Veteran journalist Carl Bernstein is famous for being part of the team that broke the Watergate scandal that brought down Richard Nixon—but his career actually began way earlier than that, at age 16, when he got the chance to cover the Kennedy presidency.
He’s now written a book about it—Chasing History: A Kid in the Newsroom—and joined co-host Molly Jong-Fast on The New Abnormal to talk about those years and what’s going on in the media world and politicians today.
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He has two theories as to why the public has a mounting distrust of news outlets—and why Fox News is so successful.
The first concerns the journalists themselves. According to Bernstein, “it’s not about doing most of the reporter’s reporting on the telephone. It’s about getting out of the office and talking to people and listening to them. A good part of being a reporter, supposedly, and ideally, is listening to people. Most people will actually try to tell you their truth, whatever it is.”
The second concerns the subjects themselves: The readers and the politicians are very different from the people he reported on decades ago, especially the Republican Party. Or as Bernstein calls it, “a party of sedition.”
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