October 28, 1997 - Journalist Gwen Ifill at Indiana's DePauw University

"I'm a great champion of the idea that there ought to be greater diversity in newsrooms," Gwen Ifill, NBC News national correspondent, said at DePauw University. "We are an industry which purports to tell the world kind of, in a veiled way, how it ought to live ... What we have is a responsibility in a constitutionally protected profession to make sure we're telling the story as clearly and as cleanly as possible. So one of the things you have to bring to that is people who come from different backgrounds." That, she says, "helps to present a variety of different viewpoints, and you end up with a product more representative of the people you're writing for."