Remembering Who We Are: A Treasury of Conservative Commencement Addresses

by Zev Chafets

Overview

The perfect gift for graduates – thirty commencement addresses about liberty, patriotism, tradition, and other conservative themes that are rarely heard on campus.

The college graduation speech has become another casualty of our age of political correctness. Historically, universities are supposed to be strongholds of tolerance, where any idea can be discussed--and tested rigorously to see if it has merit. Students should benefit from free expression and diversity of opinions, about current events and eternal questions alike.

But today, certain positions are considered too controversial for the fragile ears of liberal students, and for administrators who usually surrender to their demands. It’s no longer unusual when a U.S. Senator like Ted Cruz, a pioneering neurosurgeon like Ben Carson, a Supreme Court Justice like Antonin Scalia, or a human rights advocate like Ayaan Hirsi Ali faces protests, disrespectful shouting, or petitions to have his or her invitation revoked.

Fortunately, Remembering Who We Are collects the commencement wisdom of a wide range of thinkers who are willing to challenge the liberal consensus on campus. Editor Zev Chafets has brought together a diverse group of speakers from many walks of life, from playwright David Mamet to Ambassador Ryan Crocker, from Governor Bobby Jindal to humorist PJ O’Rourke. For example, you’ll find in these pages:

   •  “Do Your Best to Be Your Best” by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas
   •  “Gridlock, An American Achievement” by columnist George F. Will
   •  “We Have Something Wonderful” by novelist Marilynne Robinson
   •   “The Art of the Entrepreneur” by business leader Mort Zuckerman
   •   “Restore and Remake Our Country” by historian Victor Davis Hanson

Too many students now enter the real world after being taught that patriotism is misguided, that religious faith is for the foolish, and that free enterprise is unfair. The eloquent speeches in this collection will help them grasp the truth – that America is flawed but fundamentally good; that faith can have intellectual depth; that capitalism is the world’s greatest force for fighting poverty; and much more.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780698406278
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	04/21/2015
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	646 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Zev Chafets is the author of fourteen books of fiction, media criticism, and social and political commentary. He has been a frequent contributor to the New York Times Magazine and a former columnist for the New York Daily News.

Read an Excerpt

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Every spring, thousands of American higher learning institutions and tens of thousands of high schools send their graduates off with a commencement ceremony. A centerpiece of the event, as old as American education itself, is the commencement speech. At their best, these speeches furnish students with wise and inspiring advice for the future. The choice of speaker is also part of the message; it signals the sort of person of whom the university, college, or high school approves.

Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York and the tenth richest person in the country, was Harvard University’s choice in 2014. The selection was not entirely disinterested. Bloomberg, a Harvard MBA, is perhaps the largest single educational philanthropist in the country. In the past he had donated $350 million to Harvard (and more than a billion to his undergraduate alma mater, Johns Hopkins). Who knew what flights of largesse might be inspired by an invitation to deliver Harvard’s 363rd commencement speech?

But just being rich isn’t sufficient for a commencement honor by Harvard or other elite, liberal universities. You must also be politically and culturally simpatico. Bloomberg seemed perfect. A political independent, he supported Barack Obama in 2012, as did virtually everyone at Harvard. He is a leader in progressive social issues such as gun control, immigration reform, climate change, abortion rights, and gay marriage.

The Harvard committee that chose Bloomberg had every reason to expect a warm, congratulatory address to the graduates. But commencement had a different meaning for Bloomberg. He took it as an occasion to accuse the nation’s most liberal universities, including his host, of betraying their deepest notional value: tolerance.

“There is an idea floating around college campuses—including here at Harvard—that scholars should be funded only if their work conforms to a particular view of justice,” he said. “There’s a word for that idea: censorship. And it is just a modern-day form of McCarthyism.” Bloomberg cited data from the Federal Election Commission showing that 96 percent of Ivy League faculty and administrators who gave money to a presidential candidate in 2012 donated to Barack Obama.

