investigative journalist who, at The Washington Post
, teamed up with Bob Woodward
; the two did the majority of the most important news reporting on the Watergate scandal
. These scandals led to numerous government investigations, the indictment of a vast number of White House Officials such as H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman
, Charles Colson
, and John Mitchell
, and the eventual resignation of President Richard Nixon
. For his role in breaking the scandal, Bernstein received many awards; his work helped earn the Post a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service
in 1973.
In a 1977 Rolling Stone
article, Bernstein revealed that over 400 US journalists had been employed by the Central Intelligence Agency
(Operation Mockingbird
), secretly carrying out assignments and publishing news stories for them.
Bernstein began working for The Washington Post
in 1966 and played an integral role in his partnership with Bob Woodward
during the Watergate scandal
.
You can't serve the public good without the truth as a bottom line.
The failures of the press have contributed immensely to the emergence of a talk-show nation, in which public discourse is reduced to ranting and raving and posturing. We now have a mainstream press whose news agenda is increasingly influenced by this netherworld.
The greatest felony in the news business today is to be behind, or to miss a big story. So speed and quantity substitute for thoroughness and quality, for accuracy and context. The pressure to compete, the fear somebody else will make the splash first, creates a frenzied environment in which a blizzard of information is presented and serious questions may not be raised.
The lowest form of popular culture—lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people’s lives—has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.
We are in the process of creating what deserves to be called the idiot culture. Not an idiot sub-culture, which every society has bubbling beneath the surface and which can provide harmless fun; but the culture itself. For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our cultural ideal.