Carl Bernstein on Reporting the Truth During the Trump Era

BIANNA GOLODRYGA: Well, the evolution of journalism has faced many obstacles, including a current epidemic in its way. That, of course, is misinformation. Legendary journalist Carl Bernstein has seen it all. From a copy boy to winning the Pulitzer Prize for breaking the Watergate scandal, he visits that journey in his new book, out today, “Chasing History: A Kid in the Newsroom.” Here he is with Walter Isaacson, discussing his memoir and the issues that intersect politics and our culture today.

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WALTER ISAACSON: Thank you, Christiane. And, Carl Bernstein, welcome to the show.

CARL BERNSTEIN, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Good to be with you, old friend.

ISAACSON: Tell me about that moment when you first walked into “The Washington Star” newsroom and you got addicted to the clatter and clang of a newsroom.

BERNSTEIN: Well, I applied for a job as a copy boy and I hadn’t been hired yet. But the man who eventually hired me took me through a door into the newsroom, which I hadn’t seen yet. And there was this incredible chaos and commotion. But yet it was an ordered commotion. And everybody was running around and yelling “copy” and there was a deadline and it was the most exciting thing I think I’ve ever seen in my life.

ISAACSON: What were you wearing?

BERNSTEIN: I was wearing a cream colored suit that I bought a few days earlier in downtown Washington at No Label Louie’s. There’s a tale early in the book about that suit, about that suit and the kind of hazing ritual that I was put through with the suit.

ISAACSON: Tell me about that hazing ritual. You had to wash the carbon paper, man? How did you fall for that one?

BERNSTEIN: I had a feeling that my leg was being pulled, to use a polite expression. But just the head copy boy told me and showed how hard the copy boy’s job was, was to go around the newsroom and to pick up all the sheets in this terrible double-sided carbon paper. If you just put your fingers on it, it went up like dust. And that was part of the copy boy’s job. And we did it every day. But he said, “Oh, Bernstein,” he looked up at the clock and he said, “It’s noon.” “Yes, it’s noon.” And he said, “It’s time to wash the carbon paper.” And I thought about that. I said, wash the carbon paper? And especially because my father at the time owned a Laundromat. And I’m somewhat familiar with washing machines. But wash the carbon paper? He said, yes, you got to hurry up or we’ll be in trouble. And he had me going around in the whole newsroom to pick up every sheet, 100-200 sheets of this double-sided carbon paper and put it in a basket. And I’d hold out in front of me like that so it wouldn’t get on my cream colored suit. And he said, “Now take that into the men’s room and go wash that.” So I went into the men’s room and put it in the sink and filled the sink to about like that. And I turned on the water and it was one of those newfangled faucets with the big spray. And it sprayed up and suddenly, my new cream colored suit, I looked like a damn leopard that has been in a rainstorm.

BERNSTEIN: And with all these spots, it was all in purple from the carbon paper. And I knew that, wait a minute, something’s not right here.

ISAACSON: Let’s get more serious for a second. What were the values you learned in the old fashioned newsroom that’s almost like out of the movies?

BERNSTEIN: Well, it’s an old fashioned newsroom almost in the rewrite mold. But it’s also and I think resonates today and today’s media because Woodward and I came to call the best obtainable version of the truth. And “The Star” had (INAUDIBLE) about the truth and how you get to that contextual truth, by knocking on doors, by making sure (INAUDIBLE) don’t have an ax to grind. It was a much more fair and balanced newspaper than “The Washington Post” was, at that time, before Ben Bradlee got to “The Post” and threw out the old ways of “The Washington Post,” which bled its opinions on to the news pages. “The Washington Star” never did that. And Woodward and I would talk about the best obtainable version of the truth. And it was almost exactly the phrase that was used by my mentors at “The Star.” And they were absolutely insistent. You know, the elements of, what is the truth? Well, it’s about context as well as just stringing together disparate facts. And it’s about going out and seeing one source after another after another after another. And one of the things this book is about, yes, it’s about another time in America, another time in journalism. But it is also about how we still need to get stories out of this methodology that we used in Watergate. But it started at “The Star.” That’s where I learned it.

