Lindsey Vonn knows how to get back up on the slopes. At Annenberg’s 2026 commencement, she will likely tell this year’s graduating class to do the same. After a crash at the Milano Cortina Winter Olympics and emergency surgery to save her leg, she knows a thing or two about overcoming challenges.
Next month, I am moving back home to Bahrain, an island in the Persian Gulf that is about one-quarter the size of Rhode Island. Since the start of the United States-Iran war, Bahrain intercepted more than 516 drones and 194 missiles — more than two projectiles for every square mile of the country.
What does Vonn’s version of resilience say to my fellow graduates and me as we enter our profession in such perilous times in the U.S. and abroad?
President Donald Trump continues to attack press freedoms, assault the dignity of immigrants and violate the limits of executive power. In an online announcement, Annenberg Dean Willow Bay said Vonn, who scored 84 World Cup wins and three Olympic medals, would give graduates “a powerful model of courage, authenticity and modern leadership.”
“Vonn is a master storyteller who has created a global media platform shaped by the lessons of sport, struggle and reinvention,” Bay said.
After years of campus conflict, industry layoffs and global violence, a speech about personal resilience will come as a relief. That makes Vonn an understandable choice. But it falls short of the courage demanded by the moment we face.
More than 8,000 journalists have been laid off in the U.S. since 2022, according to Reporters Without Borders. For many low-income and first-generation students, that number threatens their entry into the profession.
Graduates with financial stability, citizenship protections and job protections will enter the same weakened media industry. The U.S. has seen a sharp decline in press freedom, falling from fourth to 11th among 23 countries in the Inter American Press Association study. The study cited 170 attacks on journalists in the U.S. in 2025, along with federal efforts to limit free speech and public information.
The Varieties of Democracy Institute, a Swedish research group, found that the intimidation of media and adversarial voices was a key reason for the recent national “derailment of democracy,” with research finding that freedom of expression in the U.S. is at “its lowest level since the end of WWII.”
The past two years were also the deadliest for journalists globally, with 129 members of the press killed in 2025 alone, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. This is the highest number of journalists and media workers killed since data collection began in 1992.
Annenberg had the entire public sphere to choose from — reporters, politicians, lawyers, whistleblowers and advocates — for our commencement speaker. Many of them are more connected to the world Annenberg graduates are entering.
Some graduates will leave USC and enter U.S. legacy newsrooms. Others will return to homes where immigration enforcement is not a political debate, but an everyday threat. Many international students will go home knowing that free speech does not hold the same protections everywhere. Others will freelance without health insurance.
That is the room our commencement speaker will be addressing.
No doubt, Vonn will give a beautiful speech. She will tell graduates to get back up after we fall, and that message will ring true. But we need more than a feel-good speech.
For most of us, resilience will not equate to getting back on skis. It will mean returning to countries, communities, professions and homes where the pressure doesn’t go away when the ceremony ends.