his alma mater, is well worth the read. I read it months ago, & as I watched tonight's "Countdown" it was in the back of my mind. He's a man of principle & that's why he had the courage to speak out about the election irregularities, despite the media "lockdown" on the subject.
Excerpts:
There are days now when my line of work makes me ashamed, makes me depessed, makes me cry. And it occurs to me that this moral sensor has been fine-tuned within the walls of this campus. Forty years ago the great news broadcaster Edward R. Murrow got up in front of the convention of the radio and television news directors and announced that without moral direction all this great medium would become was "wires and lights in a box," and there are days when I wish it would still be even that idealistic.
I heard an interview the other day with a brilliant British television screenwriter named Dennis Potter. He was ruminating on society and TV from a position which commands my attention: He knew he had less than three months to live. Potter described the change in society so well that I actually transcribed it. He said that in the mid-80s, quote, "Everything was given, in a sense, its pricetag. And the pricetag became the only gospel. And that gospel, in the end, is a very thin gruel indeed. And if you start measuring humankind in those terms, everything else then becomes secondary, or less important, or, in some sense ... laughable."
But I also know that the one thing you have that all of us "out here" do not ... is that you are not yet jaded by this process. To some degree you must inevitably become so. But if you keep your Moral Force intact just sufficiently so that you can stand up once or twice in the rest of your life and say, "You know what? This is wrong for me and for people I know and for people I don't know and I'm not going to do it," you will have improved the world.
But I do know without fear of contradiction what the definition of life is and it is 12 words long. "Life is defined by how much you improve the lives of others."http://www.news.cornell.edu/campus/Olbermann_speech.html 
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