Brian Lehrer Receives the 2025 Columbia Journalism Award, Delivers Keynote Address
Read his full remarks.
Each year, CJS faculty present the Columbia Journalism Award — the School’s highest honor — to a journalist whose career reflect the highest standards of excellence in the field. This year’s honoree is Brian Lehrer, longtime host of “The Brian Lehrer Show” on WNYC. He received the award at the School’s May 21 graduation ceremony.
His keynote address appears here in full:
--as delivered--
Thank you for the honor of the Columbia Journalism Award and for the privilege of addressing you all.
So congratulations graduates, I hope this was a great experience for you. I’m just sorry you had to be at Columbia for such a boring and uneventful school year.
I will give you a few pieces of advice like I guess people are supposed to do in commencement addresses. They’ll be about complexity, and humility even in extreme times, and about falling in love with local news.
But first I want to acknowledge something the New York Times columnist Frank Bruni wrote last month. The piece was called
"What Do You Tell a College Student Graduating Into This America?"
The article began by saying “It’s a hell of a thing to be surrounded by college seniors a month away from heading out into this new America, a land of malice and madness. My fellow professors and I are supposed to have nuggets of optimism at the ready, gauzy and gooey encomiums about infinite possibilities, the march of progress and that apocryphal arc, the one that bends toward justice. But all I’ve got is the metastasizing pit of fear in my own gut”, Frank Bruni wrote.
I’m guessing that many of you may relate to that pit of fear in his gut. Maybe others here disagree. We live in a polarized country.
But his column ended with the line “Hope isn’t an option. It’s an obligation.” “Hope isn’t an option. It’s an obligation.” You might think that’s a good commandment, or you might think THAT’s a gauzy encomium, but it’s definitely food for thought. Hope isn’t an option. It’s an obligation.”
Now: You’re not exactly the college seniors Frank Bruni was writing about - 22 year old undergraduates facing adulthood for the first time … for many of them, college may have just been “what comes next after high school.”
Many of YOU, however, are grownups who made an affirmative choice to go to grad school in an idealistic field that you knew was already under immense financial pressure before you applied. So most of you are probably the “hope isn’t an option, it’s an obligation” team to begin with.
But then during your school year, your chosen field came under ANOTHER kind of immense pressure: the pressure to RETREAT from its ideals and its most important function: to report truth, including criticism when warranted, about the richest and most powerful people in the world.
Whether it’s on what to call the Gulf of Whatever down there near Texas and Mexico, or whether to abandon fact-checking or moderation of hate speech, or restrict a formerly diverse Opinion section to free market viewpoints (you probably know who I’m talking about with those) or choose your example.
Sometimes the pressure is coming directly from the government, sometimes it’s news organizations doing what Timothy Snyder calls obeying in advance.Maybe most horrifyingly, a grad student like you, Rumeysa Ozturk at Tufts, i’m sure i don’t have to tell YOU about this, was detained for deportation expressly for writing an op-ed in a school newspaper. It took a COURT to say “there has been no evidence introduced by the government other than the op-ed. That literally is the case.”
So freedom of the press held in that case, the first amendment to the constitution held, but the fact that it had to come to that is chilling. In fact the judge used that word. He said rumeysa’s“continued detention potentially chills the speech of the millions and millions of individuals in this country who are not citizens."
I would add maybe of citizens as well.
I’m told this class includes students from about 40 countries. Some of you are from nations with nothing like our first amendment, our on-paper freedom of the press. Maybe you grew up under regimes that explicitly repress factual or critical coverage. If so, you probably have more relevant life experience than I do to advise your American classmates about how to remain on Team Hope.
Maybe, in this environment, your plan is to try to make a living in journalism without working for established news organizations at all, to be free from some of that pressure.
After all, you don’t have to own a radio or tv station or a printing press these days. You can start a podcast, a YouTube channel, a Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or Tik Tok or Substack or Bluesky or Reddit or Discord or Twitch feed - I could keep going - become an independent influencer with enough followers that you can decently monetize what you’re doing. But that’s difficult and extremely competitive too, and can get lost in the toxic online bad-information swamp.
And now there’s AI. Just this month, Politico had an article called
“How Gen Z Became the Most Gullible Generation.”
The subhead: “The almighty algorithm is fueling conspiracy theories among young people and ruining their ability to tell fact from fiction on the internet.”
Maybe that thesis is overstated, maybe not, but it says a lot that that’s the kind of question we’re asking today after 30 years of the World Wide Web. And Facebook just did fire their fact-checkers, deciding to leave that to the user community instead, thanks a lot.
I’ll say, though, for what it’s worth, that I used to be an internet utopian and have been reality-checked over time as I’ve seen how things have actually turned out. But I haven’t gone all the way to being an internet DYS-topian. I still think there’s value in the multitude of voices, not just three major networks plus moguls who own newspapers, like when I was a kid. But it is an epic struggle between Team Truth and Team BS.
So let me share three thoughts or principles that might be good for you and good for this crazy world at the same time:
- Fall in love with local news.
- Don’t fall out of love with complexity.
- And remember humility.
Fall in love with local news. Local news needs you.
I know you’ve been trained to cover all kinds of news. And living through these specific times, and in the context of the pressures on Columbia this year from multiple camps with national and international agendas that have been such a significant backdrop to your time here, and coming from the backgrounds and interests many of you probably had coming into this program from all over the world, many of your hearts and minds probably default to the national and global issues of the day, why wouldn’t they? If that feels like your mission in life, go for it. Make your mark there.
