Reflections of post-WafteriEate journalism.

T H E IDIOT CULTUREBy Carl Bernstein

I t is now nearly a generation since the drama thatbegan with the Watergate break-in and ended withthe resignation of Richard Nixon, a fuU twenty yearsin which the American press has been engaged in a

strange frenzy of self-congratulation and defensivenessabout its performance in that afiair and afterward. Theself<ongratulation is not justified; the defensiveness,alas, is. For increasingly the America rendered today inthe American media is illusionary and delusionary—<lis-figured, unreal, disconnected from the true context ofour Uves. In covering actually existing American life, themedia—^weekly, daily, hourly—break new ground in get-ting it wrong. The coven^e is distorted by celebrity andthe worship of celebrity; by the reduction of news to gos-sip, which is the lowest form of news; by sensationalism,which is always a turning away from a society's real con-dition; and by a political and social discourse that we—the press, the media, the politicians, and the people—are turning into a sewer.

Let's go back to Watergate. There is a lesson there, par-ticularly about the press. Twenty years ago, on June 17,1972, Bob Woodwaixl and I began covering the Watei^testory for The Washington Post. At the time of the break-in,there were about 2,000 full-time reporters working inWashington, D.C, according to a study by the ColumbiaUniversity School of Journalism. In the first six monthsafterward, America's news organizations assigned onlyfourteen of those 2,000 men and women to cover theWatergate story on a fiill-time basis. And of those four-teen, only six were assigned to the story on what might becalled an "investigative" basis, that is, to go beyondrecording the obvious daily statements and court pro-ceedings, and try to find out exactly what had happened.

Despite some of the mythology that has come to sur-round "investigative" journalism, it is important toremember what we did and did not do in Watergate. Forwhat we did was not, in truth, very exotic. Our actualwork in uncovering the Watergate story was rooted inthe most basic kind of empirical poUce reporting. Werelied more on shoe leather and common sense andrespect for the truth than anything else—on the princi-ples that had been drummed into me at the wonderful

CARL BERNSTEIN is the author most recently of Loyalties: ASon's Memoir (Simon and Schuster).

old Washington Star. Woodward and I were a couple ofguys on the Metro desk assigned to cover what at bottomwas still a burglary, so we applied the only reportorialtechniques we knew. We knocked on a lot of doors, weasked a lot of questions, we spent a lot of time listening:the same thing good reporters from Ben Hecht to MikeBerger tojoe Uebling to the yoimg Tom Wolfe had beendoing for years. As local reporters, we had no covey ofhighly placed sources, no sky's-the-Iimit expenseaccounts with which to court the powerful at fancyFrench restaurants. We did our work far from theenchanting world of tbe rich and the famous and thepowerful. We were grunts.

So we worked our way up, interviewing clerks, secre-taries, administrative assistants. We met with them out-side their offices and at their homes, at night and onweekends. The prosecutors and the FBI interviewed thesame people we did, but always in their offices, always inthe presence of administration attorneys, never at home,never at night, never away from jobs and intimidationand pressures. Not surprisingly, the FBI and the JusticeDepartment came up with conclusions that were theopposite of our own, choosing not to triangulate keypieces of information, because they had made what theacting FBI director ofthe day, L. Patrick Gray III, called "apresumption of regularity" about the men around thepresident of the United States.

Even our colleagues in the press didn't take ourreporting seriously, until our ordinary methodologyturned up some extraordinary (and incontrovertible)information: a tale of systematic and illegal political espi-onage and sabotage directed from the White House,secret funds, wiretapping, a team of "plumbers"—bur-glars—^working for the president of the United States.And then ofthe cover-up, an obstruction of justice thatextended to the president himself.

It is important to remember also the Nixon admini-stration's response. It was to make the conduct of thepress the issue in Watergate, instead ofthe conduct ofthepresident and his men. Day after day the Nixon WhiteHouse issued what we came to call the "non-denial":asked to comment on what we'd reported. Press Secre-tary Ron Ziegler, House Minority Leader Jerry Ford, orSenate Republican leader Bob Dole would attack us aspurveyors of hearsay, character assassination, and innu-

22 lliE NEW REPUBUC JUNE S, IBK

endo without ever addressing tUe specifics of our stories."The sources of The Washington Po.v/are a fountain of mis-information," the Wbite House responded wben wereported tbat the president's closest aides controlled tbesecret funds tbat had paid for the break-in and a perva-sive cover-up (not to mention John Mitchell's inspiredwords tome: "If you print that, Katie Graham's gonna gether titcaugbtin a big fat wringer...").

