The greatest failure of today's media is reporting facts without context, Carl Bernstein, of Washington Post Watergate fame, told Stony Brook University students on Nov. 18 in delivering the annual presidential lecture.
He blamed the media for amplifying the Washington’s dysfunction by focusing on “ideological and partisan ammunition,” reported Stony Brook’s “Happenings” online newsletter.
Bernstein echoed veteran journalist Leslie Gelb, saying truth has been reduced to a conflict of press releases and a contest of handlers.
Truth is judged by “theatrical performance” rather than evidence. Truth is “fear of opinion polls, fear of special interests, fear of judging others of fear of being judged, fear of losing power and prestige,” said Bernstein, visiting presidential professor at the Long Island school,
Bernstein believes the U.S. is on the “edge of plutocracy.” The biggest news stories are the “breakdown of the political system and whether it can be fixed, and whether we are going to to be a nation of the wealthy, for the wealthy, by the wealthy at the expense of the great majority of the our people.”
It will take at least a generation before the political system is fixed, according to Bernstein. “The government can begin to work only until the next generation undoes” the current mess in Washington.
He contrasted D.C. with the Kennedy era of 50 years ago when it would have been unthinkable that the federal government could “become completely dysfunctional, that money could become the most important element in the political system or that working class people and middle class people would be struggling.”
Though fractious debate existed during the 1960s, the national interest and looking for practical solutions would “come together to benefit the common good,” said the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.
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