ISAACSON: Tell me about the phrase “the best obtainable version of the truth.” Somebody will say there is no absolute truth but —

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ISAACSON: — that phrase is you say, yes, but we’re aiming there.

BERNSTEIN: You’re aiming there but you keep going. You don’t stop. You may get the story one day. Look, we did 200 stories in a year on Watergate. That’s what would have done at “The Star.” You’d the story, you keep going, you keep going. You keep going, you don’t take no. You use common sense. You don’t go visit people in their offices with their bosses next to them. You go to their houses at night. (INAUDIBLE). I learned all that stuff at “The Star.” At “The Star,” it came naturally to people.

ISAACSON: You said that at “The Washington Star,” they were careful not to blur opinions with news and journalism.

BERNSTEIN: Absolutely. There was a line that was in — you did not cross that line.

ISAACSON: So how did we end up crossing that line, where we blur opinion with news journalism?

BERNSTEIN: I think it’s both the country and journalistic institutions at once. I think we need to look at the country as a culture, not just as a politics and a media enterprise. And people began looking, 15, 20, 25 years ago for information and news quotes that fit their own preconceived notions of what the truth ought to be, to reinforce what they already believe. And increasingly, I think media institutions started repeating that out of control beast, particularly the Murdoch newspapers, for instance. You look at what the “New York Post” became. It not only bled opinion, it was not interested in what this complicated truth is. And truth can be very complicated. And I think one of the things that we were able to do in the 1960s, ’70s and into the ’80s in journalism was to reflect the complexity of the truth. Look, great reporting has always been the exception. But good reporting had really been a hallmark of an awful lot of newsrooms in this country. And that started to change. Also, a kind of — you know, again, getting back to what I learned at “The Star,” lengthiness is made into (INAUDIBLE). You’ve got to keep going. You can’t stop. And the minute you do that, you undercut the best obtainable version of the truth, because you’ve got to keep getting more facts, more information, more misinformation that you say, wait a minute, I’m going to another source. And that source says that’s misinformation and disinformation.

BERNSTEIN: So it’s not just that you’re getting from your sources the truth. Often, you’re getting what’s not the truth. And then you have to make those decisions about what is the truth and that was just bred into us at “The Star.”

ISAACSON: The first day at the job at “The Times-Picayune” in New Orleans, had to go door-knocking. My (INAUDIBLE) said go knock on that door, find out what happened during the situation. Likewise, when we covered politics in New Hampshire, I remember you’d go door knocking. In your book, you talk about knocking on people’s doors. Explain why that’s so important.

BERNSTEIN: Because you get people at home when they’re relaxed, when they’re with their cup of coffee, when the kids are all around them. They’re in an environment in which they’re free of pressure. And maybe the best scene, in some ways, in “All the President’s Men,” the movie had some great scenes in it. And they probably did a better job of showing some of the aspects of reporting than we did in the book, quite honestly. And that scene where I — or Dustin Hoffman who was playing me — goes to see the bookkeeper. And who knows the secrets of how money was used to pay for this espionage and sabotage, it was the real meaning of Watergate from the White House. And I get my foot in the door. And but it’s her home and her sister is there and I’m fighting to stay in that living room with her. And I’m trying to make her comfortable. You’re going to people with an expectation that, very often, they’re going to tell you their truth if you give them a chance and you’re a good listener. And reporters so often just come in with a bunch of questions, throw a microphone in the person’s face, if it’s television, and run out the door when they’ve got a quick answer. There’s a scene in the book where I go out with a great police reporter named Walter Gold (ph). And what I learned from Walter Gold (ph) was how he got along with cops and respected them and gave them a chance to tell the truth. He brought them donuts, coffee at night, at the scene of a murder. He did not treat them like quotes, sources, not to be human beings. He looked at them as people. That’s the other thing that we learned at “The Star.” We’re dealing with people with emotions, particularly because we were covering civil rights. People who were being denied their rights, who bled, who hurt. And that’s the other thing about, even in Watergate, the sources had feelings. And if we could start to comprehend their feelings, look at Deep Throat. He was outraged at what he had seen. It was getting to that human factor in part that enabled the reporting, knowing that the bookkeeper was exercised. Somebody had said to me, you go to see that bookkeeper because she knows and she’s angry. She doesn’t like what she had to do. That’s part of the story. And you’re not going to get that on Hulu.

