Transcript of Gloria Steinem's Honor Medal Address from Feb. 10, 2005

Gloria Steinem, a writer and an activist, was awarded a 2004 Missouri Honor Medal for Distinguished Service in Journalism in a special ceremony Thursday, Feb. 10, at the Missouri Theatre. Following is a transcript of Ms. Steinem's address.

Gloria Steinem

I have been looking forward to this ever since I got Dean Mills' letter and I was really just thinking of the award itself and how incredibly meaningful it is coming from this great, great journalism school and also coming to someone who has been involved in the social justice movement and therefore has sometimes been writing about things that are not otherwise considered to be serious enough to be reported. I was thinking about those things but I also now realize listening to my friends here tell these stories what an important community and chosen family truly journalism is when you are writing about what you care about.

Dean Mills Convergence Journalism Dean Jan Colbert Magazine Journalism Chair Mary Kay Blakely Magazine Journalism Faculty

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Amy is just possibly the only person I know who can do the big theory and detail at the same time. And both fast and accurate. She is truly, truly, truly amazing and I'm so..."blessed" is an overworked word...that makes me sound as though I've been born again. I'm not born again, once was enough. But, I'm truly blessed to have her in my life and to be able keep her in my life because she outgrew me so long ago. She's speaking, she's writing and somehow with her left hand, maybe from Paris, she's managing to continue to help me coordinate what I do, but five minutes of Amy is worth a lifetime and fulltime from anybody else.

Farai, I have this vision of her on CNN. Do you remember her when she was a commentator on CNN and she had a blonde Stepford Wife conservative opposite number. And she's sitting there in her cornrows...that was the first time I saw you. And I'm there in my apartment saying "Yes, yes!" It makes me so happy to think of Amy and Farai as being the future for the journalism we care so much about. It makes me, as we say in New York, "kvell, totally."

And, Mary Kay in Ft. Wayne was the first person who also told me the great rule how to find, as I was traveling all the time, the feminist community wherever I was. You just go and you say to anyone "Where are the crazy ladies?" Mary Kay, you've made us what we are tonight. I hope you're satisfied.

But I did, I got very freaked out about this award. It's just so meaningful. And so freaked out that I actually started to write word for word something because I usually just make notes. So now I don't know exactly what's going to come out cause I'm just winging it but I also have all these notes, so we'll see what happens. But you can empathize, right? Because not only is this the great school of journalism, but I'm being included with a group that stretches from Helen Thomas, Christiana Amanpour and from W.C. to Gordon Parks. Wouldn't that freak you out a little bit?

And, I also think I understand how much it means to social justice movements everywhere to be honored for our journalism because truly, as Suzanne pointed out, advocacy journalism is being spurned. When in fact what we are doing is I believe taking off the lenses of exclusion that allows us to look at the world as if everyone mattered.

And since journalism is the first draft of history, it's very, very important that we actually know what happened rather than the version according to the powerful few. Too much of history has turned out to be early examples of spin. That's really what it is. And, if you don't think that history is spin, go to the New National Museum of the American Indian in Washington and it's perhaps the first museum made by the cultures who are in it. Think about that. And, in a documentary there, there's a native American historian who is explaining something very simply. He says there are two things; the past that never changes and history that always changes. He encourages us to look skeptically, not only at the inaccuracies and silences that the museum proves exist -- not only in history but in our everyday journalism. But he's encouraging us to look at his and everyone else's accounts of past happenings and to inquire and to keep an open mind, to look skeptically at the museum itself. I think it's that spirit of inquiry and openness that brings us together, because that's the spirit of journalism at it's best and of social justice movements at their best. In a way, it's all these reasons that I feel unmatched pride and gratitude about tonight's award.

All those reasons in some ways could be said by someone else because what is accurate requires us to be personal, I think, as well as general. I was trying to think of a deeper reason why I feel this gratitude and this depth about this award and what came to me as I was thinking about it was an early memory of myself at maybe four or five or six, and I was being taught by my mother how to fold a piece of paper into thirds across so it became like an accordion and then numbering those thirds so that I could print in six columns on one sheet of paper.

She used to tell me this is what she did as a reporter to take notes. There weren't reporter's notebooks then; you know, those long skinny notebooks we see tucked in reporters' pockets that you can brace with your palms. And that's when I knew that my mother had been a pioneering newspaper reporter, years before I was born, for the Toledo News Bee and Toledo Blade, that still exists.

But it would be a long time before I realized exactly what this had meant in her life. She wrote first under a male pseudonym because she was living in an era in which the popular wisdom said a lady's name appears in the newspaper only three times: when she is born, when she marries and when she dies. She later was able to write under her own name but only because she was relegated to the women's page and she reported social events of the wives of civic leaders; but more importantly, the wives of guys who advertised. Sound familiar?

And, even there she managed to pioneer her way into being named the Sunday editor of the Toledo Blade, the first time there had been a woman in that position. She kept on doing this until she was into her thirties and my older sister was six or so and until my father, who was trying to realize show business dreams, tried to create a little summer resort in Michigan, too far to commute. She finally fell victim to being pulled in two very opposite directions by the people she loved and by the work she loved. She finally gave up the work.

