The Daily Beast Podcast - Watergate Reporter Carl Bernstein Has a Fox News Theory

Episode Date: January 16, 2022

Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein joined co-host Molly Jong-Fast on this bonus episode of The New Abnormal to talk about his book Chasing History: A Kid in the Newsroom and what a journo who has seen it all thinks about today’s distrust of the media, outlets like Fox News and today’s Republicans, or as Bernstein calls them, “a party of sedition.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to another bonus episode of The New Abnormal, and we thank you so much for being here. Today we have legendary reporter who you of course know from his storied career as a reporter in Watergate and countless other stories, Carl Bernstein. And he's going to talk to us about his new book, Chasing History, A Kid in the Newsroom. Welcome to the New Abnormal, Carl Bernstein. I'm so excited to have you to talk about this book, Chasing History, A Kid in the Newsroom. Why did you decide to write this at this time? What the book is, it's an account of my first five years in journalism. I went to work at age 16 at a great newspaper, The Evening Star, the Washington Evening Star,

probably the best afternoon newspaper at the country at the time. I worked there for 1960 to 65, a momentous time in our history in this country and in the nation's capital where I was born and raised. We're talking about the beginning of the Kennedy presidency, in fact, his campaign. campaign for president. I actually covered at age 16 part of it. When I went to work there in August 1960, I covered his inauguration as a 16 year old because I got at age 16 the best seat in the country. It was an amazing thing, a kind of happenstance at the time that I was hired at the Washington Star. I had one foot in the classroom, one foot in the juvenile court,

one foot in the pool hall. And I was really lucky that I got hired for this remarked. job which gave me a seat, the best seat in the country at age 16. So back to back to the question of why did I choose to write about it? My five years at the start in their way are the most joyous years of my life and everything that I learned about reporting, about journalism. I pretty much learned in those five years. And so the book is written not from the point of view or voice of the old man looking back, but rather it's the voice of his kid. Tell him that tale about the time of 1965, say, when I left. And so you have a sense of what's going on in the country and civil rights in the Kennedy White House, in the Johnson White House, in the beginning of the anti-war movement.

And in the city, it's the capital of the United States where I grew up. And it was a Jim Crow town when I grew up. How do you remember all this stuff? I mean, there's some really specific stuff in here. That's what I always wonder. I have my scrapbooks from when I work there, so I have every story that I ever wrote there. And in the scrapbook also are commendations and letters of commendation from colleagues and some internal stuff. And then I interviewed pretty much everybody who was alive, who were my teachers and mentors at the star in those days,

as well as the colleagues that I was the closest to. one of the dedications in the book is to Lance Morrow, the great former Time magazine Sass. He and I were the closest to friends in my years at the star. We've continued to be. And I have a whole huge shelf of interviews with the people that I worked with. Who were my best friends at the time, who most of them were a good 10 years older than I was, but they were also the people who taught me. The star became like my family.

I'm curious, since this book is about life in old newspapers, what do you think about the current problem where we have no local news? I think the absence of local newspapers, the absence of local real serious news gathering in our town, cities, and communities across the country is an irrevocable loss that has changed the way people live and the way they get their information. at the time that I was at the star, most big cities, had two and three newspapers. Small towns, even of 50,000 had one or two newspapers that really provided the cohesion,

a kind of social fabric for the town, the city, the community. And they started to disappear before the internet, actually. The really critical moment was when chains like Gannett started coming into town. thousands and cities, buying one of the local paper, stripping it of most of its repritorial abilities and to save money, looking only toward advertising and gimmicks instead of covering the news. Gannett was the most offensive of all of them, but all the chains eventually did it pretty much, Knight Ridder, almost all of them. And then they would enter into joint operating agreements with the other existing newspaper, which they pretty

soon would shut down. So you were left with one lousy paper. And then the internet started to come in toward, you know, the end of the last century. The result is the disappearance of these great local news gathering organizations, leaving towns, cities all across the country with no element of real reporting. You know, Bob Woodward and I have used for 50 years now since Watergate, the phrase the best obtainable version of the truth, to describe what real reporting is. is. And these papers did that. They were a real reflection of what was really going on in their communities and the interests of the people there and what was happening and local boards

and schools and businesses. That doesn't exist anymore. But the best obtainable version of the truth requires, let me back up here, that the best obtainable version of the truth was really a concept that I learned at the Washington Star, the phrase that I was taught. I was taught. it was the truth in all its complexity, which meant that the basic repartorial task was not to just get on the phone and get information. And today, people just, today, too many reporters, if not most, think, oh, I'll get, I'll go on to Google and I'll get some information from Google and I'll call a few people on the phone.

