Wednesday, March 25, 1998 | 10:20 a.m.
One of the two journalists credited with bringing down the Nixon administration by their dogged investigation of a burglary in the Watergate apartment and office building in Washington, D.C., spoke at UNLV Tuesday and browbeat the majority of today's reporters for lowering their standards.
Carl Bernstein, along with fellow Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, gained international fame and a place in history for a series of stories on the Watergate break-in that helped topple the Nixon presidency and earned the reporters a Pulitzer Prize.
But 25 years later, Bernstein expressed disappointment that the story did not have a great impact on the quality of American journalism even though he and Woodward inspired many young people to become reporters in the 1970s.
"Watergate did not have the effect on daily journalism I hoped it would have," Bernstein said after speaking to a rapt audience of about 2,000 people attending a speech sponsored by the Barbara Greenspun Lecture Series. "It did not create better coverage.
Though he said the Golden Age of Journalism may very well have been in the 1960s and 1970s, the Vietnam and post-Vietnam era, the profession has been deteriorating since then.
"My profession is in unusual trouble and in danger of losing control, not only in America but throughout the English-speaking world," Bernstein told his audience, comprised primarily of the baby-boomer generation and older.
He said the emerging journalistic culture of today has little to do with truth or reality.
"Increasingly, the picture of our society rendered in our media is illusionary and delusionary," said Bernstein. "It's unreal. It's out of touch with the truth ... disfigured by celebrity, by celebrity worship, by gossip, by sensationalism, by denial of our society's real condition."
Bernstein focused on media magnate Rupert Murdoch, owner of more than 100 newspapers around the world as well as Fox Television, 20th Century Fox films and many other media outlets, as sources of journalism's deplorable condition.
He noted that Murdoch is a metaphor.
"There are dozens of Murdoch's around the world," Bernstein said.
"I think it's time for those of us in the media to recognize Rupert Murdoch and the sleazy standards of the low end of his empire, which increasingly are affecting the high end of our business.
"The greatest threat to the truth today may well be from within our own profession because a society misinformed and disinformed by the grotesque values of Murdoch culture are truly perilous," Bernstein said.
Bernstein's own journalism career began at age 16 as a copy boy for the Washington (D.C.) Star. He now spends more and more time writing books, where he says most great reporting now takes place.
He said today's media pander to people's tastes rather than serving them what journalists know to be real news.
Truth has somehow gotten lost in a frenzied attempt to be the first to get a story, according Bernstein.
"Today, we in journalism limit ourselves more often than the government limits us because we are not willing to do the hard work of good reporting, of searching out the truth," said Bernstein. "It's not our priority anymore."
The most basic definition of reporting, he said, is "the best obtainable version of the truth."
But that no longer seems important.
"In the last 20 years we have been abdicating our primary function," he said. "Increasingly we have allowed our agenda and our priorities to become bastardized and dominated by what I call the triumph of idiot culture."
This attitude has resulted in the public viewing the media with contempt.
"We in the press have earned the contempt we are so widely held in today because our reporting hasn't been good enough," he said. "We have failed to open our own institution to the same kind of scrutiny we demand of other institutions in this society."
Unless the media rejects the Murdock agenda, it will be impossible for them to regain the trust they once enjoyed.
In today's "idiot culture" of journalism, he said, we teach our readers and viewers that trivial is significant and the "lurid and the loopy" are somehow more import than real news.
True, he said, many of those in the public demand that kind of journalism, "but still I believe it is the role of journalists to challenge people, not merely to mindlessly amuse them."
Even though some people are critical of the seemingly endless media coverage of the Monica Lewinsky allegations that she had sex with President Clinton, Bernstein said that overall the reporting has been well done.
"This is a very important story that deserves our attention," he said.
Bernstein, who was waiting for editors of Rolling Stone to make their decision on whether to hire him as a rock music reviewer when the Watergate story broke and changed his life forever, described Clinton as an "empathetic man" who connects with the people, which he says is the reason Clinton is widely liked.
"It's much more than the economy," he said. "Clinton understands the people, the country and its problems."
Even with all the negative qualities of today's reporting, Bernstein said he agrees with journalist Bill Moyers, who said millions of people in this country are not apathetic and will respond to a press that stimulates the community without pandering to it.
One of the great uncovered stories today is the media, says Bernstein.
"The story of contemporary western media is also at the heart of our society's condition. The reality today is the media are the most powerful of all our institutions and they're squandering their power and ignoring their obligations," he said.
The consequence, he said, is the triumph of idiot culture.
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