“There was more disagreement than that among the members of the old Soviet Politburo,” he said, adding that “a university cannot be great if its faculty is politically homogenous.”

As exhibit A of this campus intolerance, Bloomberg offered the current commencement season. Just a few weeks earlier, Brandeis University had disinvited human rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali from delivering a graduation speech. A Somali Muslim who has lived much of her adult life under death threats because of her critique of Islam’s treatment of women and gays, Hirsi Ali seemed a perfect speaker for the liberal university—until a cadre of Muslim activists and radical faculty denounced her. Instead of supporting Hirsi Ali’s right to speak, the president of Brandeis caved to the pressure and told her she wouldn’t be welcome at commencement due to “certain of her past statements” that were, in his view, inconsistent with the university’s “core values.” He didn’t elaborate on what those values were, but they clearly didn’t include intellectual diversity. Compounding the insult, he had the audacity to invite Hirsi Ali to visit the school someday for a discussion “in the spirit of free expression that has defined Brandeis University through its history.” Presumably, such a discussion would be vetted first by the Muslim students and radical professors whose protests had made Hirsi Ali persona non grata.

Former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice was invited to give the commencement speech at Rutgers University that spring. Rice, like Hirsi Ali, is a distinguished woman of color who overcame childhood discrimination and bigotry to rise to international prominence.

As Secretary Rice prepared her remarks, campus activists mobilized to keep her off the podium. The leaders of Rutgers’s Muslim organizations sent a letter to the school’s president, accusing Rice of “grave human rights violations,” and denounced her publicly as a “war criminal.” Rice had helped lead American wars against Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and the regime of Saddam Hussein. Muslims had died in these wars. This, the protesters asserted, gave them the right to veto Rice’s appearance (a precedent, given America’s generational struggle against Islamic fundamentalism, that would disqualify senior members of the Obama team and every foreseeable administration). The students also staged demonstrations, occupying a campus building and frightening the school’s administration. Rutgers was obviously relieved when Rice, disinclined to face such hostility, offered to cancel. The school’s administration made no attempt to dissuade her.

A trend seemed to be developing. Students at Haverford College, an elite Quaker school near Philadelphia, forced the withdrawal of scheduled commencement speaker Robert Birgeneau, former chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley. His crime was calling the cops when Occupy demonstrators set up tents on campus. At Smith College, an elite Massachusetts women’s school, a petition was circulated against Christine Lagarde’s appearance at commencement. Lagarde, the first female managing director of the International Monetary Fund, was accused of heading an organization that promoted “imperialist and patriarchal systems that oppress and abuse women worldwide,” and of failing to stand “in unity with equality for all women regardless of race, ethnicity or class.” Five hundred students and faculty signed the petition, a very considerable number on a campus of three thousand. Lagarde did the math and bowed out. She was replaced by Ruth Simmons, former president of Smith College and an Obama appointee to the President’s Commission on White House Fellowships.

Bloomberg pointed to these and other recent silencings, such as those of former undersecretary of state Robert Zoellick at Swarthmore and Dr. Benjamin Carson at Johns Hopkins. “In each case liberals silenced a voice—and denied an honorary degree—to individuals they deemed politically objectionable,” he said. It was especially outrageous, he added, because these incidents of censorship of dissenting views had taken place at elite schools in the Northeast, “a bastion of self-professed liberal tolerance.”

The silencing of invited commencement speakers made news because it was so blatant. But, in fact, commencement speakers at elite universities are almost always right-thinking liberals. In the wake of the recent epidemic of disinvitation, Harry Enten of the Web site FiveThirtyEight took a look at the roster of commencement speakers in the last two years at the nation’s top thirty universities and top thirty liberal arts colleges, as ranked by U.S. News & World Report. Enten found twenty-five current or past Democratic officeholders and zero for Republicans. (There were two former Republican officeholders, Bloomberg and Chuck Hagel, Obama’s former secretary of defense.)

