 I'm just absolutely delighted to be here today on this gorgeous day and to be part of this wonderful celebration of all of your accomplishments. You will now see the way I have prescription dark glasses is this way. Graduates, families, parents, President Sullivan, Board Chair McEnany. I just want to say one thing about this commencement proceeding. 8.30 in the morning, are you fricking kidding me? I'm just amazed there are any students here. I am a verronter by marriage. My darling husband David Rines went to med school here and loved it so much that he stayed to do his residency under the famous Chairman of Surgery John Davis. For you out of staters, welcome to Vermont, a rock-ribbed Republican state where Patrick Leahy is the only Democrat ever elected to the United States Senate. Yes, that's actually true. Of course, times have changed since the dark ages when Leahy was first elected. Welcome to the new Vermont, a state so liberal that Republicans or Democrats, Democrats or progressives and progressives are socialists. And dear graduates, welcome to Vermont where the state legislature appropriates a whopping 7% of the university's budget, which is why you will be getting fundraising letters for the rest of your natural lives and perhaps beyond. And since I am, as I mentioned, a vermonter by marriage, let me suggest to you that you give and keep giving to UVM and to NPR, of course. Both are fine investments in the future of the country. Today's graduates really are very lucky. The shoeboxes are being torn down after you leave, meaning that you will miss the largest construction site on campus in its history and the accompanying mess which will last for years and years and probably more years. Instead, you're gonna embark on being full-fledged grown-ups, which is, of course, a little scary, but still a great time of life for you. I know that each of you wants to be someone who counts, who makes a difference, you want love, family, you want it all, which is the title of a couple of poems that I've written for the class. And first, I need my water. I forgot to bring it up. I have too many things to account for. I need a keeper. So, hold on. I think the only way to do this is, I don't know what you did here, Tom. Let's see. There we go. As I was saying, so I composed these little poems for you folks. So first, the women. I want the whole life experience in a ball. I want it all. I want adventure, love, career, kids, short or tall. I want it all. Don't tell me I can't have my drother. I'll be a superstar who's also a mother. I want to feel for once a little greed, play the market and own a steed, or at least dump my Subaru and get a car that's new. I want to be Michelle Obama and Michelle Pfeiffer, or maybe Margaret Sanger or Margaret Thatcher. I want to be like Diane Feinstein, queen of the clandestine and with such a steely spine. I will be undeterred like Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Lead the charge like Sandra Day. Make people laugh like Whoopie Goldberg or just run around like Nina Totenberg. I want to be Loretta Lynch and Loretta Lynn. Lock them up and sing a hymn. I want to be Hillary Clinton, Hillary Duff and Hillary Swank or maybe instead the head of the World Bank. I want to be a hot date. Eat chocolate without gaining weight. Have a shishie pad and be secretary of state. I want a 28-hour day, six figures of pay. I want forgiveness on loans and acute erogenous zones. I want to run the marathon and do it with flair, be an academic chair who is beyond compare. I want to bleach my hair, invite guys to my lair, find a great au pair, spend tons on what I wear. I want to clean up the sludge, maybe be a judge. I want it all. And now, and now for the guys. I know it's a shocker. I want to run Hedy Topper. Drink champagne with Anthony Bourdain and find a cure for acid rain. I want forgiveness on debts and to manage the mess. I want to be Scott Turow, combine art, fame, and dough. I want to buy a place on Jay's Peak so I can sneer at Pike's Peak. I want to be Michael Douglas, Michael Jordan, Michael Bloomberg, husband of the year, player of the year, billionaire of the year, whatever the sphere. I want to be Andrew Sullivan, Gilbert and Sullivan, and of course, Tom Sullivan. I want to be Henry K. and I am Pay. Count Basie, Kevin Spacey, and Senator Leahy, or as it were, I could mess up my hair and be Bernie Sanders so racy. I want to be Thurgood Marshall, George Marshall, and Marshall McLuhan. I want to run the Fed and play the air to the Grateful Dead. I want to be Tom Brady, Tom Wolf, Tom Cruz, and on the side, I'll make headline news. I want to be Clarence Darrow, Clarence Thomas, Rand Paul, or Ralph Nader on whatever side, a fearless crusader. I want to be Nino Scalia and Samuel Alito buzzing those liberals like a big fat mosquito. Or let me just be Justice Breyer, taking common sense to a plane that is higher. I want to fight the crooks right like David Brooks, negotiate deals, and eat five-star meals, be a loving dad, a supportive mate, have a shishie pad, and be Secretary of State. I want a great chip shot, drop shot, jump shot. I want to wear a smile, run a four minute mile. I want it all. So Vermont is