Dowd Sees Future For Journalism

Despite forecasts that the age of print journalism is over, traditional reporting continues to play a vital role in holding public officials accountable, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd said last night at the Kennedy School of Government.

“It’s a tough time for journalism,” she said in the 2007 Theodore H. White Lecture. “But I don’t worry too much about journalism’s future.”

Political reporters take on the crucial task of creating a narrative that gives Americans a clearer sense of how well the government is doing its job, she said, and the importance of that charge will not wane, even as new forms of delivery emerge.

“At a time when journalism is considered an endangered species,” Dowd said, “the Bushies at least have proved that our profession is more necessary than ever.”

Dowd, whose columns on former President Bill Clinton’s affair with intern Monica Lewinksy won her a Pulitzer Prize in 1999, said the Bush administration has sought to create an “alternate reality” by “spending hundreds of millions on self-aggrandizing propaganda.”

And the Fourth Estate has been central to holding the White House in check, she said.

“The American public just has a wonderful sense of who they trust and who they don’t,” she said. “Sometimes they can get fooled, but they can judge only by what they have at hand.”

Before Dowd’s speech, Alex S. Jones, the director of Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, awarded the third annual David Nyhan Prize for Political Journalism to Washington Post reporter Dana Priest.

In 2005, Priest broke the story about secret CIA prisons in Thailand, Afghanistan, and Eastern Europe used to interrogate terror suspects. After winning a Pulitzer Prize for Beat Reporting in 2006, she co-wrote a story earlier this year detailing the neglect of veterans at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C.

According to Jones, the Nyhan Prize was created to commemorate the kind of “gutsy and stylish journalism” that Nyhan, a Boston Globe reporter, editor, and columnist who graduated from the College in 1962, embodied.

Dowd’s speech, filled with incisive one-liners, spanned a wide range of topics, from the current war in Iraq to Shakespeare’s “Othello” to the presidential campaign of comedian Stephen Colbert, who wrote for her column earlier this month.

Her speech also included the caricatures found in her biweekly Times column.

Speaking about Vice President Dick Cheney, she remarked, “Darth Vader is shaking his fist at Iran now. What could be more Shakespearean than that?”

But Dowd also expressed optimism about at least one Republican politician.

“If Rudy Giuliani can be a Red Sox fan, then anything can happen,” she concluded with a smile.