Carl Bernstein on Rupert Murdoch's Watergate

[marmar]

Carl Bernstein on Rupert Murdoch's Watergate
The Washington Post journalist compares phone hacking to the story that brought down Richard Nixon

Dan Sabbagh
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 25 September 2011


Carl Bernstein wants me to read something first. Fortunately it's not All The President's Men – where you can remember the story, but not perhaps every last detail – but instead an article he wrote in 1992 called The Idiot Culture, which is helpfully republished on his website. It's a densely argued four-page piece, which concludes "the media are probably the most powerful of all our institutions today; and they are squandering their power and ignoring their obligation".

One hesitates to summarise though, not least because Bernstein is wary of simplification. His answers to questions are lengthy, nuanced, and he likes to emphasise the importance of "context". But he thinks the 1992 article, written before the rise of Murdoch in the US, Fox News and phone hacking, particularly relevant today, as it describes the dominance of talk-show journalism and celebrity-driven news or, as he puts it, "the spectacle and the triumph of the idiot culture".

He is in London this week, to participate in a Guardian-organised debate entitled After Hacking: How can the press restore trust?, and if anybody can decide if hackgate (more of that later) has any parallels to Watergate, Bernstein is one of the few who can do it legitimately. In fact, he has made the link already, in a 9 July article published on the Daily Beast and Newsweek, called Murdoch's Watergate.

At first, though, Bernstein is reticent about being drawn into the topic for this interview, saying, "look what I wrote in that piece". He says that he wants to save fresh thinking on the topic for his visit to the UK. But he returns to theme later on, pointing out that the hacking story "was the first time I made comparisons between another event and Watergate". ........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/sep/25/carl-bernstein-rupert-murdoch-watergate

[snagglepuss]

1. .

[starroute]

2. John Dean tweeted about the July article and agreed heartily

And when Carl Bernstein and John Dean both agree on comparing something to Watergate (and that in itself blows my mind), you've got to believe it!

[joeybee12]

3. KNR Bernstein was the brains behind breaking open Watergate, Woodward the publicity-seeking ho...nt

[beac]

4. K&R! n/t