Ostensibly nonpolitical speakers but indubitably liberal cultural figures were also heard on commencement day at elite institutions. They included thought leaders such as New Yorker editor and Obama biographer David Remnick, Oprah Winfrey, authors Toni Morrison, Walter Isaacson, and Rita Dove, tennis star and feminist icon Billie Jean King, media mogul Arianna Huffington, NPR host Terry Gross, ex–New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson, and singer-activist John Legend. The only obvious political or cultural conservative in the past two years was Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who spoke at Notre Dame. The rest of the orators were celebrities, scientists, scholars, and philanthropists. They weren’t ideologically identifiable, but it is a fair guess that none had committed crimes against bien-pensant doctrine. We would have certainly heard.

It would be hard to argue that irreparable harm has been done to the graduates exposed to a doctrinal orthodoxy on commencement day. They are, after all, finished products of a liberal education, marinated for four years in academic and social sauce prepared from politically correct ingredients. Those who came to campus as liberals are very likely leaving the same way. Some who arrived as conservatives have seen the light. It is unlikely that the graduates will be lastingly edified by the parting thoughts of Arianna Huffington, John Kerry, or Billie Jean King.

What these elite students lose—throughout their education and, most visibly, on graduation day—is an opportunity to hear speakers who will challenge the conventional wisdom and encourage them to consider the possibility that all the smart, cool, talented, and virtuous role models in the country happen to be mirror images of themselves. This reinforces the self-gratifying notion that the leadership class is blessed with a monopoly on wisdom and talent. This delusion has had lamentable repercussions since the Kennedy administration’s “best and brightest” led the country into Vietnam, and it is alive and on display in the persistent pratfalls of the Obama administration.

There is a wide spectrum of conservative thinking in this collection. My purpose is not to develop a right-wing orthodoxy, but precisely to show the intellectual and cultural nuance on that side of the spectrum. And so you find Ben Carson who opposes gay marriage and Ted Olson who advocated for it in California; Bobby Jindal, a devout evangelical, and George Will, a self-described “amiable, low voltage atheist.” There are blue state Republicans and red; libertarians and Tea Partiers; fiscal conservatives and big spenders.

Some of the contributors would not call themselves conservatives. But their views—on American exceptionalism, religious traditionalism, party affiliation, foreign affairs, or constitutional government—place them in that camp. They would not all agree with one another on any particular issue. Nor do I. I have included even those with whom I disagree in this anthology for the same reason that elite schools need to include conservatives on their commencement day platforms: because it is literally impossible to maintain an open society without hearing and understanding the other side.

Most of the speeches (or columns, in some cases) in this volume are not explicitly political or programmatic. They were meant to enlighten and inspire. It is my hope that gathering them in a single volume will enlighten liberals by exposing them to new and unconventional thoughts; and will inspire conservatives—especially young conservatives—with the realization that there are plenty of brilliant, talented, and eminent men and women who share their views and who speak to, and for, them.

—Zev Chafets

DON’T WAVER IN TELLING THE TRUTH

ROGER AILES

University of North Carolina School of Journalism
and Mass Communication

CLASS OF 2012

ROGER AILES is the chairman and chief executive of FOX News. He has also served as a consultant for Presidents Nixon, Reagan, and George H. W. Bush. Before politics, he was the executive producer of The Mike Douglas Show.

The Mike Douglas Show is one of the early talk shows, and you used to book anybody who was in town. So, you could have Dr. Edward Teller and wrestling bears on the same show, didn’t matter because they were both there and you had to put somebody on. And one day a member of my staff ran up and said, “Oh, my God.” I said what’s the problem? They said, “We’ve got Richard Nixon coming in the front door,” Vice President Nixon, this was 1967, and we have Little Egypt, the belly dancer, in the green room with a boa constrictor.

So, I said, “Look, I don’t want to scare him, and I sure as hell don’t want to scare that snake. So look, put one of them in my office.” So, when I got back to my office, there was Nixon. I got into a bit of a discussion with him about television and losing elections, and somehow he had somebody call me in a couple of days and so I worked in that campaign, not in politics. I was—now, if you read The New York Times, I was in charge of politics and the Southern strategy. I was actually in charge of key lights and backlights and cameras. But at any rate, I’ve always wondered if they had put Little Egypt in my office, would I have had more fun in my career? It’s worth considering.