Rather than disappearing after Watergate, the Nixon-ian tecbnique of making the press tbe issue reached newheights of cleverness and cynicism during tbe Reaganadministration, and it flourishes today. Hence Reagan'srevealing statementabout the sad andsorry events that rav-aged bis presidency inthe Iran-contra affair:"What is driving me upthe wall is that thiswasn't a failure untilthe press got a tip fromthat rag In Beirut andbegan to play it up.This whole thing boilsdown to a great irre-sponsibility on thepart of the press."

And now in GeorgeBush we have still an-other president ob-sessed with leaks andsecrecy, a presidentwho could not under-stand why the pressconsidered it newswhen his men set up afaked drug bust inLafayette Square acrossfrom the Wliite House,"Whose side are youon?" he asked. It was atruly Nixonian ques-tion. This contempt fortbe press, passed on tobundreds of officialswho hold public officetoday—including Bush, may be the most important andlasting legacy of the Nixon administration.

In retrospect, tbe Nixon administration's extraordi-nary campaign to undermine the credibility of the presssucceeded to a remarkable extent, despite all the post-Watergate posturing in our profession. It succeeded inlarge part because of our own obvious shortcomings.The hard and simple fact is that our reporting has notbeen good enough. It was not good enougb in the Nixonyears, it got worse in the Reagan years, and it is no betternow. We are arrogant. We have failed to open up ourown institutions in the media to the same kind ofscrutiny that we demand of other powerful institutionsin tbe society. Wt are no more forthcoming or gracious

ROSS P K K O T . E ' R t S l D r . N T l A l . (.: A N I) I D A IF.

in acknowledging error or misjudgment than the con-gressional miscreants and bureaucratic felons we spendso mucb time scrutinizing.

The greatest felony in the news business today (asWoodward recently observed) is to be behind, or to miss,a major story; or more precisely, to seem behind, or toseem in danger of missing, a major story. So speed andquantity substitute for thoroughness and quality, foraccuracy and context. The pressure to compete, the fearthat somebody else will make the splash first, creates afrenzied environment in which a blizzard of informationis presented and serious questions may not be raised;

and even in those for-tunate instances inwhich such questionsare raised (as hap-pened after some oftbe egregious storiesabout the Clintonfamily), no one hasdone the weeks andmonths of work to sortit aU out and to answerthem properly.

Reporting is notstenography. It is thebest obtainable ver-sion ofthe truth. Thereally significanttrends in journalismbave not been towarda commitment to thebest and the mostcomplex obtainableversion of the trutb,not toward building anew journalism basedon serious, tboughtfulreporting. Those arecertainly not the pri-orities tbat jump outat the reader or tbeviewer from Page Oneor "Page Six" of mostof our newspapers;and not what a viewer

gets when he turns on tbe 11 o'clock local news or, toooften, even network news productions.

"All right, was it really the best sex you ever had?"Those were the words of Diane Sawyer, in an interview ofMaria Maples on "Prime Time Live," a broadcast of ABCNews (where "more Americans get their news from ...tban any otber source"), Those words marked a new low(out of whicb Sawyer herself has been busily climbing).For more than fifteen years we have been moving awayfrom real journalism toward the creation of a sleazoidinfo-tainment culture in which the lines between Opraband Phil and Geraldo and Diane and even Ted, betweenthe New York Post and Newsday, are too often indistin-guishable. In this new culture of journalistic dtiUation, we

24 THE NEW REPUBLIC JUNE 8,1992

teach our readers and our viewers that the trivial is signif-icant, that the lurid and the loopy are more importantthan real news. We do not serve our readers and viewers,we pander to them. And we condescend to them, givingthem what we think they want and wbat we calculate willsell and boost ratings and readership. Many of them,sadly, seem to justify our condescension, and to kindle atthe trash. Still, it is the role of journalists to challengepeople, not merely to amuse them.

