The United States is the leader in the communications evolution but at the same time has a “staggering” lack of moral leadership Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh said in his speech Thursday in the Memorial Union.

About 200 people attended the speech in the Sun Room.

As a free-lance journalist, Hersh received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the My Lai massacre in South Vietnam. He also worked for the New York Times in the 1970s in Washington and New York.

To complement his Pulitzer, he has won more than a dozen major journalism prizes and written seven books, including an expos‚ of President Kennedy titled “The Dark Side of Camelot.”

Hersh spent a considerable amount of his presentation talking about his disapproval of Clinton’s administration, saying the president lies often and does not keep his promises.

“Clinton talks a good game, but he cuts the heart out of everything,” he said. “He has a chronic ability not to do what he says he’s going to do.”

Hersh said he feels that Americans put up with Clinton’s behavior because they do not demand in public figures what they do in friends.

“The same standards we impose in our personal life we don’t even begin to impose on public figures,” Hersh said, but apparently Americans put up with him because “he’s bringing in the economic bacon.”

Hersh showed concern about the corporation mergers that are going on right now, saying the poor will be negatively affected by them.

“The losers are the poor, the downtrodden,” he said. “The American working man is going to be a McDonald’s guy.”

Hersh also addressed his own field of study and how media mergers are affecting reporters, with newspapers becoming “ad factories.”

“We [reporters] don’t have a cutting edge,” Hersh said about the sterilization of the newsroom.

Lulu Rodriguez, associate professor of journalism and mass communication, attended the lecture, and she said she agreed with Hersh about consolidation of the media.

“You have more and more media being controlled by fewer and fewer people,” she said. “I think he hit that right on the nail.”

However, she said she felt Hersh spent too much time on Clinton’s personality flaws. “I think we’ve had too much of that already,” she said.

Hersh also said he was concerned about the United States constantly attacking Third World countries.

“It’s a disturbing trend how easy it is for us to go to war against Third World countries,” he said. “Something tells me there is something wrong with making the world safe for American democracy. Our policy — it’s a laugh-a-minute.”

Hersh said while America used to be respected in these countries during the ’60s due to involvement in their development, now they are not as well-liked.

“Have we lost something along the way? I think so,” he said.