Good morning from my home. Like you, I wish we were together on campus. There's so much now we can no longer take
for granted. The air we breathe is first among them. So those of us who are healthy have ample
reason to be grateful. I'm also grateful to Harvard and to President
Bacow for inviting me to be with you. To the Harvard Class of 2020, congratulations, and congratulations to the parents, professors, mentors, and friends who helped you along
the way. Joining you for graduation is a high honor. For me this is an opportunity, an opportunity to speak about subjects that
I believe are of real urgency, especially now during a worldwide health emergency. I would like to discuss with you the need
for a commitment to facts and the truth. Only a few months ago, I would have settled for emphasizing that
our democracy depends on facts and truth, and it truly does. But now as we can plainly see, it is more elemental than that. Facts and truth are matters of life and death. Misinformation, disinformation, delusions,
and deceit can kill. Here is what can move us forward: science
and medicine, study and knowledge, expertise, and reason. In other words, fact and truth. I want to tell you why free expression by
all of us and an independent press, imperfect though we may be, is essential to getting at the truth, and why we must hold the government to account, and hold other powerful interests to account
as well. When I began thinking about these remarks, I expected, of course, to be on Harvard's campus, and I thought not a bad place to talk about
a free press, not a bad place to talk about our often testy
relationship with official power. It was in Boston after all where the first newspaper of the American colonies
was founded. Its first edition was published September
25th, 1690. The very next day, the Governor and Council
of Massachusetts shut it down. So the press of this country has long known
what it means to face a government that aims to silence
it. Fortunately, there has been progress. With the First Amendment, James Madison championed the right of "freely
examining public characters and measures". But it took a very long time before we as
a nation fully absorbed what Madison was talking about. We took many ominous turns. We had the Alien and Sedition Acts under John
Adams, the Sedition and Espionage Acts under Woodrow
Wilson, the McCarthy era. It was not always clear where we, as a nation,
would end up. Finally, witnessing the authoritarianism of
Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, we began to secure a free press in this country. The Supreme Court would forcefully emphasize the press's role in guaranteeing a democracy. Justice Hugo Black said it well decades later, ''The press was protected so that it could
bare the secrets of government and inform the people.'' Not only the secrets of government, I would
add, our duty to inform the public does not stop
there, not by a long shot. That was evident during my years as a journalist
in Boston. Amid today's crisis, it seems like another
era, and I guess it is. But I want to tell you about it because I
think it remains instructive about what a strong independent
press must do. I started as editor of The Boston Globe in
the summer of 2001. One day, prior to my start date, a Globe columnist wrote about a shocking case. A priest had been accused of abusing as many
as 80 kids. A lawsuit alleged that the cardinal in Boston
at the time knew about the serial abuse, didn't do anything about it, and repeatedly reassign this priest from parish
to parish warning no one over decades. The archdiocese called the accusations baseless
and reckless. The Globe columnist wrote that the truth might
never be known. Internal documents that might reveal it had
been sealed by a judge. On my first day of work, we asked the question, ''How do we get at the truth because the public
deserve to know?" That question led us to challenge the judge's
secrecy order, and our journalists launched an investigation
of their own. In early 2002, we published what we had learned
through reporting and by prevailing in court. We published
the truth. The cardinal did know about the abuse by this
priest, yet he kept him in ministry, thus enabling further abuse. Dozens of clergy in the diocese had committed
similar offenses. The cardinal had covered it all up and a bigger
truth would emerge. Covering up such abuse had been practiced
in policy in the church for decades. Only now the powerful were being held to account. Late in 2002, after hundreds of stories on
this subject, I received a letter from a Father Thomas P.
