Carl Bernstein Quotes
Carl Bernstein provides sharp journalism insights, urging the public to demand truth from media.
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The reality is that the media are probably the most powerful of all our institutions today and they, or rather we [journalists], too often are squandering our power and ignoring our obligations. The consequence of our abdication of responsibility is the ugly spectacle of idiot culture!
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You can't serve the public good without the truth as a bottom line.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The Congress is a dysfunctional institution; it's broken. One of our three branches of government is broken.
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The Congress is a dysfunctional institution; its broken. One of our three branches of government is broken.
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I think all good reporting is the same thing - the best attainable version of the truth.
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If you are a great news organization, you can't have the best obtainable version of the truth if your vision and your scale is reduced to a fraction of its former self.
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The most important ethical issues and the most difficult ones are the human ones because a reporter has enormous power to hurt people.
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There had always been black people in and out of our house, and from the outset I had been taught that for them life was defined by struggle and filled with injustice.
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Donald Trump is american neo-fascist. The word "neo" meaning "new", has a lot to do with it, a new kind of fascist in our culture, dealing with an authoritarian demagogic point of view, nativist, anti-immigrant, racism, bigotry that he appeals to.
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For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norms, even our cultural ideal.
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Hillary [Clinton] is neither the demon of the right's perception, nor a feminist saint, nor is she particularly emblematic of her time perhaps more old-fashioned than modern.
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In the John Paul II days, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had the advantage of staying in his cupboard - the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith - exchanging views only with the Pope, and speaking publicly only through carefully written missives on doctrinal issues.
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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.
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What will a Hillary Clinton presidency look like? The answer by now seems obvious: It will look like her presidential campaign, which in turn looks increasingly like the first Clinton presidency. Which is to say, high-minded ideals, lowered execution, half truths, outright lies (and imaginary flights), take-no prisoners politics, some very good policy ideas, a presidential spouse given to wallowing in anger and self-pity, and a succession of aides and surrogates pushed under the bus when things don't go right. Which is to say, often.