Transcript of her testimony…
I have worked at the highest levels of the media as a full-time correspondent for 60 Minutes, chief foreign correspondent for CBS News, chief foreign affairs correspondent for CBS News.
That was my home for 16 years.
And as a journalist, I have sat down with world leaders, mass murderers, and terrorists.
And I have held people on both sides of the aisle accountable.
I have seen suffering and I have faced evil and I have walked through the fires of hell on distant battlefields.
I faced my own death at the hands of a mob of some 200 men in Egypt when I was gang-raped and sodomized and beaten almost to death while on assignment for 60 Minutes.
And yet for almost a decade, I have been targeted and falsely branded and accused of many things that I did not do.
They have attacked my work, my character, my sanity, and my marriage.
And I am not alone.
We are many.
And we will not give up, and we will not give in.
It's important to all of us, because of everything discussed today, that we address the vital principles and values that exist really only in the United States of America.
And that said, these are the worst of times for the media in this country.
We live in the age of information warfare, where propaganda is not simply a weapon, it is the entire field of battle.
This is a war for our minds that is aided by advanced technology, and we have never been here, not in all of human history.
It is a moment when we as journalists should stand together, united, and regardless of politics, we should fight for the truth and we should fight for freedom.
Yet, not very long ago, we allowed one of our own to be branded as a traitor simply for doing his job.
In fact, there were many so-called journalists who were leading the charge against Tucker, accusing him of treason for the simple fact of interviewing the president of Russia.
And to my knowledge, there was not a single legacy media institution that spoke up.
This was more than a politically motivated attack on one man.
It was a betrayal of the most sacred principles of a free press.
And my media colleagues know this to be true, no matter what they say.
My fear is that they either no longer care or that they lack the moral courage to be honest, including with themselves to those who wish to censor the idea of free speech in America and all over the world.
Media companies, institutions, and journalism schools have failed all of us.
And for too long we have allowed non-profit organizations to masquerade as non-partisan media watchdogs, when in fact they are little more than highly paid political propagandists and assassins whose entire reason for being is to crush anyone who stands in their way and along with them the long-held and cherished ideas of free speech, free-thinking, and free minds.
This is a blood sport for them, their political allies, and their puppet masters.
They know how to kill a journalist without murdering them.
We call it cancel culture.
In truth, it is a death sentence.
And they get away with it because they have information dominance.
Some are strong enough to survive, but only a few like Glenn Greenwald, Tucker Carlson, and Matt Taibbi, only a few like them are able to reach greater heights and thrive.
These nonprofits that I'm talking about are part of a vast censorship network that includes government agencies.
They use deception to mask their actions with lofty goals like preventing the spread of misinformation, disinformation, hate speech.
They use phrases like protecting democracy and make no mistake, words matter.
While propaganda and censorship are not new.
Technology means unprecedented power and reach in the hands of a few.
Companies like Facebook, Instagram, and Google, as you have heard many times today, have been allowed to amass monopoly power.
And as a result, they not only reach billions of people across the world every second of the day, they have absolute control over what we see and what we hear.
Imagine those tools in the hands of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Hitler.
When I became a journalist more than 35 years ago, we were under emergency restrictions in apartheid South Africa.
And I was 17 years old.
Public safety and security were the weapons of state censors.
Ours was the truth.
We had no Bill of Rights, no Constitution, no First Amendment, no Declaration of Independence and journalists would have to hide their footage from the security police, sometimes sewing the tapes into their mattresses at home so they could not be seized and used to identify and target the protesters that we had filmed.
The light of freedom that set fire to our hearts in South Africa was lit thousands of miles away.
It was lit right here where we sit today in the United States of America.
When the Founding Fathers put freedom of speech first, it was not by chance, it was by design.
The rights that followed were in part created to protect the First Amendment.
Without it, they knew that freedom itself would perish.
I am reminded today of the words spoken by the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Gray, in 1914, at the beginning of the First World War.
He said, “The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime”.
We are once again watching the lights of freedom.
They're going out here and all over the world.
And it is up to us to determine if they will be lit again ever.
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