Doyle. Father Doyle had struggled for years in vain to get the Church to confront the very issue
we were writing about. He expressed deep gratitude for our work. "It is momentous," he wrote, "and its good effects will reverberate for
decades." Father Doyle did not see journalists as the
enemy, he saw us as an ally when one was sorely needed. So did abuse survivors. I kept Father Doyle's letter on my desk, a daily reminder of what journalists must
do when we see evidence of wrongdoing. Harvard's commencement speaker two years ago, civil rights pioneer John Lewis once said
this, ''When you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, you have to speak up. You have to say something, you have to do something.'' We as journalists have the capacity along
with the constitutional right to say and do something. We also have the obligation, and we must have the will. So must you. Every one of you has a stake
in this idea of free expression. You want to be free to express your views. You should be free to hear the views of others, the same or different. You want to be free to watch any movie, to read any book, to listen to any lyrics. You should be free to say what you know is
true without threat of government reprisal, and you should acknowledge this if you value
these freedoms that come with democracy. Democracy cannot exist without a free and
independent press; it never has. Leaders who crave more power for themselves always move quickly to crush an independent
press. Next, they destroy free expression itself. Sadly, much of the world is on that worrisome
path, and efforts in this country to demonize, delegitimize, and dehumanize the press give license to other governments to do the same
and to do far worse. By the end of last year, a near-record 250 journalists worldwide were
sitting in prison. Thirty of them faced accusations of ''false news'', a charge virtually unheard
of only seven years earlier. Turkey has been trading places with China
as number 1 on the list of countries that jail the most
journalists. The Turkish government has shut down more
than 100 media outlets, and charged many journalists as terrorists. Independent media have been largely extinguished. China, of course, imposes some of the world's tightest censorship on what its
citizens can see and hear. In Hungary, the Prime Minister has waged war
on independent media. Harvard Nieman fellow, Andras Petho, who runs an investigative reporting center
there, notes that the Prime Minister's business allies
are, ''Taking over hundreds of outlets and turning them
into propaganda machines.'' Like other heads of state, Hungary's Prime Minister has exploited the
pandemic to grab more power, suppress inconvenient facts, and escalate
pressure on news outlets. A new law threatens up to five-year jail terms
against those accused of spreading supposedly false
information. Independent news outlets have questioned how
the crisis was managed. The fear now is that such accountability journalism
will lead to harassment and arrest as it has in other countries. In the Philippines, the courageous Maria Ressa, who founded the country's largest online-only
new site, has been battling government harassment for
years on other fronts. She now faces prosecution on bogus charges
of violating foreign ownership laws. By the end of last year, she had posted bail eight times. Her real violation, she brought scrutiny to
the president. In Myanmar, two Reuters journalists, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, were imprisoned for more than 500 days for
investigating the killing of 10 Rohingya Muslim men and
boys. Finally, a year ago, they were released. In 2018, an opinion writer for The Washington
Post, Jamal Khashoggi, walked into Saudi Arabia's consulate in Istanbul to get
documents he needed to marry. He was murdered there at the hands of a team
sent by a highest level Saudi officials. His offense, he had sharply criticized the
Saudi government. In Mexico, murders, vengeance against journalists
is common. Last year, at least five were killed, more than in any other country. I think also of the risks that American journalists
have taken to inform the public. Among them are colleagues I can never forget. One is Elizabeth Neuffer, 17 years ago this month, I stood before her friends at the Boston Globe
to report that she had died covering a war in
Iraq. Elizabeth was 46, an experienced foreign correspondent, a mentor to others, vivacious and brave. Her Iraqi driver was traveling at high speed
because of the risk of abductions, he lost control. Elizabeth died instantly, her translator too. Elizabeth had a record of fearlessness in investigating war crimes and human rights
abuses. Her goal, reveal the world as it is because
someone might then make things better. Another colleague was Anthony Shadid. In 2002, I visited Anthony, then a reporter for The Globe, after he was shot and wounded in Ramallah. Lying in a hospital in Jerusalem, it was clear that he had narrowly escaped
being paralyzed. Anthony recovered and went on to report from
Iraq, where he won two Pulitzer Prizes for the Washington
Post. From Egypt, where he was harassed by police,
from Libya, where he and three New York Times colleagues
were detained by pro-government militias and physically abused. He died in 2012 at age 43, while reporting in Syria, apparently of an asthma attack. Anthony told the stories of ordinary people. Without him, their voices would have gone
unheard. Now I think constantly of reporters, photographers,
and videographers, who risk their own well-being to be with heroic
frontline health workers. Frontline workers of every sort, to share their stories. Anthony, Elizabeth, and my present-day colleagues
sought to be eyewitnesses, to see the facts for themselves, to discover the truth and tell it. As a professional, we maintain there is such