And, at what great penalty to her spirit. I don't think I ever understood until the women's movement came along and allowed so many of us to say this could happen to us to and to stop blaming our mothers for what had happened to them. I didn't understand how much her spirit had been broken by losing everything she loved and cared about. But I think her spirit is here today. I think that this award would mean more to her than anything that I have ever done or any award I could possibly get.

And so for those of you with children, never doubt how much they care about your example. It was that lovingly-folded paper and her insistence on the importance of words and going to the dictionary, and her anger at some political leader didn't get his facts straight. All of that told me how important journalism was.

But it remained for the civil rights movement, women's movement, gay movement, environmental movement and all the great social justice movements to show me how much journalism had suffered from excluding women like my mother from journalism, who had enormous talents and enormous smarts and whose experience just wasn't present.

Now journalism faces a lot of parallel challenges, though we've come a long way.

Sometimes they sound kind of familiar, they just take different forms. Newsrooms, whether they are now physical or electronic, are a lot more diverse, and we're grateful for that, but they still don't look like the country, whether the measure is race, or sex, or experience.

We're no longer reporting as the journalists of yore on kings and leaders, but celebrities occupy an incredible amount of our reporting space. The sensitivities of advertisers are allowed to censor. Our own King George 2nd gets his way with the media an awful lot of the time. He's benefiting from a long and manufactured campaign, so long I remember when this campaign was manufactured in the Nixon administration to call the media liberal. Most of the media has never been liberal.

Never, never, never.

It was a campaign embedded to make the media defensive and it has worked, I'm sorry to say. The media bend over backwards so much that most of the time it's kinda lying down.

For instance, the serious issue-oriented talk shows on Sunday shows; 80% of the talking head authorities on those shows now come from right wing think tanks. And of course we have the entire Fox Network, the Pravda of the Republican Party, and yet the cries of being too liberal don't let up because they've worked. We no longer keep women out of journalism by category, that's good news, but we do an interesting categorical thing anyway a little more subtly by treating some subjects as if they were inherently feminine and others as if they were inherently masculine.

We therefore neglect some and over-report others, and most of all we don't make a connection between the two and don't see the world as whole. For example, the change toward the possibility of democracy in the former Soviet Union was more due to the long gradual change from punitive child rearing methods and a much-too-high child birth rate than due to the mega-economic problems that it was attributed to, and certainly much more than Reagan calling the Soviets an "evil empire," which had a negative impact...and yet it's credited somehow.

The rural impact of family forms and child rearing are the biggest determinants of whether or not we will have a democracy and what kind of societies we will have. Certainly, in Germany between WWI and WWII, the authoritarian family form and child rearing methods were what allowed people to elect Hitler, and he was elected on a low voter turnout, as Alice Miller and many others have pointed out.

But we don't say this. I'm on campuses a lot and I always ask, "Is there somewhere a government, political science or some kind of foreign policy course that connects family forms and child rearing methods to forms of government?" I hope there's one somewhere, perhaps there's one here. But I haven't found them and I certainly haven't found that connection made in journalism.

So there are many reasons we have tonight to celebrate and to keep going and to work even harder. And I'm really looking forward to hearing from you, learning from you what you find them to be, and what solutions and actions you suggest. I'm eager for the question and answer time because I hope you will give us answers as well as questions and make any organizing announcements of upcoming trouble-making meetings you think this group should know about, and overthrow this structure we've got here because there are so many of you and I'm grateful to you for coming.

But you are looking at each other's backs and we up here are looking at you and that's hierarchal, and hierarchal is based on patriarchy and patriarchy doesn't work anywhere anymore, at home or in this hall. So I hope that during the discussion time we can pretend we are sitting in a circle and listen to each other and learn from each other.

I've been trying to figure this out because there are just so many things we want to say to each other, right? So I made a top ten list. So, symbolically speaking, here are the top ten reasons why we desperately need the Missouri School of Journalism plus the Reynolds Journalism Institute investigation into new technology to distribute news. Plus a new medium movement of diverse women that's at least as important as the women's health movement. And most of all why we need you, the future journalists to think way outside the current boxes.

#10. O.K. we've passed the era of "Grandmother wins Nobel Prize." That was an actual headline in the 60's, I think. But what about last week, "Mrs. Clinton faints." Had that been Ted Kennedy it would have been "Senator Kennedy collapses." A small thing? Not really. The women at CNN are trying to point this out because if we're still one step from swooning, we're many more steps from the White House and from power.

#9. There were many more reporters covering the Scott Peterson trial than have covered the entire length and duration of the Iraqi war, the first unprovoked war in U.S. history. We can look back and see why. In a way, it started with the deregulation of ratings, so suddenly news was no longer about community service. It was much more only about ratings. So the news became much more celebrity-driven and sex-driven and so on. You can look at the reasons why. But the fact is, the result is our responsibility. And we are now spending a billion dollars a month in Iraq and losing at least half as many lives as the entire tsunami lost, but we don't hear that and we don't see that.

