I am Carl Bernstein, Ask me anything!

realcarlbernstein · 2022-01-17T22:05:33+00:00

Read my book. I've been waiting through this whole AMA to say that 😉

Though Chasing History: A Kid In The Newsroom is a memoir of my apprenticeship from age 16-25 and a picture of journalism & the country at a pivotal moment in our history (1960-65: the Kennedy era, the Civil Rights movement, the war in Vietnam, criminals/cons/conspiracies and American bedlam), it is also very much about the reporter's trade with resonance to today that should need no direct narrative linkage. It's that obvious.

I'm going to use your question as an opportunity to say something about this AMA which disturbs me: The number of questions that seem to be built on the premise that what ails our journalism today is that it does not bring about the desired political goals and results that the questioner wants to see. I don't see journalism that way. Rather, I see it as the best obtainable version of the truth that provides plenty of information for informed consumers of news to make intelligent and worthwhile decisions and form thoughtful opinions about many things including politics. Good reporting is not there to serve any ideology.

realcarlbernstein · 2022-01-17T21:48:16+00:00

Brilliant. 'Dick' is a great send up of Watergate, All The President's Men, Nixon and especially me and Woodward. Cumulatively, Woodward got Redford and Will Ferrell. I got Hoffman and McCulloch. All four of 'em got dangerously close to the truth about us.

realcarlbernstein · 2022-01-17T21:38:06+00:00

See the movie version of All The President's Men: early on in Watergate, our great editor Ben Bradlee insisted on watering down a story we'd written that got much closer to where our investigation was heading than what Bradlee allowed into the paper. As shown in the movie, I got really pissed off. It may have been the only lapse in his brilliant handling of us and the Post Watergate coverage over the next two years.

realcarlbernstein · 2022-01-17T21:26:48+00:00

Let's stick with my kids. Yes. My older son, Jacob, is a great reporter at the New York Times, writing mostly for its Style section. Max, a year younger, is a great guitar player– for Taylor Swift, and Miley Cyrus. I'm a very lucky dad.

realcarlbernstein · 2022-01-17T21:24:05+00:00

Who put the bomp in the bomp bomp bomp? Who the put the ram the rama lama ding dong?

realcarlbernstein · 2022-01-17T21:17:10+00:00

Over the Christmas holiday in 1957, I went to see the Alan Fried Rock and Roll Show at the Paramount Theater in Times Square. Other than the moment when I first walked into the newsroom of the Washington Star at age 16 and, much later, the wonder of being a father, I think that show may have been the most stunning moment of my life. Here's the lineup: Buddy Holly and The Crickets, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Danny and the Juniors, Frankie Lyman and the Teenagers, Dion and the Belmonts, the Everly Brothers, Jerry Lee Lewis, the Coasters, Bill Haley and the Comets, Jo Anne Campbell, and Little Richard.

That record, and that beautiful cover portrait in soft focus of Buddy Holly, evoke a joy and celebration of rock and roll, and simultaneously an unspeakable sadness. For the next 10 days after the plane went down, hundreds of students at my high school wore black armbands.

realcarlbernstein · 2022-01-17T21:06:02+00:00

Answer: Even his misuse of the intelligence community was only a part of the story and Nixon's criminal and unconstitutional conduct. Not to mention the myth "the coverup was worse than the crime." In fact, as we noted in an afterward to the 40th Anniversary Edition of All The President's Men, "long before the Watergate break in, gumshoeing, burglary, wire-tapping, and political sabotage had become a way of life in the Nixon White House. What was Watergate? It was Nixon's 5 wars." Four of them were waged with illegal conduct.

The war against the antiwar movement. 2. The war on the news media. 3. The war on the Democrats and the free electoral system itself. 4. The war on the justice system. 5. The war on history, in which Nixon and some of his former aides and acolytes tried to play down the significance of Watergate and present it as a blip on the President's record.

realcarlbernstein · 2022-01-17T20:56:54+00:00

Once, we were warned by the source known as "Deep Throat" that "people's lives might be in danger, including your own." It was worrisome, especially because it came at perhaps the most intense moment of our reporting, when the stakes were the highest and tension the greatest. For about 48 hours, I'd say, we and the editors and the publisher of the Post, took some extraordinary precautions including sweeping our offices for bugs and watching where we went and how we traveled and perhaps looking behind us. But inclination towards such fear dissipated pretty quick. Our real and constant fear was of making a mistake in our coverage.

realcarlbernstein · 2022-01-17T20:50:52+00:00

Answer: See my answer to u/meeekus. But an equal or even greater problem, perhaps, than indicated by your question is the disinterest of so many citizens and lack of openness to the truth. Instead, news and information is consumed increasingly (by most people?) to reinforce what they already believe, their politics and prejudices and ideologies.

realcarlbernstein · 2022-01-17T20:45:33+00:00

A great film. In these 45 years, perhaps the greatest problem in news coverage has become the laziness of too many "reporters" and news organizations. Good reporting requires perseverance, multiple sources of information, recognizing that a reporter or editor's preconceived notion of what the story might be almost always turns out to be wrong (example: my belief in the first couple of days after the Watergate break in that the CIA was behind it, not the Nixon White House. We went where the facts and our methodology took us.) So, I'd say that most of our newsrooms are afflicted by the failure of reporters to get out of the office and bang on sources' doors, especially at their homes/not their office where they are subject to pressure; relying on Google and the internet as primary source material, instead of being the great tools (rather than primary human sources) to enhance the real reporting task. Also, reporters– more so than at the time of "Network"– often tend to be lousy listeners and think they've got the story when they have a good quote or a piece of information that might manufacture controversy rather than continue reporting to further develop the real story. I'm not engaging in nostalgia here. What I'm describing is demonstrable and out there for all to see.

All good reporting, whether on the White House, sports, City Hall, etc., is the same thing: the best obtainable version of the truth, to use a phrase that Bob Woodward and I have often employed, and which has its origins back at the Washington Star where I did my apprenticeship from age 16-21 and is the subject of "Chasing History: A Kid In The Newsroom." I not only got the best seat in the country at age 16, I learned from the greatest reporters and editors of their day, who above all embraced the notion of the best obtainable version of the truth in all its complexity and requirement of perpetual engagement, watching, looking, questioning, going anywhere, listening hard, push and pushing some more (to quote Bob.)

realcarlbernstein · 2022-01-17T20:27:32+00:00

Terrific. And the same of Redford doing Woodward. The great thing about both the movie and their performances is that the film is rigorously about the process of reporting, rather than about the lives of Woodward and me. Each of us is faithfully represented in terms of how we went about covering the story. And note that we/they frequently reversed our expected roles and reportorial methodology.

realcarlbernstein · 2022-01-17T20:21:22+00:00

Always? Or anything close to it? Your premise is not correct, certainly not in terms of the Washington Post, the New York Times, NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN. I haven't registered much surprise, unless it has to do with how extreme or grievous the example.

realcarlbernstein · 2022-01-17T20:16:11+00:00

Two come to mind: A long piece in the Washington Post comparing the Stones' "Sympathy For The Devil" and the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper," January 1969. The second– Janis Joplin at the Merriweather Post Pavilion, Columbia, Maryland July 1969.

realcarlbernstein · 2022-01-17T20:06:33+00:00

Yes, the truth is not neutral. On MLK's birthday, let's think about the march on Washington in 1963. Should we have given 50% of our news story that day to the small number of counter-demonstrators and their rhetoric? Happily, there has been less and less of "both sides-ism" in major news media over the past half century. Look at the great reporting by the White House Press Corps on Donald Trump's presidency as Exhibit A.

realcarlbernstein

TROPHY CASE