a thing as fact, there is such a thing as truth. At Harvard, where the schools motto is veritas. Presumably, you do too. Truth we know, is not a matter of who wields
power or who speaks loudest. It has nothing to do with who benefits or
what is most popular. Ever since the Enlightenment, modern society has rejected the idea, that truth derives from any single authority
on earth. To determine what is factual and true, we rely on certain building blocks. Start with education, then there is expertise
and experience. Above all, we rely on evidence. We see that acutely now, when people's health can be jeopardized by
false claims, wishful thinking, and invented realities. The public safety requires the honest truth. Yet education, expertise, experience, and evidence are being devalued, dismissed,
and denied. The goal is clear, to undermine the very idea
of objective fact, all in pursuit of political game. Along with that is a systematic effort to disqualify traditional independent arbiters
of fact, the press tops the list of targets, but others populate the list too: courts,
historians, even scientists and medical professionals, subject matter experts of every type. So today, the governments leading scientists
find their motives questioned, their qualifications mocked, despite a lifetime
of dedication and achievement, that has made us all safer. In any democracy, we want vigorous debate
about our challenges and the correct policies. But what becomes of democracy if we cannot
agree on a common set of facts, if we can't agree on what even constitutes
a fact? Are we headed for extreme tribalism, believing only what our ideological soulmates
say? Or do we become so cynical that we think everyone
always lies for selfish reasons? Or so nihilistic that we conclude no one can
ever really know what is true or false? So no use trying to find out. Regardless, we risk entering dangerous territory. Hannah Arendt, in 1951, wrote of this in her first major work. The Origins of Totalitarianism. There she observed, "The possibility that
gigantic lies and monstrous falsehoods can eventually
be established as unquestioned facts." That the difference between truth and falsehood
may cease to be objective and may become a mere matter of
power and cleverness, of pressure and infinite repetition. One hundred years ago in 1920, a renowned journalist and leading thinker, Walter Lippmann, harbored similar worries. Lippmann, once a writer for the Harvard Crimson, warned of a society where people cease to respond to truth and respond simply to opinions; what somebody asserts, not what actually is. Lippmann wrote those words because of concerns
about the press itself. He saw our defects and hope we might fix them, thus improving how information got to the
public. Ours is a profession that still has many flaws. We make mistakes of fact and we make mistakes
of judgment. We are at times overly impressed with what
we know when much remains for us to learn. In making mistakes, we are like people in
every other profession, and we too must be held accountable. What frequently gets lost though, is the contribution of a free and independent
press to our communities and our country, and to the
truth. I think back to the aftermath of Hurricane
Andrew in 1992, when the Miami Herald showed how LAX zoning,
inspection, and building codes had contributed to the
massive destruction. Homes and lives are safer today, as a result. In 2016, the Charleston Gazette-Mail in West Virginia exposed how opioids have flooded
the state's depressed communities, contributing to the highest death rates in
the country. In 2005 after Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana's newspapers were indispensable
sources of reliable information for residents. The Washington Post in 2007, reveal the shameful neglect and mistreatment
of wounded veterans at Walter Reed Hospital. Corrective action was immediate. The Associated Press in 2015 documented a
slave trade behind our seafood supply. Two thousand slaves were freed as a result. The New York Times and The New Yorker in 2017, exposed sexual predators in elite boardrooms. A movement of accountability for abuses against
women took root. In New York Times in 1971, was the first to publish the Pentagon Papers, revealing a pattern of official deceit in
a war that killed more than 58,000 Americans and countless others. The Washington Post broke open the Watergate
scandal in 1972. That led ultimately to the President's resignation. Those news organizations searched for the
truth and told it, undeterred by pushback, or pressure, or vilification. Facing the truth can cause extreme discomfort. But history shows that we as a nation become
better for that reckoning. It is in the spirit of the preamble to our
Constitution to form a more perfect union. Toward that end, it is an act of patriotism.
W. E. B. Du Bois, the great scholar and African American
activist, and the first African American to graduate
with a PhD from Harvard, cautioned against the falsification of events
in relating our nation's history. In 1935, distressed at how deceitfully America's
reconstruction period was being taught, Du Bois assail the propaganda of the era. "Nations real and stagger on their way," he
wrote. "They make hideous mistakes, they commit frightful wrongs, they do great and beautiful things, and shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this so far as the truth
be ascertainable?" At this university, you answer that question
with your motto, veritas. You seek the truth, with scholarship, teaching, and dialogue, knowing that it really
matters. My profession shares with you that mission, be always arduous, often tortuous, and yet essential pursuit of truth. It is the demand that democracy makes upon
us. It is the work we must do. We will keep at it. You should too. None of us should ever stop. Thank you for listening. Thank you for honoring me. Good luck to you all and please stay well.
