Montgomery fellow and Pulitzer Prize winner Roger Wilkins claimed that contemporary journalism is inherently slanted towards providing entertainment at the expense of honest reporting during a lecture last night in Filene Auditorium.
"There used to be newspapers that were in the news business -- not the media business," Wilkins said.
Wilkins said that journalism today is geared more toward entertainment because it is entrenched in a money-making business. He did indicate, however, that the New York Times and the Washington Post have made sincere efforts to provide quality news outlets.
In contrast, the primary agencies of broadcast journalism -- CBS, NBC and ABC -- no longer fairly report the news, Wilkins said, because they are now "members of giant conglomerates ... and are constantly crushed by huge behemoths who want profits all of the time."
According to Wilkins, the cultural revolution of the 1960s has also affected the nature of journalism today. Although he said the era was overwhelmingly positive for providing "more human freedom and more opportunity," it also bred unmerited radicalism.
"You don't need to desecrate a flag to tell a president that you don't like his policies," he said.
He said today there is not just polarization in perspective, but there is also "a bitterness and nastiness toward other people that is unbelievable."
According to Wilkins, this bitterness has led to the gradual replacement of the "talking heads" of the news media with "screaming heads," such as Chris Matthews.
Wilkins said one of the biggest challenges in remedying the state of journalism today is the presentation of news to people who are not intellectuals without talking down to them or shouting at them like Matthews. This change is necessary because people today are generally not well informed, he said.
To support his claim, Wilkins pointed out that more than half of the nation still thinks that there is a link between Saddam Hussein and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks -- even after the government admitted ties were unlikely.
Consumers of news do not demand more from its sources, Wilkins said, indicating that if they did, it would prompt improvements in journalism.
Wilkins said he is optimistic that reforms in media will occur.
"I was born into a country that was segregated ... blatantly, as a national policy ... a country who's economic views are laissez-faire, meaning that it had no responsibility for the well-being of its citizens."
America has come a long way on those issues, and he said he is confident that even the news media will correct itself because American democracy is both contingent and predicated on the free flow of information.
Wilkins, currently a professor at George Mason University, received both his undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Michigan. Wilkins has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Washington Star and shared a Pulitzer Prize in 1972 for his coverage of the Watergate scandal with the Washington Post staff. Under the Johnson administration, he served as an Assistant Attorney General.
Wilkins spoke last night as part of the Montgomery Endowment's 25th anniversary series on truth and ethics in journalism.
