A two-time Pulitzer prize nominee and former White House correspondent warned an audience at Southeast Missouri State University Sunday that the media was in danger of losing freedom of the press unless it restored its credibility in the public's eyes.

Chuck Stone, a White House correspondent during the Kennedy administration, told the university audience that the public's perception of the media has been greatly diminished over the past 50 years and will require efforts to restore its credibility.

Unless that credibility is restored, freedom of the press is endangered, he said.

Stone is a journalism professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a media and political analyst for WTVD-TV in Durham. He was in Cape Girardeau to deliver the annual Michael Davis lecture at the university.

"Despite what the media has done to expose corruption and despite the massive good deeds we've done for the community," Stone said, "the public still ranks the media's integrity down somewhere between politicians and used car salesmen."

Stone pointed to the media's handling of the Monica Lewinsky-Bill Clinton scandal as an example of a specific case where the public blamed the media.

Polls indicated that 58 percent of the public thought the media's coverage of the Lewinsky matter encouraged Congress to proceed with the trial, Stone said. Half thought the media's coverage of the Lewinsky ordeal was "irresponsible," he said.

"The public demands that we clean house or they are going to do it for us," Stone said.

He encouraged the audience, many of whom were mass communication students at the university, to restore the credibility of the media by duplicating the efforts of the early journalistic muckrackers of a century ago, calling their investigative efforts "the legacy that still defines our mission."

He said, the press is obligated to defend the First Amendment. But the public's grant of freedom of the press obligates the press to do its job.

"The First Amendment is a conditional loan from the people," Stone warned. "And it is a loan that cannot be guaranteed forever unless we do our job."

The Michael Davis lecture series began three years ago. It is named in honor of Davis, a university student who died five years ago today as a result of injuries received during a fraternity hazing. He was studying mass communications.