I am no longer sure that when I go out there and do my job it'll even see the light of air, if the experience of my network colleagues is anything to go by.

I leave CNN with the utmost respect, love and admiration for the company and everyone who works here. This has been my family and shared endeavor for the past 27 years, and I am forever grateful and proud of all that we have accomplished.

I was planning, I told everybody, to take him on the road with me. At the very least I fully expected to keep up my hectic pace, and my passion as a war correspondent.

I was really just the tea boy to begin with, or the equivalent thereof, but I quickly announced, innocently but very ambitiously, that I wanted to be, I was going to be, a foreign correspondent.

In emerging democracies like Russia, in authoritarian states like Iran or even Yugoslavia, journalists play a vital role in civil society. In fact, they form the very basis of those new democracies and civil societies.

Indeed in the full flush of journalistic passion and conviction I once told an interviewer that of course I would never get married. And I most definitely would never have children.

'm thrilled to be joining the incredible team at ABC News. Being asked to anchor 'This Week' and the superb tradition started by David Brinkley, is a tremendous and rare honor, and I look forward to discussing the great domestic and international issues of the day.

We hear foreign accents on CNN. It's crazy, it's wild, who knows, maybe they'll take you because you certainly don't fit in, in the American spectrum of news.

Yes, you are running businesses, and yes, we understand and accept that, but surely there must be a level beyond which profit from news is simply indecent.

Because if we the storytellers don't do this, then the bad people will win.

And I believe that good journalism, good television, can make our world a better place.

I have always thought it morally unacceptable to kill stories, not to run stories, that people have risked their lives to get.

If we have no respect for our viewers, then how can we have any respect for ourselves and what we do?

If you have a child, I said, you have a responsibility at least to stay alive.

They take journalism really seriously because they know the force that it is and can be.

U.S. soldiers, with whom I now have more than a passing acquaintance, joke that they track my movements in order to know where they will be deployed next.

And I really believe good journalism is good business.

But 17 years ago, I arrived at CNN with a suitcase, with my bicycle, and with about 100 dollars.

Here in the United States, our profession is much maligned, people simply don't trust or like journalists anymore and that's sad.

I have made my living bearing witness to some of the most horrific events of the end of our century, at the end of the 20th century.