a very special place. People here take their citizenship very seriously, from town meetings to stewardship over natural resources. All those things I expect you folks have absorbed in your years here, if you hadn't already absorbed them. But I want to talk to you very briefly about what it means to be an informed, and therefore useful, citizen. In an era when newspaper readership is plummeting, and there are literally thousands of easy ways to get information, what we know is often a good deal less reliable than it once was. And there's considerably less sense of a shared community. People bookmark subjects they like, leaving out vast swaths of information that they would be interested in if only they knew about it in the first place. When Franklin Roosevelt was president, he delivered 30 fireside chats over 12 years. And the whole country tuned into those things. If you walk down the street in Chicago, for instance, you would hear FDR's voice coming from the open windows of apartments, from the taxis, from the radios and stores, and then people would talk about what they'd heard, agreeing, disagreeing, but they talked. Today we have endless TV channels, websites, streams, and lots and lots of radio stations. But in the broadcast world anyway, the content has changed dramatically. Before 1987, and the advent of cable, if a broadcaster wanted to keep its license, it had to comply with something called the fairness doctrine. That meant it had to cover controversial issues of public importance, and to do so in a fair and balanced way. The result was that all TV and radio stations had regular news broadcasts, and that competing viewpoints were expressed. Another element of the fairness doctrine was the so-called personal attack rule. It required that when individuals involved in public issues were attacked, the station was required to provide a similar time slot for a response. In 1987, with cable channels and FM stations abounding, the Federal Trade Commission abolished the rule, figuring that there were now plenty of avenues for expression. The result is that many radio and TV stations carry no news at all. Some cable channels have an obvious political agenda, think Fox, MSNBC for instance, and talk shows or talk harangues have become ubiquitous. I wanna make a couple of observations about all of this. Opinion shows or opinion newscasts do not present news. News are packages carefully reported, researched, and edited. That would cost a lot of money. Opinion shows generally feature smart people, confidently popping off, often with few facts or facts that are half truths, with a little video or audio thrown in for good measure. The same is true of many opinion pieces on the web and in print. Now there's nothing wrong with reading, listening to, or watching any of this, but being informed means actually knowing something that you can rely on that has a genuine element of truth to it. That means reading a well-edited newspaper or magazine or, forgive me, listening to NPR where we spend millions and millions and millions of dollars on reporting and editing, or watching TV broadcasts reported by people of distinction, integrity, and journalistic reputation. I'm not ignoring excellent analytical opinion pieces, but for God's sakes, don't just read or listen to things you just agree with. If you're a liberal, read the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. If you're a conservative, read the editorial page of the New York Times. It might make your blood boil, but every now and again you'll learn something or even better, you'll be forced to think. If you're a liberal who can't bear to read the journal, well, then try the more moderate and totally reliable conservative David Brooks on the Times op-ed page. And if you're a conservative who gags at the New York Times editorial page, then try the more moderate and less predictably liberal Ruth Marcus on the Washington Post op-ed page. The point here is that this all feeds into not just the notion of being an informed citizen, but being able to hear each other as citizens. A study conducted by the Pew Research Center last year is or at least I think probably should be troubling to those of us who believe in our democratic system of government. The year long study found that increasingly people are more likely to interact with those who agree with them. There are striking differences between consistent liberals and consistent conservatives. The conservatives are tightly clustered around one main news source, Fox News, which 47% almost half of consistent conservatives watch. The consistent liberals are not clustered like that. The largest group, 15% watch CNN, 13% listen to NPR and 10% read the New York Times, go figure. Consistent conservatives distrust most of the 36 major news sources listed in the study. In contrast, consistent liberals trust most news sources. But the liberals are more likely to de-friend someone on a social networking site because of politics. The consistent liberals and conservatives share one important trait. They are all very interested in politics and public policy and are more likely to drive political discussions. In other words, they're leaders rather than