Academy Award-winning actress Meryl Streep called on journalists to “hold power to account” on Sunday night during her acceptance speech for the Cecil B. DeMille Award at The Golden Globes.
“We need the principled press to hold power to account,” Streep said. “To call them on the carpet for every outrage. That’s why our founders enshrined the press and its freedoms in our Constitution.”
Streep enjoined “the famously well-heeled Hollywood Foreign Press” and her fellow actors to support the Committee to Protect Journalists.
“Because we’re going to need them going forward,” Streep said. “And they’re going to need us to safeguard the truth.”
Earlier in the speech, Streep referenced an episode where President-elect Donald Trump’s mocked Serge F. Kovaleski, a reporter for The New York Times who suffers from a physical disability.
“It kind of broke my heart when I saw it, and I still can’t get it out of my head because it wasn’t a movie,” Streep said. “It’s real life.”
In a statement last year, Trump denied mocking Kovaleski, saying that he didn’t remember the reporter “despite having one of the all-time great memories.”
Here’s the press freedom segment of Streep’s speech:
The portion of that Meryl Streep speech that stunned and silenced the Golden Globes. pic.twitter.com/QIcQfTqDqB
— Dave Itzkoff (@ditzkoff) January 9, 2017
Trump was “not surprised” that his campaign was criticized by Streep, who he called “a Hillary lover” and one of many “liberal movie people” in an interview with The New York Times.