But arguably the biggest crisis in journalism - and the biggest needs for your passion and your skills - are in local news. It’s there that the business model has collapsed the most significantly and that reporting staffs have been the most decimated. The stats my station reports are that the US has lost a third of its print newspapers over the last 20 years and 80% of those that REMAIN are weeklies, not dailies. Almost all of those lost papers are local. Even in New York City there have been drastic cuts. One example: the Daily News, laid off half the paper’s editorial staff in 2018 citing the media BUSINESS environment. I could give you many others.
A silver lining is that new local sites have sprung up in this environment with DIGITAL business models, which are based more on subscriptions than in the past.
This increasing reliance on subscriptions may be a GOOD thing. Newspapers used to be almost free or sometimes ACTUALLY free - same with free television before cable and now the streaming services - Why were they free? Because the CONTENT wasn’t the PRODUCT. The NEWS wasn’t the product. YOU were the product. (I don’t mean you as journalists, I mean you as in ALL of us - as information consumers.) If they could gather a big audience, they could sell that number of YOU to their REAL customers, the advertisers who would pay them money based on the product: your attention.
We still live in an attention economy, obviously. But if readers, listeners and viewers are the ones paying more directly - providing more of the revenue than before - to subscribe to the newspapers or the Substack newsletters or the podcasts or public radio stations (hint hint) that you feel serve your information needs the best, you might be more the actual customer and not just the bait that you were before. That could be a good thing for incentivizing meaningful content rather than just whatever sells to a mass audience.
A thriving local news environment also CONNECTS people in vital ways.
If we’re disaggregating on NATIONAL news - and honestly the subscription model probably incentivizes THAT - but if we’re disaggregating into our subscriptions to our Fox News and Charlie Kirk worlds or our MSNBC and Hasan Piker worlds, or whoever you want to cite, how do we TALK to each other? How do we respect each other’s humanity across the lines of competing interests and values? On local issues, you kind of HAVE to read some of the same things because they’re much smaller media ecosystems. That creates more opportunity for principled compromise and community-building. And that can spread once it starts. So local news needs you. Fall in love with local news.
Number two: don’t fall out of love with complexity.
I put it that way because I think journalism is partly about complexity at its core. That’s not ALL it’s about but it’s ONE of the core things. It’s one of the biggest things that drew ME into the profession. All these competing views and interests while we all share a common humanity was always a compelling reality to me for whatever reason.
I have said many times on my show “ambivalence is welcome here.” Sometimes we have explicitly “open phones for ambivalence” segments, just for callers to say what issues in the news they feel conflicted about. That’s one way we acknowledge complexity.
But I also grapple with a complexity ABOUT complexity that’s especially relevant today.
It’s a tension between platforming multiple points of view and simply reporting what’s true. We want to respect difference - demographic differences and political differences - and we also want to avoid false equivalencies, like presenting someone’s lies or hate speech as simply their opinions. But sometimes that’s not as simple as it sounds, especially when it comes to whatever opinions or sensibilities you yourself might feel most strongly are just or right - on whatever side of whatever issue. Too much of THAT and people can feel dismissed or looked down on and lose trust in journalism. That in turn feeds polarization and openness to authoritarianism. So yes call out lies and hate and injustice, it’s probably our Job One right now in emergency times for the truth. But don’t fall out of love with complexity.
And…
Remember humility. A classic Bob Dylan line says “I was so much older then. I’m younger than that now.” That song was about DYLAN’s views of the world getting more complicated as he aged - he was all of 23 then, by the way. For me, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve developed a greater appreciation for how much I don’t KNOW. Part of that is a greater appreciation for my own privilege. And with that, I hope, has come an appreciation for my own blind spots. I grew up with a curiosity about the world outside of my own, which is what largely drew me into journalism. That was a GOOD thing, I think.
But I was never hungry as a kid, never racially discriminated against, I wasn’t an immigrant, never had reason to have a strong personal sense of grievance - I also never lived in a rural area or a very religious environment or a declining manufacturing town. All of that contributes to one’s emotional and intellectual relationship with the world.
So my curiosity about the world *without* has hopefully become more balanced by an appreciation of my own world *within*. With that has come hopefully a greater humility, and from that, a greater appreciation for the importance of representation in journalism. Representation in journalism, to me, is not a favor to anyone or part of a discriminatory formula. It’s a necessary ingredient to deliver the best information we can to the public.
So in conclusion, I started with Frank Bruni from last month on the idea that hope is an obligation. I’ll end with something that someone a little more well KNOWN than Frank Bruni said about JOURNALISM, just last week.
Pope Leo gave a speech to the 6,000 journalists who came to cover his installation mass. He called them witnesses— referring especially “to those who report on war even at the cost of their lives— and who defend dignity, justice and the right of people to be informed, because only informed individuals can make free choices”, he said. And he called on “each one of you to strive for a different kind of communication, one that does not seek consensus at all costs,” he said, but also a kind of communication that “does not use aggressive words, does not follow the culture of competition, and never separates the search for truth from the LOVE with which we must humbly seek it.” Pope Leo.
So fall in love with local news.
Don’t fall out of love with complexity.
And Remember humility…
Even in these times, your work in journalism can give other people reasons to join Team Hope.
Thank you again for the privilege of addressing you,
And graduates, good luck!