Speaking at Indiana University’s Media School, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Carl Bernstein said journalists shouldn’t try to bridge the gap in a polarized society.
“I’ll be the skunk at the garden party by saying that I’m not at all sure that our job as journalists is to contradict or undermine polarization,” Bernstein said. “Our job is the best attainable version of the truth.”
He continued: “Civil Rights Movement was a radical piece of work. So was the gay rights movement. So was the women's movement, first wave feminism. So, the idea that we have a responsibility to the press to stake out some position to contradict polarization seems to me the opposite, in some regards, of what our role is.”
Bernstein, who helped expose the Watergate scandal that led to the resignation of former President Richard Nixon, participated in a panel discussion with Washington Post reporter Mariana Alfaro, IU professor Gerry Lanosga, and media attorney Amelia McClure.
Bernstein said the national media has had difficulty this election cycle covering President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline as well as Donald Trump’s mental state and falsehoods, and he argued for a reexamination of journalists’ reportorial restraints in covering a uniquely radical election cycle.
“It is a hell of a difficult story to figure out how to cover,” he said of Trump. “And we've been confronted with this story increasingly as he becomes more and more unhinged.”
Bernstein joined IU this year as a journalist-in-residence and will come to the university for several public discussions. He visited Bloomington in June for IU’s Granfalloon festival and will return in November.
