A Quote by Katharine Viner
After working at the 'Guardian' for two decades, I feel I know instinctively why it exists. Most of our journalists and our readers do, too - it's something to do with holding power to account and upholding liberal values.
Related Quotes
Our duty as journalists is to use our clarity - and our imagination - to build hope in the societies in which we work. Our duty is to keep holding power to account, and to fight for press freedom around the world.
Perhaps the most significant thing a person can know about himself is to understand his own system of values. Almost every thing we do is a reflection of our own personal value system. What do we mean by values? Our values are what we want out of life. No one is born with a set of values. Except for our basic physiological needs such as air, water, and food, most of our values are acquired after birth.
The reality is that the media are probably the most powerful of all our institutions today and they, or rather we [journalists], too often are squandering our power and ignoring our obligations. The consequence of our abdication of responsibility is the ugly spectacle of idiot culture!
The American tradition of foreign policy exceptionalism, our grand strategy as a nation, reaches back much further. Really at the turn - the end of the 19th century, when we achieved power a generation after the Civil War, the outlines of an American vision came into focus, and what we - it was based on two things. One, our realization that our values and our interests were the same, and that our business interests would advance as our values advanced in the world.
We think our leadership has been too timid to go after corruption, and often times, they bow to the liberal progressive demands of the White House instead of standing up for our values.
I would encourage anyone who shares our liberal values in or outside parliament to join our party and join our liberal movement. Our door is absolutely open.
Keeping this facility [Guantanamo prison] open is contrary to our values. It undermines our standing in the world. It is viewed as a stain on our broader record of upholding the highest standards of rule of law.
To overcome extremism, we must also be vigilant in upholding the values our troops defend ? because there is no force in the world more powerful than the example of America. That is why I have ordered the closing of the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, and will seek swift and certain justice for captured terrorists ? because living our values doesn't make us weaker, it makes us safer and it makes us stronger.
Education is 'the guardian genius of our democracy.' Nothing really means more to our future, not our military defenses, not our missiles or our bombers, not our production economy, not even our democratic system of government. For all of these are worthless if we lack the brain power to support and sustain them.
Holding our own government to account for the use of its power is, in my view, the highest mission of a U.S. news organization.
In the Art of Dreaming Don Juan tells Carlos, "... most of our energy goes into upholding our importance... if we were capable of losing some of that importance, two extraordinary things would happen to us. One, we would free our energy from trying to maintain the illusory idea of our grandeur; and two we would provide ourselves with enough energy to ... catch a glimpse of the actual grandeur of the universe."
Digital is not about putting up your story on the web. It's about a fundamental redrawing of journalists' relationship with our audience, how we think about our readers, our perception of our role in society, our status.
We did really well for a generation after 1989 and the fall of communism. Our liberal values expanded in the world, our prosperity expanded.
We are not living in the same world we were immediately after the Cold War, when there seemed to be a greater belief in the universality of human rights and there was enough prosperity to make us question why we had not committed more resources to upholding the values we claimed to hold most dear.
I suppose we acquire most of our feelings about our bodies too early, and in ways too complicated, to make them easy to account for.
If we've learned any lessons during the past few decades, perhaps the most important is that preservation of our environment is not a partisan challenge; it's common sense. Our physical health, our social happiness, and our economic well-being will be sustained only by all of us working in partnership as thoughtful, effective stewards of our natural resources.
Related Authors
Ambrose Bierce Quotes
American
Journalist
Andy Rooney Quotes
American
Journalist
Ann Coulter Quotes
American
Journalist
Anna Quindlen Quotes
American
Journalist
Bill Vaughan Quotes
American
Journalist
Dave Barry Quotes
American
Journalist
Dennis Prager Quotes
American
Journalist
Erma Bombeck Quotes
American
Journalist
Fran Lebowitz Quotes
American
Journalist
George Will Quotes
American
Journalist
Glenn Beck Quotes
American
Journalist
Hunter S. Thompson Quotes
American
Journalist
Mignon McLaughlin Quotes
American
Journalist
Molly Ivins Quotes
American
Journalist
Rachel Maddow Quotes
American
Journalist
Walter Lippmann Quotes
American
Journalist