I have a twelve-year-old son now, so I’m very interested in education. We went through the last twenty-five years where they told all the kids they have to all get a trophy. Did you guys go through that? Anyway, there’s a whole generation of people who think—or are still waiting for their trophy because they think they won something.

Recently, even at the grade-school level, they’re going back to making people actually earn grades. And I’m sure here, you have to earn your grades. So, I think that’s gone away, but I do think self-confidence and self-esteem in students is critically important.

One day I was in my son’s class, he was about seven, and it was an art class and the teacher was walking all around the room seeing what they were doing. And one little guy was just drawing for all he was worth, and the teacher said, “What are you doing, Bennett?”

He said, “I’m drawing God.”

Teacher said, “Well, nobody knows what God looks like.”

And he said, “They will in a minute.”

I think having self-esteem is really important, but actually being able to do the work is even more important.

First, I want to put a disclaimer here. Anything I say tonight is my fault; I don’t speak for News Corporation, I’m not speaking for FOX News, I’m not speaking for Rupert Murdoch. I take full and complete responsibility because nobody else wants it, frankly.

I understand most of you are journalism students. Well, I think you ought to change your major because you’re probably all interested in politics and you probably are going into journalism because you think you can affect politics. Well, maybe you can, maybe you can’t. But if you’re going in to affect it, you have to think about that, because you might want to go to political science where you can join a campaign, help elect who you want, push the issues you believe in. I’m uniquely qualified to talk about that because I did work in politics, made a conscious effort to quit, and did quit, walked away twenty years ago, and now, I run a journalism organization. And people say, “Well, you have no journalism degree, how dare you run a journalism organization? What are your qualifications?”

And as I said to The New York Times, I only have two. One, I didn’t go to Columbia Journalism School, and two, I never wanted to go to a party in this town anyway, so there’s nobody’s rear end I have to kiss. If you’re going to run a journalism organization, you better be independent. Now, I do guest lectures at many colleges or universities.

I teach occasionally at West Point, or to West Point cadets, so I spend some time, a lot of time, with students. I often ask people why they want to go into journalism. They tell me some version of it’s because they want to change the world or save the world. I usually ask them what makes them think the world wants to be changed in the way they want to change it, which stumps them.

The younger journalism students tend to be more progressive. They believe we need to spend more money, taxpayer money, on green energy. Maybe we do, maybe we don’t. But that’s not their job. The job is to report about green energy, the good, the bad, and the ugly. Up in Ridgewood, New Jersey, they just put solar panels on every telephone pole. Why they want to warm these telephone poles, I don’t know. Nobody can figure out. So, we sent a film crew out to interview some of the people, and we said, “Did your energy costs go down?”

They said, “No, they actually went up a little.”

And we said, “Well, why did they do this, because they’re really ugly?”

And they said, we think it was to count the people who put them on there as green jobs, but don’t worry, there’s a lot of snow and ice in New Jersey, some will fall and they’ll start killing people at bus stops and then they’ll come out and take them down.

One-point-five or less percent of our energy today comes from alternative energy. Should we invest? Yes. Should we pretend it’s going to solve our problems in the next ten or fifteen years? No. One-point-five percent.

So, that’s a way to report that, but you have to report the real numbers and the real facts. If your point of going into journalism is to show how much you care, or how sensitive you are, or to affect the outcome of your personal desires, it’s the wrong profession for you. If you want to bring world peace or save starving children, both very noble goals, the way to affect that as a journalist is to investigate why the United Nations is so ineffective at doing either of those, even though they get 22 percent of their budget from the American taxpayers. They seem to have trouble bringing peace, and they seem to have trouble feeding people. We need to question that.

