Bob Wigginton

Bob Wigginton: A Great News Journalist

Bob Wigginton delightfully came to our Survey of Professional Media class on Friday February 26th. I really enjoyed listening to what he had to say. The principle of the speech was, “how will we know what we need to know without newspapers and journalists?” Bob brought up many good questions, which made me think about the near future. How are we going to know about anything happening in our country without our dependable newspapers? The journalists are almost like a fourth branch to our great government. Mr. Wigginton called these journalists “the watch dogs”. We have the executive branch, legislative branch, the judicial branch and of course “the watch dogs.” Without our journalists we won’t know what is happening out there. We take for granted what information we are receiving and where that comes from. Other countries such as China regulate what the citizens get to hear. America has never been like that, but if we lose our news sources, then it will become that. Investigative journalists work for the people. They keep us safe in the fact that if our government oversteps their boundaries than our journalists reveal their secrets. Mr. Wigginton also talked about black sites briefly. He talked about how a law made by Bill Clinton in the Clinton Administration brought upon something called Extraordinary Rendition.
This gives the power to the government to seek out and question anyone they feel is a liability to the United States as a whole. Without journalists we would not know anything about this causing anyone to be susceptible to this treatment.

Newspapers may not be around forever, but journalists will. The constant need to learn and keep people informed will always be there. We might be reading everything off of the internet soon instead of our hard copies of news print. This will change our lives, but since we are so connected to all of this information, we will also have to change. Change is inevitable. Bob Wigginton stated, “Finding a job will be tough as a journalist, but take it as a challenge.” He said of himself that he found out how important journalism was when he watched the Watergate scandal on television. This kind of informative power is very important. It comes with a lot of responsibility. No journalist has all of the answers, but what they do to try and inform the people should be commended.