only the journalists of America are pure enough to judge all others."

   A new and growing confusion about the need to be entertaining, a tendency to see news as an entertainment commodity rather than as information. And on and on the list goes.

   And there is something else going on now that you non-journalists of the world should know about. And that is the most unusual and growing influence of the cable news networks. CNN, of course, but also MSNBC and the FOX news channel. It has nothing to do with the sizes of their audiences, which are small when compared to the commercial television networks, and even to us. When we're on the air, our audience is larger than MSNBC's, CNN's, and the FOX News channel combined. But it's the kind and type of people who are watching and listening.

   People like me are watching them, people in their offices engaged in the practice of journalism. In newsrooms, of all sizes, of newspapers, magazines, television, and radio stations and networks, in all kinds of cities, towns and markets. Walk into any of them and you'll immediately notice that there are television sets most everywhere, and they are turned on, constantly, permanently, to one or more of the cable news channels.

   The significance of that, I have concluded, is enormous -- not necessarily bad or evil, only enormous. Because the sounds and news judgements flowing constantly from those television sets have replaced those earlier clackety-clacks and new judgements that came from the old ticker machines of the wire services.

   The Associated Press and the United Press and the international news service machines, later to become the AP and the UPI and Reuters machines, had an enormous effect on the coverage of news throughout the world. The way a story was played by the wires led to a similar play in newspapers, television newscasts and so on. Now, it's the cable news service that is having the same influence.

   My concern is not yet a red flag, but is a yellow one of caution.

   The cable news operations have airtime to fill, excitement to generate that may not always be tied directly to the true value and weight of a particular story. Two obvious examples from recent news history are the O.J Simpson trial and the intricate details of the Monica Lewinsky story. I believe the gavel-to-gavel, wall-to-wall coverage of those two stories on cable drove the mainstream coverage as well.

   An unconscious process of osmosis was at work. Gosh, CNN or MSNBC or FOX ran that as "breaking news" with bells and whistles all day. That means it's important and we here at the Sumter Daily Item or the Witchita Eagle or the Washington Post or the Los Angeles Times or the CBS Evening News or the Newshour on PBS should see it that way too.

   And because it's television, there's a companion assumption that the whole world is watching along with all of us in our newsroom. That's not so . . .

   Most people are at school, at work or play, and are not glued to their favorite cable television news outlet all day, anymore that the average non-journalist was glued to the sounds and stories of the old wire machines. I am not advocating shutting down the cable news operations or removing all television sets from newsrooms; I'm merely commenting on a development in, or business that could lead to, profound consequences for all of us who either dispense or consume the news.

   And, as I see it, that covers all of us here today, and most everyone else somewhere else today.

   It matters because, at a time of consolidation and amalgamation in the news and information business, I believe it is more important than ever that each of us in journalism make an independent judgements about what is news and how it should be reported and displayed. It is that difference in judgements that make up a fully-blossomed and functioning free press.

   End of my yellow flag waving.

   For the record, and speaking of judgements, a couple of years ago I was asked by the sponsor of an Aspen seminar on journalism if I had guidelines I used in my won practice of journalism and, if so, would I mind sharing them.

   Here is what I sent them:

   --Do nothing I can not defend.
   --Cover, write and present every story with the care I would want if the story were about me.
    --Assume the viewer is as smart and caring and good a person as I am.
    --Assume the same on all people on whom I report.
    --Assume personal lives are a private matter until a legitimate turn in the story absolutely mandates otherwise.
    --Carefully separate opinion and analysis from straight news stories and clearly label everything.
    --Do not use anonymous sources or blind quotes except on rare and monumental occasions. No one should ever be allowed to attack another anonymously.
    --And, finally, I am not in the entertainment business.

   Now, some true-blue commencement speaker advice for my fellow and sister classmates here in the class of 2001. I hope you understood there was no way you were going to get away from here today without a little of that . . .

   First and foremost, don't make a mistake about what is happening here today. The fact that you are about to get a diploma from one of America's finest institutions of higher learning does not mean you are educated.

   Some of the dumbest people I know have degrees from some of America's finest institutions of higher learning. They took diploma in hot little hand, pronounced themselves educated and proceeded to never read another book, entertaining another fresh or new idea and, most tragically for their society and country, never again paid attention to much of anything other than themselves, to much of anything that was happening around them, or to others.

