 Ladies, gentlemen, and colleagues, it is an honor and great privilege to present to you Lindsay Hilsom. It is impossible to imagine journalists in conflict without thinking of Lindsay, who's reporting for Channel 4 News and almost lightly television presence has made her a household name and a role model for journalists worldwide, particularly those working on war and conflict. Lindsay Hilsom is Channel 4's international editor and the author of two books. In Extremis, The Life of Four Correspondent, Mary Colvin, and Sandstorm, Libya in the Time of Revolution. For three decades, she has specialized in covering conflict and refugee movements, reporting every continent, barred, and targeted. This year, she has reported on the political and humanitarian crisis in Venezuela, the demise of the Islamic State's caliphate in Syria, human rights abuses in Balway, and from the front line of the abortion wars in the United States. Lindsay is the recipient of several international awards, including the Royal Television Society journalist of the year, the Charles Wheeler Award and the James Cameron Award, as well as the patron's medal from the Royal Geographical Society and the Mango Park Medal from the Royal Scottish Geographical Society. She was rather surprised to get any award for geography since, despite having spent a lifetime traveling, she has no sense of direction, and I'm quoting her. She is capable of getting lost on a very short journey, for example, from the Channel 4 News Studio on Grace in Broad to Sohas, a journey of less than a mile. She has, however, made it today. Gone are the days when a foreign correspondent was inevitably a white man, intrepidly selling off to, setting off to tell us about them. Instant satellite communication and the proliferation of smartphones have enabled people to tell their own stories. Now growing numbers of people from the global south are reporting for northern media as well as for media in their own country, and I see some of them there. Lindsay is a great supporter of this hugely positive development, and is a founder of the Marie Colvin Journalist Network, which supports female journalists in the Arab world, and has been a mentor for young journalists through the John Shofield Trust. After graduating in Spanish and French from Exeter University, Lindsay began her career as an aid worker with Oxfam in Central America and then UNICEF in East and Southern Africa. From 1986 to 1989, she was a stringer for the BBC and the Guardian based in Kenya. In 1994 she was the only English-speaking foreign correspondent in Rwanda when the genocide started. She joined Channel 4 News in 1997 and spent much of 1999 in Belgrade under NATO bombing and 2003 in Baghdad during the USA campaign. She has reported extensively from Iran, Iraq, Mali and Ukraine and was Channel 4 News China correspondent from 2006 to 2008. In 2011 she witnessed the Arab appraisings in Libya and Egypt and spent the summer of 2015 travelling with refugees and migrants through Europe. She has witnessed and helped us understand the most dreadful and violent events that followed the optimism of the New World Order at the end of the 20th century. Her approach to making them understandable to viewers far away has been consistent. She has witnessed on the stories of ordinary people involved in or affected by these conflicts, thus remaining true to journalist's most cherished and valuable contribution, speaking truth to power and storytelling that is informative, objective, honest and empathetic. But Lindsay also likes to tend to her North London garden, see friends, go bird-watching, voice-writing, read poetry and listen to bad country music. She mistook who in Egypt once because she had tickets for Bruce Springsteen. Lindsay also confesses that her technical skills are rudimentary. She depends on a camera operator and increasingly technically skilled producers to get the story onto their television or the internet. At the end of the day journalism is practical. Either you get your story out or you don't. Sometimes in remote places all communications collapse. As she once told an interview quote, the best thing is to be an eyewitness to the history of time and to hear people's stories. The least rewarding thing is that if the technology lets us down, it's devastating, unquote. Technology can do more than just let us down. It can be used to track down those people exposing atrocities and corruption. Stories of journalists have been killed, imprisoned or simply disappeared in conflict zones in the 21st century. The most prominent in recent times is of course Lindsay's friend and colleague Marie Colvin killed an artillery attack in Syria in 2012 and we know of Jamal Khashoggi and others. Lindsay's biography was an attempt to ensure that Marie was remembered not just for her tragic death but also for her extraordinary life. In writing this tribute I try to think what sums her contribution to journalism. There are many, and time does not allow me to speak at length. But I found this quote which resonated with my own very short experience as a war correspondent in the Middle East. Addressing young female reporters, she said, and I quote, be confident and do not let boys trample all over you. I think it's an advantage to be a woman. You may fail or screw up, but pick yourself up and keep going. You may occasionally come across people who are disparaging or discriminating with me because you are a woman. They can sort off. You just have to keep going. You have to do things on the same terms, unquote. Madam President, it is my privilege now to present to you Lindsay Hilson for the award of Honorary Fellowship of the School and to invite her to address this assembly. The phrase sort off has been used in a graduation ceremony here and it's all my fault. I'm not going to talk about this before you, so listening to Dina, I sort of feel like I'm spluttering, coming up for air. But you know, she missed out a lot of stuff. She missed out all the bad things that I did in my teens and twenties. Actually, maybe that's not such a good subject for a gathering like this. She also missed out at times I was wrong. That's what I think is really important because I was often wrong. I often am wrong. It was TSN who said between the idea and the reality falls the shadow. And that I think is what journalists should do. We should dwell in the shadow. We're trying to find that difference between the idea and the reality. And that's why I believe, as my late friend Marie Colvin believed, in being an eyewitness, in going out there and finding out what's really happening. This year I've interviewed women who support ISIS. I interviewed Trump supporters. You know, I always change a little bit with every person that I meet. And it's not about abandoning my principles, but changing your mind. That is so underestimated in today's world. And yet I believe that the whole point of being a journalist is to let people change you just a little. Because to understand is not to justify. To understand is to understand. And in the world we have at the moment, which is so polarized, where I do believe that there is a danger of fascism. Where I do believe that the opponents of fascism don't know how to oppose it. If we don't try and understand the people we disagree with, I think that we are nowhere. And that's why I think that journalism, the kind of journalism I aspire to do where you go out and you talk to people and you really listen, I believe in it. Dina mentioned that now the journalism community is so much more diverse. I'm hummed a little. I am so happy with that. I am happy on how to understand, how to change. But we need people of all different backgrounds. And we need them in what is often called the mainstream media, sometimes disparagingly so, but I believe in the mainstream media. I believe in having diverse voices and different people within the media that so many different people can understand from right, from left and from centre. I know that there are many of you here who want to be journalists or who will be working with information in the future. I commend to you, you are done so well in your education here. You've had a fantastic education here. Now you've got to test it with reality. Now you've got to explore that place in the shadow. And I rely on you to carry the flame. Thank you.