ABC’s Jonathan Karl talks in Tucson about ‘truth telling’

“And the reason that I knew what was happening, as I sat in my dorm room in Poughkeepsie, New York, was because there were American journalists there, to bear witness.”

But, “if you were graduating from college today in Shanghai or Guangzhou or Beijing, you wouldn’t know a damn thing about (it),” he said. “The Chinese government has erased the memory, or tried to erase the memory, of what happened in Tiananmen Square.”

“I set out to be a journalist because I wanted to be there watching history unfolding. I wanted to be a truth teller, of the good, the inspiring, the tragic.” 

As his career took him to Washington, D.C., Karl said, “I felt both humbled and proud to live in a country where I could ask tough questions of the most powerful people on the planet, without fear of retribution.
A country with a freedom” the Chinese students did not have. “A country where the First Amendment of the Constitution guarantees freedom of speech, freedom of the press, a country where a president can’t, or shouldn’t be able to, banish a reporter, or a news organization, simply because he doesn’t like a question that was asked, or the editorial policy.”

Here, Karl’s audience broke into applause for his references evoking current news stories. The clapping would resume a minute later, after he said he had been proud to work in a country where “even the military leadership welcomes the scrutiny of a free press, and where nobody can take away a press pass because the journalist refuses to sign a pledge that makes it impossible to do journalism,” where “the secretary of defense doesn’t ban photographers because his staff finds the photos unflattering.”

Karl told of being at the U.S. Capitol when it was evacuated on Sept. 11, 2001, and learning later that “a group of heroes broke into the cockpit (on Flight 93) and brought down a plane that was likely headed to the Capitol dome above me. Saving countless lives” — including Karl’s — “as they ended their own.”