   Please, please, do not do that. Leave here today caring about your mind and your neighborhoods and your government and your world.

   I am sure George McGovern believes that there is no problem that we, the most civilized nation and progressive and democratic and wild and wonderful country in the world can not solve economics, race, education, crime, health care, welfare, energy . . . And I agree with him.

   It is absolutely absurd for us, you and me and everyone else, to allow those problems to eat away at our human resources and our spirits. It is also absolutely absurd to think they are going to be solved without you and me and everyone being involved in the solutions.

   And for you and me, more than everyone else, there is a special absurdity. We are the privileged ones, the fortunate ones. We are the ones who got the great educations. We are the ones who got the encouragement and the help from parents or teachers or preachers or friends or god. We are the cream of our society. We must show it by rising to the top. And staying there on the top of the mountain of leadership and concern and action.

   It is not an option for people like you and me. It is an obligation. And not just an obligation to others but to ourselves, for our own sakes, for our own peace of mind, for our own sense of ourselves.

   This is not a political philosophy I am talking about. It is a state of mind. And I urge all of you in the class of 2001 to accept it, adopt it, and shout it this afternoon in this great place and in all other great places you go from this day forward. But after you have first shouted it, I would also ask please, that you hold down the shouting, the noise.

   Be civil, be fair. One of the most serious losses we as a society have suffered in recent years, in my opinion, is that of civil discourse.

   There is a meanness of communication alive in the land right now. I see it in the mail we get at our program. I hear it on television and the radio and read it in the newspapers and magazines. The controversies involving the immediate past president of the United States and the post-election development in the selection of the current president of the United States certainly heightened that meanness and stridency of the discourse.

   And maybe it is calming down, maybe it is passing. We'll see...

   We are civilized people. We should disagree in a civilized manner. We should acknowledge the possibility that sometimes, some very rare times, we might be wrong. And, strange as it may seem, we might learn more from listening than from talking, more from talking than from shouting.

   You want a positive model for a civilized person? There is no better one than David McCullough.

   My second piece of advice is derived from Robinson Davies, the late great Canadian writer, who gave the commencement at Dowling College, on Long Island New York, in 1922. He said, among other things, to the graduates:

   "Get yourself a good anthology of poetry and keep it by your bed. Read a little before you go to sleep. Read a little if you wake up before the alarm goes off. Read a little if you wake up in the middle of the night. When you are idle during the day--on public transport, or at a committee meeting--let your mind dwell on what you have read. One book will last you a long time. Indeed it may last you a lifetime. Read, listen, and savor the sense."

   And finally, let me pass on something that comes in the form of the ultimate recycled quote. It is what a fictional lieutenant governor of Oklahoma said in a commencement speech to a fictional graduating class in the fictional town of Hugotown, Oklahoma.

   He said: "As you search for your place in life, I hereby advise you to take risks. Be willing to put your mind and your spirit, your time and your energy, your stomach and your emotions on the line."

   "To search for a safe place is to search for an end to a rainbow that you will hate once you find it. Take charge of your own life. Create your own risks by setting your standards, satisfying your own standards. Take charge."

   Still quoting... "Congratulations to you all. It is unlikely that any of you will have occasion to remember either me or my commencement address. I don't blame you. But if by chance something does linger, I hope it's just that there was a guy up here who kept saying risk, risk. The way to happiness is to risk it. Risk it."

   End quote.

   It is the ultimate recycled quote because it is from a novel published in 1990 called "The Sooner Spy." I wrote that novel.

   I stole those lines verbatim from a real commencement speech I made myself in 1984 to my oldest daughter's college graduating class. So . . . it's a quote of a fictional quote that began as a real quote. Like I say, the ultimate recycled quote.

   But I mean it as much today as the day I said it the first time in real life in 1984. My fictional lieutenant governor of Oklahoma asked me to tell you he still feels that way too. He also joins me in congratulating each and every member of the Tufts University's class of 2001.

   I'm delighted to be one of you. I'll see you at our reunions, along with professor Vendler, David McCullough and Senator McGovern.

   And please remember what I said at the very beginning. Wherever you go, don't forget your baggage, please.

   Thank you.