The new face of Reliable Journalism On March 6, 2015, the legendary journalist, Carl Bernstein said,
"Increasingly, from the Nixon administration onward, every successive administration and President has become even more and more secretive. It's been an upward progression like that, but also I think we need to look at the question of institutional secrecy generally. Corporate, sports, entertainment -it has become a cultural force that as we live more and more in a culture where people are looking for all kinds of information that can reflect badly and I think some of this goes back to -I wrote a piece for the New Republic Magazine in 1992 called "The Triumph of Idiot Culture". And it was about the idea that the sensational and manufactured controversy and gossip has all become conflated so that the press increasingly, and people reading/watching television, are less and less interested in what I call, Woodward has called, the best obtainable version of the truth and more and more drawn to manufactured controversy, to sensationalism and gossip. And this in turn leads to a cultural problem... a lack of receptivity to the best available version of the truth by people who are more and more inclined to look for information that will buttress and enhance their already held, ideological, political, religious beliefs. And this problem works back to what we're doing and against what we try to do as reporters -making smart decisions about what is news."
You must read this to fully understand what it now means to have and to hold the best available version of the truth.
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