The media today is all sex and soundbyte, Newkirk says.

Question: Are journalists doing their jobs?

Ingrid Newkirk: I think the media today is a total mess. It’s all sound bites. It’s all sex. It’s all confrontation. It’s all absurd, phony reality shows. It’s very hard to have an intelligent discourse that lasts any amount of time where someone can actually ask questions, you can answer, and they can ask a follow-up question, and you can answer it. You can actually get the brain opening, and closing, and moving around, and digesting this material and dwelling on it.

It’s what can you say in five words? How can you sum this up? So at PETA we have become gimmicky. We have become sex obsessed ourselves. We use naked women. We use scantily clothed people. We do whatever we need to do to take this serious message and try to get it into the media mind. And that’s very, very hard these days because the old days of the serious debate, they’ve gone.

Recorded on: November 12, 2007