I always tell my journalists, if there’s something in your piece that you don’t agree with, good. If there’s nothing in your piece you don’t agree with, you’re probably doing a biased job. A nineteenth-century etiquette book said it’s improper to kick a newspaperman down the stairs simply because he has chosen to make his living in a disagreeable manner. General Grant wanted all journalists shot as spies. Critics say most injuries to journalists occur by them falling off their egos onto their IQs. I think it’s a little rough because many journalists are fine, intelligent people. Hundreds are locked up or killed every year. I’ve had journalists kidnapped, beaten, it’s tough out there. Many are smart, brave, competitive, and believe me, there are easier ways to make a living.

I want to talk a little bit about your course for the future. This is going to set the tone for the rest of your life. I’m currently working on a book about my life, and while I’d like to say to you that it was well planned, my mentor suggested the title be called “Fluke.” Not very flattering, but true. As opportunities presented themselves, I figured out how to get it done and I move on. I asked my mentor, “How did I get to be head of a network? How did this happen?”

And he said, “I’ve known you since you were twenty-two years old,” and he said, “I heard the same words over and over and over.” I’m going to tell you this because this will make a difference in how you succeed. He said, “Even people who don’t like you, Ailes,” and there were plenty, he said, “I heard the words ‘Get Ailes. Get him because he has ideas. He’ll work until everybody else drops. He’ll never quit. He’ll come up with inventive ideas. And he won’t suck the air out of the room while he’s doing it.’”

If you’re a person and they put your name next to “get,” then the chances are, you’re going to have a great career.

There are going to be tough times. Thomas More once said, “You must not abandon the ship in a storm because you cannot control the winds.” The winds will blow. The change will come. The most important thing for you to learn is you must adapt to the change. Journalism is changing—you change every day. You’re on this, you’re on that, you’ve got input, you’ve got to make a decision, you do this, that. If you’re not a person who can change, this is also not the profession for you.

Now, you’re going to hear your country criticized. As a journalist, you must question your country. But you must also question the criticism of the country, which is rarely done. We live in a country where we believe individuals are innocent until proven guilty, but often don’t give that same time to our country. So, we shouldn’t get up every morning saying, “What did our country do wrong?” We should question the country and question the questioning of the country because after 235 years, it’s small, it’s young, it needs protection. Who better to protect it than the ones who actually enjoy the freedoms provided by this country?

Of course, America can be improved. Of course, we make terrible mistakes from time to time. But in the end, the United States has fed more and freed more people than all of the other countries put together. You must take that into account.

We have a historic, heroic history. Don’t let people attack your traditional values if you have them, or your institutions that have been a beacon of light. American exceptionalism does exist because we believe in freedom. And you can tell this is a great country because everybody’s trying to get in and nobody’s trying to get out.

I just saw a story a few weeks ago on our air and I said, “Oh, this sounds like a really terrible country. Boy, this is awful.” So, I called our desk in the newsroom and I said, “Have you got any pictures of the lines?”

And he said, “What lines?”

I said, “Well, God, if I lived in a country like that, they must be lined up to get out of here.”

He said, “Nobody’s trying to get out.”

I said, “My point exactly. Nobody’s trying to get out.”

Another point. Don’t let people talk you out of trying to succeed or make you feel guilty about making money. We have a responsibility to assist the poor, not just directly through charity, although that is a big responsibility, but by creating jobs and opportunities for them. If you have the ability and the spirit and you can create a business, that’s a major contribution to society and a major contribution to poor people. Every major journalism company I know is run by a rich guy, and I like those guys. Every time I needed a job, I had to go to a rich guy. I love the poor guy; he had no job. I got a job. I tried to help the poor, okay? But I’m not going to let anybody divide me against the people who actually gave me the jobs. That does not seem very productive.

Don’t be afraid of challenges. Much of your success will come from taking difficult situations head-on. When I started the FOX News Channel, we had six months. We had no studios, no talent, no programming, no news gathering, no shows, no staff, no control rooms, nothing. I was up against Time Warner; they had a seventeen-year head start with CNN. I had to take on Microsoft and GE that owned NBC. They had unlimited resources. They were launching MSNBC in July of ’96. I said, “I’ve got to launch this year against them because if they get too far ahead, we’ll never have room for three channels.” So, I launched it in six months.

