“An insistence on reflecting the world as it is, not as you wish it to be”

A privilege to host New York Times publisher A. G. Sulzberger, who gave the 2024 Reuters Memorial Lecture March 4. Among many favourite lines from his talk is this – “Journalistic independence demands a willingness to follow the facts, even when they lead you away from what you assumed would be true. A willingness to engage at once empathetically and sceptically with a wide variety of people and perspectives. An insistence on reflecting the world as it is, not as you wish it to be. A posture of curiosity rather than conviction, of humility rather than righteousness.”

And an honour to chair the subsequent panel discussion with him, Zaffar Abbas from Dawn, Melissa Bell former publisher of Vox, and Alessandra Galloni from Reuters, all of them people I deeply admire for their work and how they do it.

Full text and video of Sulzberger’s lecture here.

Summary of our panel discussion here.