We are in the process of creating, in sum, whatdeserves to be called tbe idiot culture. Not an idiot sub-culture, which every society has bubbling beneath thesurface and wbich canprovide harmless fun;but the culture itselfFor the first time inour history the weirdand the stupid and thecoarse are becomingour cultural norm,even our culturalideal. Last month inNew York we witnesseda primary election inwhicb "Donahue,""Imus in the Morn-ing," and the disgrace-ful coverage of theNew York Daily Newsand the New York Posteclipsed The New YorkTimes, The WashingtonPost, tbe network newsdivisions, and the seri-ous and experiencedpolitical reporters onthe beat. Even TheNew York Times hasbeen reduced to nam-ing the rape victim intbe Willie Smitb case;to putting Kitty Kelleyon tbe front page as anews story; to parlay-ing poUs as if tbey werepolicies.

I do not mean to attack popular culture. Good jour-nalism is popular culture, but popular culture thatstretches and informs its consumers rather tban thatwhich appeals to the ever descending lowest commondenominator. If, by popular culture, we mean expres-sions of thought or feeling that require no work of thosewbo consume them, then decent popular journalism isfinished. What is happening today, unfortunately, is thatthe lowest form of popular culture—lack of information,misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for thetruth or the reality of most people's lives—has overrunrealjournaUsm.

Today ordinary Americans are being stuffed withgarbage: by Donahue-Geraldo-Oprah freak shows (cross-

GERALDO RIVERA, TELEV ISI O N J O U RN ALIST

dressing in the marketplace; skinheads at your cornerluncheonette; pop psychologists rhapsodizing over tbeairways about the minds of serial killers and sex offend-ers); by the Maury Povich news; by "Hard Copy"; byHoward Stern; by local newscasts that do special seg-ments devoted to hyping hype. Last month, in sup-posedly sophisticated New York, the country's biggestmedia market, there ran a craven five-part series on the11 o'clock news called "Where Do They Get Those Peo-ple .. .?," a special report on where Geraldo and Opraband Donahue get their freaks (the promo for the seriesfeatured Donahue interviewing a diapered man with a

pacifier in his mouth).The point is not

only that this is trashjournalism. Tbatmucb is obvious. It isalso essential to notethat this was on an NBC-owned and -operatedstation. And who dis-tributes Geraldo? TheTribune Gompany ofChicago. Who ownsthe stations on whichthese cross-dressersand transsexuals andskinheads and lawyersfor serial kiUers get tostrut their stuff? Tbenetworks, the Wash-ington Post Company,dozens of major news-papers that also owntelevision stations,Times-Mirror and theNew York Times Com-pany, among others.And last month IvanaTrump, perhaps thesingle greatest cre-ation of the idiot cul-ture, a tabloid artifactif ever there was one,appeared on the coverof Vanity Fair. On the

cover, that is, of Conde Nast's flagship magazine, the sameConde Nast/Newhouse/Random House whose execu-tives will yield to nobody in their solemnity about theirprofession, wbo will tell you long into the night how seri-ously in touch with American culture they are, how seri-ous they are about the truth.

Look, too, at what is on The New York Times best-sellerlist these days. Double Cross: The Explosive Inside Story oftheMobster Who Controlled America by Sam and Chuck Gian-cana, Warner Books, $22.95. (Don't forget that $22.95.)This book is a fantasy pretty much from cover to cover. Itis riddled with inventions and lies, with conspiracies thatnever happened, with misinformation and disinforma-

continued on page 28

JUNE a, 1992 THE NEW REPUBLIC 25

tion, aU designed to line somebody's pockets and satisfythe twisted egos of some fame-hungry relatives of a mob-ster. But this book has been published by Warner Books,part of Time Warner, a conglomerate I 've been associatedwith for a long time. (-4// the President's Men is a WarnerBros, movie, the paperback oi All the President's Men wasalso published by Warner Books, and I've just finishedtwo years as a correspondent and contributor at Time.)Surely the publisher of Time has no business publishing abook,that its executives and its editors know is a historicalhoax, with no redeeming value except financial.

By now the defenders of the institutions that I amattacking will have cried the First Amendment. But this isnot about the First Amendment, or about free expres-sion. In a free country, we are free for trash, too. But thefact that trash will always find an outlet does not meanthat we should always furnish it with an outiet. And thegreat information conglomerates of this country are nowin the trash business. We aU know pornography when wesee it, and of course it has a right to exist. But we do notall have to be porn publishers; and there is hardly amajor media company in America that has not dipped itstoe into the social and political equivalent of the pornbusiness in the last fifteen years.