We passed both of those networks and for ten straight years, we’ve not lost a single day to either one of them. We just completed fifty-eight consecutive quarters of operating profit growth. In fiscal 2012, coming up here in June, we’ll probably do $1 billion in profit. The asset value is somewhere between $12 and $13 billion from an empty room in fifteen years.

We’ve been 123 months through March 12, forty-one quarters of number-one position in cable news, ten and a quarter years. We have six shows that have maintained the number-one position for over one hundred consecutive months. The top ten out of thirteen shows are on the FOX News Channel. In prime time, CNN is number thirty-one, MSNBC is number twenty-three, and FOX News is number four. In total day, we’re number five, but MSNBC is number twenty-six and CNN is number thirty-two.

Why is this important? And I’m not bragging. I got one talent. I pick good people. So, I have a staff that really puts it together, makes it work. That’s my talent. Picking good people. Although, as some people point out, most of them are blond. It’s not true. I asked my assistant that once because she said, “You know, you’ve been accused of hiring blondes. Your wife’s blond. You like blondes.”

I said, “Do I hire a lot of blondes?”

She said, “You get most of your on-air talent from tape and 95 percent of the tapes that come in here are blondes because when women get into television, they dye their hair blond.”

So, I said, “Oh, that’s why we have so many blondes.” So, anyway. It’s not my fault.

But I tell you about these ratings because ratings bring in money, and that’s how you get a paycheck. Oh, my God, a paycheck. You mean we’re not doing this for some higher reason? Yes, you are doing it for a higher reason. But without the paycheck, you’re not doing it at all. So, we’ve been able to put food on the table for our employees and we are the only news network that has not had any layoffs because of economic reasons. Why? Because we win. So, winning’s not bad, but everybody doesn’t get a trophy.

Your generation will determine whether the American way of life can continue. Don’t waver in telling the truth and don’t fight for a tie. There’s a disadvantage to winning. People will criticize you. They will particularly hate you if you beat them. Many of them are just pathetic people who think every kid should get the trophy. Some of them are actually untalented, vicious people who won’t be able to stand the fact that you’re more talented or work harder than they do and make more money. So, they’ll say terrible things about you. You must be able to withstand that.

They will ascribe motives to you that they don’t have and they will tell people what you think when they actually have no idea. A few practical pointers in business. The best advice I ever heard was from an old management consultant who died at age ninety-six, Peter Drucker, who said—spent his entire career writing about business and it came down to two words: the difference between activity and results. We’re going to have a meeting, we care, we’ll postpone, let’s have a dialogue about it, please send me a memo, is all activity. When a problem is solved, something is accomplished, that’s a result. Don’t ever confuse the two.

I have a friend—well, he’s sort of an alcoholic, he always knows when it’s five o’clock for some reason, but he says, “I have all the money I’m ever going to need as long as I die by four o’clock tomorrow.” He’s not worried about money. That isn’t how he defines success. You have to define it for yourself. When I was a kid, I thought, “Gee, if I could ever make $20,000, I’d be rich.” Now that’s well below the poverty line. So, they keep moving the goalpost on you anyway. Don’t focus on that. The money will come if you do the right thing and you use your talent well. Secret to jobs is find something you like to do and get somebody to pay you to do it. Then, you’re doing what you like and you have the income you need.

I’m not a big fan of government confiscating more than a third of what we make. I think a third’s fair. There’s a lot of stuff to be paid for. I’m not just a big fan of that. I do believe greatly in giving to charity voluntarily. When I was young, I thought, “I’m never going to be happy until I’m successful,” and it took me a long time to figure out I was never going to be successful until I was happy. And so, I turned it around, and I’m having a great time with my kid and I’m happy.