# 8. The ultra right wing is spending a million bucks a month on the leadership institute in Virginia. Do you know about this? Do you study this? It's a place where they train their media spokespeople. It's a state-of-the-art radio and TV studio and they also have dormitories so they can isolate and train young people, in addition to individual media celebrities. We sent a young English woman who we thought was untraceable through this leadership institute and it was fascinating, because they tell you how to speak and what to say. There are page-long position papers and the proper language, etc. on every issue. An enormous number of people we see on television come from this training and other right wing think tanks. Ralph Reed is on the faculty and it's been a very, very successful effort. They also subsidize right wing books and then the authors get on television as spokespeople because they have written this book, and meanwhile we are depending on free will efforts and legitimately unsubsidized books to provide our spokespeople.

#7. As a result of the above, plus Fox News, etc., what we have right now are embedded right wing ideologues in the media vs. journalists who are trying to be fair by showing both sides. What that means is we don't get 50/50, we get 75/25. And that is for the most part what is happening in the media and what most people see. Yes, we are very grateful for the Internet and bloggers and for all the alternate sources of information, but most people in this country still get their information from conventional sources and they don't have time to search for anything else.

#6. This administration has had fewer press conferences than any since the invention of television or radio, and it is the first as far as I know to refuse to answer any question that hasn't been embedded and approved in advance. That has never happened before. Do we know that? It's almost as if we should have a little ticker tape underneath: "This question was pre-approved or it wouldn't be allowed."

#5. This White House has complained to the bosses of TV journalists--and I guess other print journalists, too, but I only talked to TV journalists--with more detail and more veracity than any administration in history. For example, Katie Couric told me that even she, on the Today Show, is monitored for her "tone of voice" when interviewing subjects of which the White House has any interest in. And if she is viewed as sounding skeptical, her boss gets a letter criticizing her.

#4. Three columnists at least, I mean three that we know of, have been exposed for being on salaries from this administration--I'm sure you've seen this in the press, and I'm grateful to all the people who exposed this--on government payroll in return for writing supposedly independent opinions in support of Bush policies. These are paid opinion makers and we know what opinion they are paid to make.

#3. The head of a Republican organization has been posing as a member of the White House press corps--this is news that broke yesterday--even using a phony name in order to plant softball questions or praiseful questions or serve as an alternative to questions that have any critical edge at all when directed at the President. His phony name is Jeff Gannon, his real name is James Dale Guckard, and he has had access to secret memos. He has asked questions like, "How can you stand to be confronted by these Democratic Senators who are divorced from reality?" That's his idea of an objective question. He has said that Kerry may have been the first gay president, but he himself has established and appeared in gay porn websites. This should be an interesting story to follow.

#2. Perhaps you saw a University of Maryland poll that was released 12 days before the election. What it said was that 60-80% of people who were supporting GWB believed they were voting for policies that were the opposite of his real positions on the international criminal court, on environmental protections. They supported these. The bad news is that they didn't know that he has threatened with sanctions any other country that supports them. And that he has certainly fought against environmental protections and trade agreements and there were a whole list of issues in this poll.

There is a real deep information crisis in this country.

When I was going around campaigning just before the election, often on campuses or union groups, bagel parlors, bowling alleys, we were in an RV going through Midwestern states, and I just tried to give simple facts. For instance, there is more arsenic in our drinking water than there has been before because this is the first administration in history, of either party, who has failed to support the Clean Water Act.

Or I would ask, "How many of you are going to graduate in debt?" Quite a few here too, maybe. Well how many of you know college tuition went up 30% just under the first four years of GWB, and student loans went down because he paid too much interest to his banker supporters?

We've always had the poverty draft. More and more we have an education draft because people can't afford to get an education otherwise, not to mention a citizenship draft. These are the kind of questions, the kind of facts, that people will say to me, "Where do you find these facts?" I would start going around with a list of Web sites where more such facts can be found.

We know in our hearts what's happening in the media, what's happening to journalism. There is an incredible information and fact crisis in this country. In fact, polls show that people of every other industrialized democracy know more, and sometimes know more about our affairs and our system of government than we know ourselves.

#1. I looked at the Index of Suspicions of whether a country is or is becoming totalitarian or authoritarian:

1. powerful and continuing nationalism;
2. disdain for the recognition of human rights;
3. identification of enemy scapegoats as a unifying cause;
4. supremacy of the military;
5. rampant sexism;
6. controlled mass media
7. obsession with national security;
8. religion and government intertwined;
9. corporate power protected;
10. labor power suppressed;
11. disdain for intellectuals and the arts;
12. obsession with crime and punishment;
13. rampant cronyism and corruption;
14. fraudulent elections.

You and I, in caring for journalism, are understanding that we must look at the world as if everyone mattered if we are to have a world in which everyone does matter. You and I have influence on a lot of these elements, but most especially on journalism and the mass media.

So with gratitude to all of you who are undertaking this work, I say don't get discouraged. As I.F. Stoner said, "If you ask a question that can be answered in your generation, you've asked the wrong question."

I proudly, gladly accept this award in the name of the spirit of all of us here and all of us who are united in this effort, and also in the name of my mother Ruth Nuneviller Steinem. Thank you.