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After helming the MS NOW show that bore his name for six years, host Ali Velshi signed off from his weekend show for the last time on Sunday — ahead of his move to late nights.
Velshi teared up as he spoke for nearly 20 minutes about the importance of journalism in holding the powerful to account in this age of hostility toward the press.
He said:
The press is not the enemy of the people. The press is the people’s guarantee that they will know what is done in their name. Some of the institutions that taught this country what bearing witness looks like are right now under pressure from, or perhaps in bed with this administration. And that is not a coincidence.
CBS News gave us Edward R. Murrow, but his most important broadcast was not from the roofs of London. In 1954, when Senator Joseph McCarthy was destroying lives with accusations and innuendo, a time that feels familiar to us today, Murrow turned the cameras on McCarthy himself and let the man’s own words convict him. Quote, “We will not walk in fear, one of another,” quote.
CBS gave us Walter Cronkite. When the government kept assuring Americans the war in Vietnam was being won, Cronkite flew there. He saw the Tet Offensive for himself. He came home and he told the truth. The war was a stalemate.
That journalism by the most trusted man in America at the time contributed directly to the end of that war. That same CBS, the network of Murrow and Cronkite paid $16 million to settle a lawsuit, to settle a lawsuit from this president. That first amendment lawyers called frivolous.
The executive producer of 60 Minutes resigned on his way out, warning that the program’s independence was being compromised. His successor was fired for trying to preserve that independence.
PBS put the Senate Watergate hearings on gavel to gavel, re-broadcasting late into the night so that working people could watch them with their own eyes what their government had done. The network Nixon tried to strangle bore witness to his own undoing.
Today, our president signed an order to defund PBS and NPR. Congress eliminated more than $1 billion in their funding.
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting closed its doors after 58 years. A federal judge ruled the order unconstitutional. But by then the money was gone.
And now the administration wants career civil servants, the people who know what’s actually being done in your name with your money to sign non-disclosure agreements, strip away the legal language.”
Velshi added, “It’s pretty simple. They’re trying to make the witnesses afraid to speak while they prevent the press from reporting on what’s really going on. A network they can sue. A public broadcaster they can defund. A civil servant they can silence. Each one is someone who might otherwise tell you something that the powerful would prefer that you never knew. That’s why bearing witness has never mattered more than it does right now.”
The MS NOW host went on to talk about the impact of everyday citizens bearing witness by invoking the killings of George Floyd, Renee Good, and Alex Pretti.
“You don’t have to be a journalist to bear witness. On Memorial Day 2020, a teenager named Darnella Frazier stood on a sidewalk in Minneapolis and held up her phone. She had no press credential. She had only the courage to keep reporting and recording what she was seeing for nine minutes and 29 seconds, when everything in her cried out to look away. Darnella Frazier’s video changed the world. A police officer was convicted of the murder of George Floyd. She was a citizen doing the oldest thing that a citizen can do, holding power to account.
“Nearly six years later on those very same streets of Minneapolis, two other American citizens were bearing witness to what their government was doing to their neighbors. Renee Good was a 37-year-old poet and mother of three who had stopped her car to support her neighbors. Her wife, Becca, later said, “We had whistles. They had guns.” Alex Pretti was a 37-year-old nurse in the intensive care unit at the Minneapolis V.A. medical center, a man who spent his days keeping other Americans alive. Both were killed by federal immigration agents while bearing witness.”
Velshi choked up as he spoke of choosing to become an American citizen after being born in Kenya and growing up in Canada.
“I chose America. I still choose it because of what was built here. A nation founded not on blood or soil or a single faith, but on an idea and an argument and a set of rules generous enough on its best days to hold all of us. I choose it, I choose you, and I’m standing here in the studio as this program comes to an end, asking you who were born to it, who inherited it, or who, like me, chose it, to choose it again. Not because it’s perfect,” Velshi said, his voice cracking.
“America has never been perfect, but because democracy works when ordinary people decide that it will work, and because when it works, there has never been anything like it.”
Velshi will be taking over the 11 p.m. slot on MS NOW that was held by host Stephanie Ruhle, who will head back to the 9 a.m. hour.
Watch the clips above via MS NOW.
The post MS NOW’s Ali Velshi Tears Up in Emotional Sign Off Ahead of Move to 11pm — Delivers Clarion Call for Journalism: ‘Bearing Witness’ Never Mattered More first appeared on Mediaite.
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