Ali Velshi delivered an emotional goodbye to his eponymous show on Sunday as the MS NOW chief data reporter prepares to move to weeknights on June 15, when he will take the reins of “The 11th Hour.”
Velshi began his nearly 20-minute monologue by thanking his team for their contributions to the show since its launch in 2020. “For more than six years, our newsroom has been filled with journalists who chose this work at the exact moment in American history when it was most needed,” he said. “Producers and bookers, writers and researchers, people who spend their week fact-checking what the powerful said, so that you and I could hold those words up to the light on weekend mornings.”
The host reflected on the major news events that he and his team covered on “Velshi” over the years, including the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the killing of George Floyd.
“Journalism starts with bearing witness,” he said. “Journalism is the decision made every single day by people who could be doing something safer and more lucrative, to go to the place where something is happening, to look at it directly, to describe it as honestly as language allows, and to make sure the people who were not there, who cannot be there or who have deliberately kept away from there, know what happened.”