Right. The real thing about reporting is you've got to get out of the office. You've got to knock on doors. You've got to go to one source after another, after another, after another. You need real perseverance. And there's a kind of straight line in this book, even though the book is written about these five years of this kid, learning these amazing things from the greatest reporters in the country, really, many of them.

When I went to work at the Star in 1960, we had three Pulitzer winners from the previous three years, Mary Lou Werner, had won the Pulitzer in 1959 for covering massive resistance to desegregation in Virginia. Miriam Ottenberg, the first woman reporter on the staff back in the 1930s. She had just won a Pulitzer in 1960 for crooked merchandising in the city of Washington. She had won the Public Service Award. We had these incredible reporters, Haynes Johnson, Mary McGurray, perhaps the greatest writing stylist in the country. who later came to the Washington Post

around the time the Star folded. So what you had in the Star, which was kind of the apex, the absolute best of a community paper, the community happened to be the capital of the United States and the best of the afternoon

papers, was a standard to provide readers with what's really going on. In the case of the Star, both into Washington, D.C., the town, as opposed to the Capitol building and the White House, as well as great national coverage. Tell me, have you thought of a way to save local news that no one else has thought of? No, I haven't. I think there is an awful lot of great local reporting going on through public service,

journalistic communes and news organizations like ProPublica. I think there are small weekly paper. that are alternative newspapers that are actually print newspapers that still exist as well as online. But no, there is no substitute for what we've lost here. And the terrible fact is that local news is left to television. And local television news has always been really a disgrace in this country. If you look at the 10 o'clock or 11 o'clock news in almost every market in America, and this goes back 40, 50 years, the coverage that doesn't really. reflect what's really going on in the community. We used to call it lead and bleed. It's got to crime stories. It's got to weather. It's got some happy time stories. It's got the most obvious stuff. Does it go into any kind of depth about what's really going on in a city? No. And is it any reflection of the reality, the existential reality of what goes on in Philadelphia or a small

town in Maryland? No, not at all. I agree, and a lot, you're not the first person to tell me that younger journalists don't necessarily have the same kind of shoe leather on the ground hunger that older journalists did do, but I just want to push back on that for a minute. I mean, people don't answer their telephones anymore. It is a little bit of a different situation, right? It's a totally different situation. Let's look at why it's different, but you just gave the really disheartening answer. People don't answer their telephones anymore. It's not about doing most of the reporter reporting on the telephone. It's about getting out of the office and talking to people and listening to them. A good part of being a reporter supposedly and ideally is listening to people,

give you information. Most people will actually try to tell you their truth, whatever it is. If you sit across from them and you spend some real time with them and you develop them as sources, you're not going to do that sitting sitting in an office and an antiseptic office where you don't even have the ability to use a telephone. It's an insane notion of news. And I don't think this is about nostalgia in the least. It's about laziness. It's about not caring. It's about news organizations, not giving a damn about their readers and their viewers. And it's an awful situation.

Why in the world, if you're sitting in a newsroom that Politico or the beast or anybody else has given you this office, has given you this wonderful job, why would you not go out to talk to the people who are making news? You give me the answer, Molly. It's nuts. And it's one of the reasons that people don't have confidence in the media today because so little of it is being done. Look, we have this great technology. The great technology should be an impetus for more great reporting. You use the technology in support of what has been done to cover news well for a century.

The basics remain the same, but the basics have been undermined by laziness, by editors and publishers of the new news sites who think, okay, well, we can get. our ads, we can thrive without doing a reporting. And that's what's really going on is one reason why people think that the quote media is, have such little trust in it. The other thing that's happened in this country is that there is a predilection among readers and viewers to look for information, not the best obtainable version of the truth, but rather to look for information that fits their preconference. notions of their own politics, their own philosophical beliefs. It's one of the reasons

