Christiane Amanpour
Yes, you are running businesses, and yes, we understand and accept that, but surely there must be a level beyond which profit from news is simply indecent.
Why have we given George W. Bush such an easy ride when-until now, that is-when actually his qualifications are questionable?
What we do and say and show really matters.
What Americans don't care much about is the piffle we put on TV these days, what they don't care about is boring, irrelevant, badly told stories, and what they really hate is the presumption that they're too stupid to know the difference.
We, I believe, are in the fight of our lives to save this profession which we love. I believe we can do it, and I believe we can win this battle.
We were thrilled and we were privileged to be part of a revolution, because make no mistake about it, Ted Turner changed the world with CNN.
We thrived as I said on the pioneer spirit of CNN. We adored being the little network that could.
We manage the fear, I manage the fear, but it certainly takes its toll, the strain does.
We in the press, by our power, can actually undermine leadership.
We hear foreign accents on CNN. It's crazy, it's wild, who knows, maybe they'll take you because you certainly don't fit in, in the American spectrum of news.
We do it because we're committed, because we're believers.
U.S. soldiers, with whom I now have more than a passing acquaintance, joke that they track my movements in order to know where they will be deployed next.
They take journalism really seriously because they know the force that it is and can be.
That was seven years ago. I have been married two years and I have a five-month-old son now.
Sadly, marriage and motherhood have coincided with the demise of journalism as I knew it and I dreamt that it would always be.
Our industry has invested so much money in technology that perhaps it's time to invest in talent, in people.
No matter what the hocus-pocus focus groups tell you, time has proven that all the gimmicks and all the cheap journalism can only carry us so far.
Mostly, as I said, a desire to do a bit of good, and the quaint notion that this is what we signed up for, this is the business that we have chosen.
More times than I care to remember I have sympathized with too many of them assigned like myself, to some of the world's royal bad places.
Little did we know then that CNN would become the big league.