WTNH News Channel 8 / News / 1999

	TV personalities stress morality, media responsibility in commencement talks (Hamden-AP) _ Well-known TV personalities told new college graduates in Connecticut Sunday that they should work to help create a more moral nation and a more responsible media. At the University of Hartford, veteran CBS newsman Mike Wallace urged 1,350 new graduates to take responsibility for shaping a better world. "We have given you a prosperous America, but we oldsters have not, perhaps, given you the most admirable America as your inheritance. There is scandal in Washington, demeaning scandal at the top, a fumbling foreign policy, campaign finance reform still unfulfilled, sensible gun control measures still stifled. You can do better than we have done. Today is a happy day for you and you deserve it, but don't forget the responsibilities that lie ahead," said Wallace, co-editor and reporter for the TV news program "60 Minutes". At Quinnipiac College, Fox News anchorwoman Paula Zahn warned the school's 832 graduates that today's advanced technology means the media must be more responsible and cautious, especially in reporting stories such as the school shootings in Littleton, Colo. Zahn, who spent six years as the co-host of "CBS This Morning," noted that the media, in its haste and zeal to report the story, might have endangered some of the students hiding in Columbine High School while two armed students prowled the classroom searching for targets. Zahn said that after a student called a TV station while trapped inside the school, the station didn't hesitate to put the call live on the air even though there were TV sets in the school that the killers could have been watching and therefore learning where the caller was hiding. "With so many conduits of information out there, the pressures to be first are coming dangerously close to overtaking the need to be accurate," Zahn said. At Saint Joseph College in Hartford, Richard Rodriguez an essayist for the Lehrer NewsHour, told the school's 400 new graduates that he owed his success in life to the Sisters of Mercy, the order that founded the college. Robert Fiondella, chairman, president and chief executive officer of Phoenix Home Life Mutual Insurance Co., also addressed the Saint Joseph graduates and advised them to "live in the moment." Quoting from a Sanskrit proverb, Fiondella said, "Today well lived makes yesterday a dream of happiness, and tomorrow a vision of hope. Look well therefore, to this day." And, at the University of Connecticut Law School commencement, Harry T. Edwards, chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for Washington, D.C., told the nearly 200 new lawyers that their primary duty is not to their client, but to the public good. Edwards, one of the nation's foremost African-American jurists, cited the contributions of famed black humanitarians such as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Frederick Douglass and Marian Wright Edelman. "We must do for others not just ourselves," Edwards said. "Keep asking yourself, `How can I make a return on all the good that has come my way in life?"' Today's News Page. WTNH Home Page. ©1999 WTNH/WTNH-DT A LIN station.

TV personalities stress morality, media responsibility in commencement talks
(Hamden-AP) _ Well-known TV personalities told new college graduates in Connecticut Sunday that they should work to help create a more moral nation and a more responsible media.

At the University of Hartford, veteran CBS newsman Mike Wallace urged 1,350 new graduates to take responsibility for shaping a better world.

"We have given you a prosperous America, but we oldsters have not, perhaps, given you the most admirable America as your inheritance. There is scandal in Washington, demeaning scandal at the top, a fumbling foreign policy, campaign finance reform still unfulfilled, sensible gun control measures still stifled. You can do better than we have done. Today is a happy day for you and you deserve it, but don't forget the responsibilities that lie ahead," said Wallace, co-editor and reporter for the TV news program "60 Minutes".

At Quinnipiac College, Fox News anchorwoman Paula Zahn warned the school's 832 graduates that today's advanced technology means the media must be more responsible and cautious, especially in reporting stories such as the school shootings in Littleton, Colo.

Zahn, who spent six years as the co-host of "CBS This Morning," noted that the media, in its haste and zeal to report the story, might have endangered some of the students hiding in Columbine High School while two armed students prowled the classroom searching for targets.

Zahn said that after a student called a TV station while trapped inside the school, the station didn't hesitate to put the call live on the air even though there were TV sets in the school that the killers could have been watching and therefore learning where the caller was hiding.

"With so many conduits of information out there, the pressures to be first are coming dangerously close to overtaking the need to be accurate," Zahn said.

At Saint Joseph College in Hartford, Richard Rodriguez an essayist for the Lehrer NewsHour, told the school's 400 new graduates that he owed his success in life to the Sisters of Mercy, the order that founded the college.

Robert Fiondella, chairman, president and chief executive officer of Phoenix Home Life Mutual Insurance Co., also addressed the Saint Joseph graduates and advised them to "live in the moment."

Quoting from a Sanskrit proverb, Fiondella said, "Today well lived makes yesterday a dream of happiness, and tomorrow a vision of hope. Look well therefore, to this day."

And, at the University of Connecticut Law School commencement, Harry T. Edwards, chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for Washington, D.C., told the nearly 200 new lawyers that their primary duty is not to their client, but to the public good.

Edwards, one of the nation's foremost African-American jurists, cited the contributions of famed black humanitarians such as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Frederick Douglass and Marian Wright Edelman.

"We must do for others not just ourselves," Edwards said. "Keep asking yourself, `How can I make a return on all the good that has come my way in life?"'

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