Fox News has been so successful. People would gravitate, it's not a news organization, but people gravitate toward it because it reinforces what they already believe. That's not covering the news. I have a question for you, which is you, I think you have a good point there about the sort of difference in the way the culture is now than it was during Watergate. During Watergate, since you were so involved with Watergate, I think it's important. You had a Republican Party that was not beyond shame. Do you notice a difference now? I mean, of course, I've talked about, I've talked about this on the air at CNN for four years. The difference between the time of Watergate and now, indeed, is the Republican Party that Richard Nixon was forced from office,

because Republicans joined Democrats, first of all, in the Senate Watergate investigation, you had Republicans who were interested in getting to the truth. Then you had the impeachment proceedings against Nixon in the House by the House Judiciary Committee where courageous Republicans voted for articles of impeachment. And Nixon knew that he was going to be impeached by the House. The question was whether he would be convicted by the Senate. And after his tapes were disclosed and the contents of the tapes made it clear that we had a criminal president of the United States who had undermined, among other things, the electoral process in this country through political sabotage and espionage that Woodward and I had written about for two years at the

Washington Post, Barry Goldwater, the great conservative who had been the nominee for president of his party in 1964. Goldwater, along with the other leaders of the Republican Party in the House and in the Senate, marched down to the White House, sat across from Richard Nixon in the Oval Office, and Nixon said to Goldwater, Barry, how many votes do I have in the Senate? Nixon thinking that he would have enough votes to, as Donald Trump was able to do, to escape conviction in the Senate, where you needed two-thirds of the members of the Senate to vote for conviction if you were going to be removed from office. And Nixon really expected he would be acquitted, that he would not be convicted. Goldwater looked at Nixon and said, Mr. President, you might have four votes and you

don't have mine. And at that moment, Nixon knew that he was finished and then he would have to resign. Compare that to the Republican Party today, which has become a party of sedition. We've never had a seditious president of the United States before who tried to stage a coup to keep in office and a criminal conspiracy to remain in office. A Republican Party today, which continues to cover up what had happened on January 6th. So we're talking about a different time in America,

a different Republican Party. A good part of what, you know, a good part of what chasing history a kid in the newsroom is about is what was happening from 1960 to 65. The last thing, in the last part of the book about me covering the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Exact legislation that today's Republican Party is trying to undermine and scuttle.

This was one of the great fights of all time to end the disenfranchisement of black people in this country. So what the book is and what it keeps doing is going to, who were we at the time that I was at the Washington Star as a city, as a country? as a community. It's got all kinds of stuff that this kid reporter got to do, including covering grisly crimes and they get great characters in the newsroom, covered police headquarters, as well as, you know, look, I had been at the star for four weeks. And head copy boy said to me, Bernstein, go to Burning Tree Country Club. President Eisenhower, who was then in his last weeks in office, is playing golf at Burning Tree, and we've got a photographer there, Paul Schmick,

go up there, find Schmick, get his rolls of film, and bring him back to the office. I get the Burning Tree, and I have this Washington Star ID that functions as a press card. I flash it at the head caddy. The head caddy takes me up to the putting green, where the president of the United States is sinking putts, going to practice green. And one secret service agent is is a few yards beyond them. And I'm able, first time I ever saw a president of the United States. I was so close to Eisenhower,

I could see the brown spots on his hands while he was putting. And, you know, I made a note in my notebook about the brown spots on his hands. The photographer motioned me over to him. He gave me, opened his camera, gave me his roles of film, which I ran back to the office. These are the things I got to see.

A couple weeks later, John Kennedy, who was in the last days of the campaign against Nixon for president, came to my high school and in Silver Spring, Maryland. And the state editor of the newspaper said, Bernstein, we've got our top political reporter coming to cover Kennedy at Montgomery Blair High School. But you know the grounds in a school.

Why don't you cover the crowd? And so here I was. I'd been there like two months. And I was covering the candidate for the presidency in the United States. You think of what I got to do there, this kid with this amazing. seat, watching this world, growing up in this world of the President of the United States, the Senate of the United States, the House of Representatives, but also the alleyways and streets of this city. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Carl Bernstein.

Well, I hope people read this book. On that note, we'll wrap this episode of the new abnormal from The Daily Beast. In future episodes, we'll be talking to smart folks from the Daily Beast and beyond from media, culture, politics and science will help us understand what's happening to our country and the world. We hope you'll subscribe to us on your favorite podcast app and share the show on social media. Thanks so much for listening and we'll see you again on the next episode. Want more great listens?

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