When I was a young man, I talked to someone who was faced with triumph and disaster. His name was Martin Luther King. I was doing The Mike Douglas Show and I had three encounters, I would say, with him. And in two of those, he was sent to my office to wait to go on the air and so I had a chance to sit and chat with him. He was a very brave man because he knew that he could die. He was under tremendous pressure to lead a violent revolution and he refused to do it. He said we’d change the country peacefully. He lost his life doing it. But, he’s gone down in history as a great man.

Always respect the people who want peace and will risk their own life to get it. If you watch FOX, you know we do a lot with the military because we have a lot of regard for the people who put their lives on the line. They are warriors who don’t want war. It’s actually not in their best interest or their family’s to have war. But they are willing to die for peace if it comes to that. And so, we need to respect that group. That’s one of the reasons I go up to West Point, work with them on the media and the military. They’ve chosen a profession to protect the peace. They defend the Constitution, which was written to protect us from government. That’s why it was written. Everybody who wrote it came from countries where the government got a little too oppressive. There’s only one job protected in the Constitution, journalists. They actually decided, “We’re not going to take cake decorators or doctors, we’re going to protect journalists because they are in place to protect us from an oppressive government, from things we don’t need or want, from staying in power too long so they can have power.”

People who came to this country came from places where the government showed up in the dark of night and took away their family members, took away their possessions, and took away their dignity. The Constitution was written to protect our freedoms: speech, press, freedom to openly practice our religion without the government telling us where or when we can do it. There’s nothing in there that says you can’t pray in an end zone or a Dairy Queen. It says you really can’t interfere with people’s right to express their religion at all.

The press was set up to keep an eye on this government. Thomas Jefferson said it, if it were left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I’d not hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter. So, when the press becomes subservient to the government or falls in love with politicians or neglects their responsibility, journalism has to act as a watchdog, not a lapdog, not an attack dog, but as a watchdog.

While freedom of the press is a central pillar of democracy, freedom of the press did not invent democracy. Democracy is the structure, the support, the cradle for freedom of the press. So, democracy depends on freedom of the press. But freedom depends on fairness in the press. There has to be more than one point of view.

When I started FOX News in ’96, I wrote the following mission statement. I wrote it the morning we launched.

“FOX News is committed to providing viewers with more factual information and a balanced and fair presentation. FOX believes viewers should make their own judgment on important issues based on unbiased coverage. Our motto is we report, you decide. Our job is to give the American people information they can use to lead their lives more effectively. And our job is to tell them the truth wherever the truth falls.”

Now, I’ll tell you something that will surprise you. In fifteen years, we have never taken a story down because we got it wrong. You cannot say that about CBS. You cannot say that about CNN. You cannot say that about The New York Times, and the mainstream media won’t report it, but that is the fact. We’ve lived with this bull’s-eye on us for fifteen years and our journalism actually is very good. Now, when you watch it, some people say it’s too conservative. So, they look at it, they don’t understand. We have journalism and you have talk shows, and all cable news—CNN has talk shows, MSNBC has talk shows, Rachel Maddow has a talk show, Sean Hannity has a talk show. That’s fine. That’s not the actual journalism. Shep Smith, the wheel that runs during the day, the news stories that break, that’s the hard journalism. And somebody said to me, “Well, don’t you work for that kind of conservative FOX News Channel?”

And I said, “Let me ask you a question. Are you comfortable with CNN?”

They said, “Yes.”

I said, “What about MSNBC?”

“Oh, they’re great.”

“ABC, NBC, CBS okay?”

“Yep, fine.”

“PBS? NPR, great?”

“Yep. Great.”

“New York Times, Washington Post, L.A. Times fine?”

“Great.”

So, I said what you’re really telling me is that there’s a little cable channel over here that’s driving you nuts because it won’t line up with your worldview. Don’t you think it’s valuable to have at least one little voice in the wilderness that might differ? I said, “Remember, the last time all of us got lined up together, they lined it by two guys. Hitler and Stalin.”

So, if there’s an alternative point of view, don’t wet your pants. Suck it up and say, “Hey, there’s room for everybody.”