ISAACSON: As you were going through the Trump scandals that obviously brought back a lot of memories, what you and Bob Woodward did in Watergate, how were things different in the Trump scandals, especially the journalism? And was that a problem?

BERNSTEIN: It was a problem but I think it was a problem that a lot of the press met brilliantly. It might have taken a little while but they started reporting on television, in newspapers, — newspapers, yes, but also online, the best obtainable version of truth about Trump. And I can remember, you might remember this, on CNN. In the early months of the Trump presidency, I went on the air and I said, “He is lying. He is a serial liar.” And I think it may have been the first time that anybody said this. And I remember thinking long and hard that I was going to do this on the air. “He is a serial liar.” And I said, you know, I have to step back myself as a reporter. It almost takes my breath away to hear myself saying that on the air. But it’s repertorially accurate. It’s justified by the facts. And so we now need to be reporting on his serial lying, because it’s the fact. It’s the context.

BERNSTEIN: It’s the best obtainable version of the truth. And if we ignore that lying, that serial lying, then we are not telling the truth in our reporting. So I think what happened, that Trump was so extreme in his actions, in his authoritarianism, in his disdain for truth, so extreme, so easy in some ways, to get, as a reporter, facts, accounts of his dishonesty, accounts of his authoritarianism, accounts of his disbelief in democracy, that the reporting was done. What wasn’t, what didn’t happen, is people of the country were indifferent, to a large extent, a huge number of people in our country are more than indifferent to what Trump did and has done. And then there’s half the country that’s saying, in one way or another, you know, we know what it was and the support he continues to have, OK, it’s all right that he does these things.

ISAACSON: One reason that people felt that way about Trump and supported him and said, yes, stick it to him, is because they hated the media. What was that about?

BERNSTEIN: Oh, they hated the media. I think it’s easy to go — you know, during Watergate in the early days, as you know, Richard Nixon tried to make the conduct of the press the issue in Watergate; the conduct specifically of Woodward and me and Bradlee at “The Washington Post.” And every day, a spokesman for the president would get up and attack us for using innuendo and hearsay and all this. And it worked for a good while. That tendency of people to blame the messenger is always going to be there. We now live in a different culture, in which truth is devalued by huge numbers of people, who are looking for reinforcement of what they already believe in their media consumption. That’s a big difference from when you and I started out in this business. We live in a different culture. We live in a culture of untruth, to a large extent.

ISAACSON: What caused that? Why did that happen?

BERNSTEIN: That’s way beyond anything, the locus of it is not journalism. The locus of it is cultural. It has to do with the forces that have been building this country for 30, 35 years. You probably heard me say on the air over and over again, we are in a cold civil war in this country. I’ve said it ad infinitum, to the point where other people got sick of it. But then that cold civil war was ignited by Trump. And we are now past the point of ignition. And that is also what we need to be reporting on right now. I’d like to also turn for a minute to what may be the biggest story of all, that I think every news organization has got to keep on through this presidency, the next presidency, and that is voter suppression, voter suppression. We have one of our two political parties is now committed to undermining democratic election. That’s really what the Trump lies are about and their embrace by the Republican Party. It’s astonishing. It’s amazing what happened January 6th in the White House. It is amazing what those Republican senators and congress men have done since to embrace the untruth of what happened on January 6th and who was responsible. So it just gives a totally different reporting imperative, I think, than we’ve ever had before because never — and you have to go back to the Civil War when one of the two parties has become wed to undemocracy. That’s factual. That’s the best obtainable version of the truth. Now it doesn’t mean everybody in the party or everybody who votes for that party is committed to undemocracy. But right now, that story is not a story just about politics; it’s a story about our culture. That’s what we need to be reporting on right now.

ISAACSON: Carl Bernstein, thank you so much.

BERNSTEIN: Good to be with you, old friend.