Many, indeed, are now waist-deep in the big muddy.Take Donahue. Eighteen years ago Woodward and Iwent to Ohio on our book tour because we were told thatthere was a guy doing a syndicated talk show there whowas the most substantive interview in the business. Andhe was. Donahue had read our book. He had charts, heknew the evidence, be conducted a serious discussionabout the impUcations of Watergate for the country andfor the media. Last month, however, Donahue put BillClinton on his show—and for half an hour engaged in amud wrestiing contest that was even too much for thestudio audience. Donahue was among those interviewedfor that WNBC special report about "Where Do They GetThose People . . .?," and on that report he uttered adamning extenuation to the effect that as Oprah and theothers get farther out there, he too has to do it.

Yes, we have always had a sensational, popular, yellowtabloid press; and we bave always had gossip columns,even powerful ones like Hedda Hopper's and WalterWinchell's. But never before have we had anything liketoday's situation in which supposedly serious people—Imean the so-called intellectual and social elites of thiscountry—Uve and die by (and actually believe!) thesecolumns and these shows and millions more rely uponthem for their primary source of information. Liz Smith,Newsday's gossip columnist and the best of a bad lot, hasadmitted blithely on more than a few occasions that shedoesn' t try very hard to check the accuracy of many of heritems, or even give the subjects of her coltimn the oppor-tunity to comment on what is being said about them.

For the eight years of the Reagan presidency, thepress failed to comprehend that Reagan was a realleader—however asleep at the switch he might haveseemed, however shallow his intellect. No leader sinceFDR so changed the American landscape or saw hisvision of the country ajid the world so thoroughly

implanted. But in the Reagan years we in the pressrarely went outside Washington to look at the relation-ship between policy and legislation and judicialappointments to see how the administration's policieswere affecting the people—the children and the adultsand the institutions of America: in education, in theworkplace, in the courts, in the black community, in thefamily paycheck. In our ridicule of Reagan's rhetoricabout tiie "evil empire," we failed to make the connec-tion between Reagan's poUcies and the willingness ofGorbachev to loosen the vise of communism. Now therecord is slowly becoming known. We have, in fact,missed most of the great stories of our generation, fromIran-contra to the savings and loan debacle.

The failures of the press have contributed immenselyto the emergence of a talk-show nation, in which publicdiscourse is reduced to ranting and raving and posturing.We now have a mainstream press whose news agenda isincreasingly infiuenced by this netherworld. On the daythat Nelson Mandela returned to Soweto and the aUies ofWorld War II agreed to the unification of Germany, thefront pages of many "responsible" newspapers weredevoted to the divorce of Donald and Ivana Trump.

Now the apotheosis of this talk-show culture is beforeus. I refer to Ross Perot, a candidate created and sus-tained by television, launched on "Larry King Live,"whose willingness to bluster and to pose is far less in tunewith the workings of liberal democracy than with thesumo-pundits of 'The McLaughlin Group," a candidatewhose only substantive proposal is to replace representa-tive democracy with a live TV talk show for the entirenation. And this candidate, who has dismissivelydeflected all media scrutiny with shameless assertions ofhis own ignorance, now leads both parties' candidates inthe polls in several major states.

Today the most compelling news story in the world isthe condition of America. Our political system is in adeep crisis; we are witnessing a breakdown ofthe comityand the community that has in the past allowed Americandemocracy to build and to progress. Surely the advent ofthe talk-show nation is a part of this breakdown. Somegood journalism is stiU being done today, to be sure, but itis the exception and not the rule. Good journaUsmrequires a degree of courage in today's climate, a qualitynow in scarce supply in our mass media. Many currentassumptions in America—about race, about economics,about the fate of our cities—need to be challenged, andwe might start with the media. For, next to race, the storyof the contemporary American media is the great uncov-ered story in America today. We need to start asking thesame fundamental questions about the press that we doofthe other powerful institutions in this society—aboutwho is served, about standards, about self-interest and itseclipse ofthe public interest and the interest of truth. Forthe reality is that the media are probably the most power-ful of all our institutions today; and they are squanderingtheir power and ignoring their obligation. They—ormore precisely, we—have abdicated our responsibility,and the consequence of our abdication is the spectacle,and the triumph, ofthe idiot culture. •

28 T H E NEW REPUBLIC JUNES, 1992