Sid Salter, Perspective Editor and columnist for the Clarion-Ledger, addressed students and faculty in the Colvard Student Union’s Fowlkes Auditorium Friday on the evolution of media and politics in his presentation of “State Politics and the New Journalism.” The speech was hosted by the department of political science and public administration in conjunction with the Stennis Montgomery Center.In the MSU alumnus’s speech, Salter defined new journalism as a medium driven by bloggers and podcasters, who employ mass emails and YouTube to get their message across to the intended audience. He also cited Barack Obama as the first major American politician to proficiently use the power of new journalism
Salter, quoting blogger Jay Rosen of the Columbia Journalism Review, said that new political journalism is continuing to thrive with audiences due to a hole in traditional coverage.
“People are tired of hearing denial and reasoning in a vacuum,” Salter said. “Blogs, podcasts, e-mails, YouTube videos, text messages and websites from everyday citizens have started to fill this vacuum. In short, the gates are down in political journalism.”
Despite Salter’s description of a growing, evolving medium, he says that conventional mass media will continue to survive.
“Traditional mainstream media has enjoyed its best days in times of the nation’s greatest crises and cataclysms,” Salter said. “Readers and broadcast audiences flock to the mainstream media because of two motivating factors-credibility and access.”
Salter also relived some of his fondest stories as a journalist with the audience gathered in the auditorium, specifically a experience that would guide him throughout his career.
As a young journalist, fresh out of school, Salter worked at a small town paper. A local man brought a snake, which had supposedly swallowed a light bulb, to Salter’s office. Salter, at the time a self-described trusting soul, snapped a picture of the snake and published it in the next week’s newspaper without a caption explaining what happened.
Salter received a phone call the day of publication from an anonymous source that told him that the light bulb had been sewn in the snake. After realizing that he had been duped, Salter said that he had been taught a valuable lesson.
“From that day forward, I have been a better journalist and a more skeptical man,” Salter said. “No matter the source and no matter how reasonable the claims, I always closely investigate and spend time looking for the stitches.”
While investigating the stitches of issues, Salter said journalists must work to be fair and not become jaded.
“While I work hard to be fair as a journalist, I do not accept nor pretend to subscribe to the notion that journalists can ever be totally objective in their coverage,” Salter said, “For there is simply no way to divorce a journalist from his life experiences, from his core values, from his own individual sense of right and wrong, or from the point that his intelligence trumps his ability to buy into artifice and deception in the political realm.”
At the end of his speech, Salter reflected on the current state of MSU, saying the university is currently experience at time of uncertainty.
“We’re going through a rough patch right now,” Salter said. “We’re losing a baseball coach and we’ve had some snips about daffodils, brown [painted] things and other things of that nature.”
Salter also showed a sign of approval for the current interim president, Vance Watson.
“Whether or not Watson is the interim president or if he gets the job on a permanent basis, he’s a Mississippi State man in the position to steer the bus right now.”
In an interview after the lecture, Salter said that IHL members have assured him that the search for the university’s permanent president will be fair.
“I think it is critical that the IHL search process include all MSU
stakeholders in a meaningful way,” Salter said.
He said that it is now IHL’s standard policy with all institutions to keep searches closed. The policy is a directive of the IHL board and came about under director Tom Meredith, Salter said.
“Dr. Meredith says that confidentiality is necessary to protect current job status of applicants,” Salter said. “I think that choices involving the leadership of a major state university should be as open and as transparent as possible.”
Salter said he believes his paper, the Clarion-Ledger, handled the Foglesong controversy appropriately.
“While the Clarion-Ledger doesn’t shy away from controversial stories, we generally attempt to support and defend public education at all levels,” he said. “To that end, we believe we reacted to the Foglesong controversy in a measured and appropriate way.”
Political science instructor Whit Waide said he asked Salter to speak because of his vast knowledge on Mississippi politics and his connection to the university.
“He’s seen everything there is to see in politics,” Waide said. “Were it not for SidSalter, we wouldn’t have the political history and library that we have.”
Freshman communication major Sarah Stone said she heard about the lecture through Waide’s government class, but attended because the topic interested her.
“Being a communication major, it was cool to hear his opinion of how the media is rapidly changing,” Stone said.
She said she liked the fact that Salter is an active journalist in mass media, not just a professor. Stone also said she appreciated him talking about the university at the end of his lecture.
“He was a very real speaker,” Stone said. “He wasn’t just giving a speech.