It is a distinct honor for me to be here, both because of the good work of the World Media Association with the importance of the theme of “Media as Conscience of Society,” and because of my own personal background. Adding to that would also be my family connection with the University of Maryland Merrill School of Journalism. I grew up in a journalist family, although my father wouldn't call himself a journalist. He preferred the term ‘reporter.' He passed away a year ago this last summer and we established an endowment at the Merrill School in his name. Now each year we are able to support an intern reporting in the field of political economy, which was my father's field. The first Joseph Slevin intern was placed at Congressional Quarterly, which experience and clips helped her to land a job at the New York Times. My mother in particular is grateful to the fine school at the University of Maryland, Dr. Thornton, and for this experience of being able to provide some memory to her husband.

Growing up in a newspaper family, we had two sayings up on our wall. One was the very familiar one from Thomas Jefferson about the importance of a free press, that, “The press is the best instrument for enlightening the mind of man and improving him as a rational, moral and social being.” The press was the only industry mentioned in the Constitution of the United States. That's the importance of what we do here to a democratic and representative form of government.

The other was a quote by Arthur Hays Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times until 1961, who stated, “Give a person the truth and he may still go wrong when he has the chance to be right, but give him no news or present him only with distorted and incomplete data, with ignorant, sloppy or biased reporting, with propaganda and deliberate falsehoods, and you destroy his whole reasoning processes, and make him something less than a man.”

So in terms of media as conscience of society, and then in my role as a judge of the essay contests, I had this lofty yet real and important ideal of the media in mind.

There were so many splendid essays from 30 or so universities and journalism schools – undergraduate and graduate – from around the country. It was a hard choice. One, though, stood out above the others, and that was Lauren's essay. She framed her essay, “Lessons from the Other Side of the World,” with the role and the importance of the media, not only to American society, but also to the world. The fact that she talked about the role of a “principled and professional press in the bleak global landscape” was on target. Lauren also concluded her essay by speaking about the role and the ability of a responsible, principled and conscious media to change the world.

On the one hand one can attribute such hopefulness to youthful idealism. Yet on the other hand, one can go back to the principles of this nation's founding and say it completely resonates with what the founding fathers and the founding spirit of our country considered to be absolutely essential both for maintaining freedom and for providing value to the rest of the world.

Having said that, I want to welcome Lauren Gilger, an English major at Fordham University, to read her essay. Let's give a wonderful hand to our First-place winner.