“Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”

Excerpts from a June Callwood speech, on Canadian journalism:

“Journalists have an advantage over politicians because they can be indifferent to opinion polls. To be sure, they cut their cloths to fit other contours than their own. But the best journalists are inherently freelancers, which term was first applied to those few medieval knights who were not pledged to a lord. Their lances were their own. They were free of encumbrance and they could choose their battles. A part of the journalist’s mandate as I see it is to rock the boat. This is done by seeing what is in the spaces between received wisdom and reality and by putting into public view hard won information that authorities would prefer to hide. If journalists don’t do that, who will?”

“That’s [the need for society to accept blame for how we fail others, ie. The case of a prisoner, who was severely abused physically, and by the system] what I call connecting the dots. When journalists look at cause as well as affect, the whole country has a chance to advance to the point where fewer trucks topple over, for instance. Or maybe Canadians will begin to believe that children deserve, as a matter of natural right, a safe start and receivable educations. Improvements and supports for very young children might just enable them to be stable and affectionate adults. And imagine a country where most of the adults are stable and affectionate. What would we do with the underused prisons and drug treatment programs and mental hospitals? It’s a worry I’ll never live long enough to share.”

“There are no hermetically sealed journalists. We are all porous as hell! To the vagaries of the opinions of others. To our own pious prejudices. And to a full deck of unshakable, wooly headed views. There are books we should have read, but didn’t. Warnings sounds that found us deaf. Flash points in our natures that shatter our ability to reason.”

“My view is that journalists also [in response to John Hersey’s three points on journalism] have an obligation to set themselves a high ethical standard and to be passionately driven to meet that goal. If you never find a task master harder on you than you yourself are, you’ve got it right. This is the part of journalism that no one sees. If you knock on one door and get a useful quote, that’s good luck. If you knock on twenty doors and finally get one useful quote, that’s good work. But nobody knows, except you.”

“You can be a good person without being a journalist. Lots of people do that. But you cannot be a good journalist without being a good person.”

~ June Callwood


Write, Write, Write! Timothy Findlay
Write, Write, Write! Read, Read, Read! Margaret Atwood
Write, Write, Write! Read, Read, Read! Rewrite, Rewrite, Rewrite! June Callwood