Christiane Amanpour
It occurred to me that I have spent almost every working day of the past ten years living in a state of repressed fear.
It is true the Cold War has ended and that our big bosses think that relieves them of the obligation to cover the world.
Indeed in the full flush of journalistic passion and conviction I once told an interviewer that of course I would never get married. And I most definitely would never have children.
In Iran the whole reform and democracy movement has been based on the emerging free press.
In emerging democracies like Russia, in authoritarian states like Iran or even Yugoslavia, journalists play a vital role in civil society. In fact, they form the very basis of those new democracies and civil societies.
In Bosnia, little children shot in the head by a guy who thinks it's okay to aim his gun at a child.
If you have a child, I said, you have a responsibility at least to stay alive.
If we have no respect for our viewers, then how can we have any respect for ourselves and what we do?
I'm not an American but I have always had the outsiders' respect for the American people and the American way.
I was showing a man and telling his story and explaining how ill he was, and it was a live camera and all of a sudden I realized that he was dying.
I was really just the tea boy to begin with, or the equivalent thereof, but I quickly announced, innocently but very ambitiously, that I wanted to be, I was going to be, a foreign correspondent.
I was planning, I told everybody, to take him on the road with me. At the very least I fully expected to keep up my hectic pace, and my passion as a war correspondent.
I still have many years left in me, if I still have a job, but that's what I'll tell my son when he's old enough to torture me with painful questions.
I have spent the past ten years in just about every war zone there was.
I have made my living bearing witness to some of the most horrific events of the end of our century, at the end of the 20th century.
I have lost many friends and I've seen many, many more wounded, by snipers, by mortar shells, by landmines and by the crazed Kalashnikov-wielding druggies at checkpoints.
I have always thought it morally unacceptable to kill stories, not to run stories, that people have risked their lives to get.
I am personally thrilled though by the changes at CNN, which no doubt you have all read about. because it means we are responding to the times.
I am no longer sure that when I go out there and do my job it'll even see the light of air, if the experience of my network colleagues is anything to go by.
Here in the United States, our profession is much maligned, people simply don't trust or like journalists anymore and that's sad.