listeners. The result I would suggest is the kind of gridlock we see in Washington. And if you hate it and you find yourself in the mushy middle, you just have to get in there and rumble. One final note on all of this. I know the fashion is to think that social networking has produced so much more information and it has. It started the Arab Spring, it's toppled governments and in this country it's shown that we do have a serious problem with police practices. But having said that, raw data and raw opinion are not the same as news. Just having someone tell you something does not mean it's true. I can't tell you how many times I've had a good story ruined by the facts. In my view, two things are critical for reporters. Rules, i.e. standards and editors. I'll tell you just one story to illustrate the point. During the Clinton-Lewinsky debacle, I was writing the roundup lead for the top of all things considered one day and the Wall Street Journal website moved a story online saying that a secret service agent had actually been a witness to the liaison. So I quoted the Wall Street Journal story in my roundup and my editor asked me who my source was. And I pointed to my copy attributing the story to the journal and I said we would look really stupid if we didn't include this in the roundup that it was all over the place. This isn't even close, he said. He made me take it out because I didn't have independent confirmation. Well, I grumped around for a while saying he was a purist. Lucky for me he was. The story wasn't true and the journal ate it hours later. Let me note parenthetically that I don't think that story would have ever made it into the newspaper. One of my colleagues at a top newspaper said to me just a couple of weeks ago that when he writes a web piece it gets a look from one set of eyes other than his own. But if he writes a piece for the paper and it's on the front page it's likely to get 10 other sets of eyes. I think that that would be true for all of us in the news business. Dangerously true. We have so many platforms we report for that it's the one that's the centerpiece in NPR's case radio that gets most of the eyes or in our case ears prior to publication. One other thing, if you want good information you have to pay for it. There is no free journalism that will last for any period of time because if there's no money to pay there's no money to pay reporters and editors. So get used to it. You want something good you have to pay for it. Finally I want to talk about something just a bit more personal. When my late husband fell on the ice more than 20 years ago nobody could have known on that morning that it would take three brain operations and four months in the hospital before he could come home. Frail and learning to walk again. Nor could anyone have known that a year lady he would return to the hospital and spend seven months in intensive care reeling from one crisis to another. At the time I really wondered whether I was capable of doing all the things that needed to be done for him. I managed in large part because of my family my friends and colleagues. They wind me and dined me to keep my spirits up. They sat with me in hospital rooms. They went to doctors meetings with me. They took notes at meetings with social workers and then read them the riot active promise services were not delivered. And let me tell you you do not want to have Koki Roberts reading back to you from her notes. There is of course a lesson in all of this besides friendship and family. It's a lesson that involves a rather old fashioned word duty. When you come to a crisis in life I think you will find that doing your duty will serve you rather well. Whether it's your crisis or someone else's crisis. The path is clear. The choices are few and there are no regrets afterwards. Indeed there are rewards. You're a better person for one of a better expression. You're a deeper person and able to accept life's blessings too. Not long after my husband Floyd died in 1998 I started dating my Vermont her husband David whose wife had also died after a long illness. Our friends and family I think rejoiced at our wedding every bit as much as we did. In part because they had shared in our grief and loss and our climb back to the living. This provides a segue for me to turn to one last subject, your work life. The thing that if you're lucky will drive you and provide great, great satisfaction. My late husband Floyd was a lawyer who changed careers at least three times. He enjoyed all of them. My husband David is a trauma surgeon, vice chairman of surgery at a huge hospital and a teacher of surgical residents and med students. One of the many things I admire about him is that he's always willing to look at what he does with a fresh eye, to think about new training for himself and to change the emphasis of what he's doing. And we both know that however much we love our jobs and we do and however hard we work and we do that life is ephemeral and that in the end there are times to say, no, I'm going home. So take those diplomas, go home, knowing that there's so much more to come. Good luck, Godspeed and thank you for adding me to the roster of Vermont degree holders.