DEMOCRACY AROUND THE WORLD | Giving citizens a voice
08 April 2008
Newspaperman Ben Bradlee Says Good Reporters Dig for Truth
Bradlee coordinated his newspaper’s coverage of Watergate scandal
Washington -- Good journalists work hard to uncover the truth “or come as close” to the truth as possible, former Washington Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee tells America.gov.
Now the Post’s vice president at large, Bradlee said an “awful lot gets in the way” of a reporter seeking to dig for a good story that is based on verified facts. The reporter must deal with human nature in that sometimes “people [news sources] lie on purpose, or people lie because they don’t know the truth and think they do. It’s not the easiest thing in the world to tell when somebody is lying,” said Bradlee, who was interviewed in his office at the Post in advance of World Press Freedom Day May 3.
Bradlee, the Washington Post's executive editor from 1968 to 1991 who directed his paper’s uncovering of the Watergate scandal in the 1970s, said reporters do their best work in finding newsworthy articles when not restricted by a paper’s owner or editors. The Watergate scandal led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon in August 1974.
The term press freedom has become almost a “bromide,” said Bradlee, meaning that it has become too commonplace an expression for discussing reporters’ independence to pursue their stories.
On that score, he said the question of reporters “voluntarily surrendering” their independence to report news during wartime treads into “dangerous territory.”
Most reporters and editors, Bradlee said, are reluctant to hold a story unless overriding national security interests intervene. But Bradlee added that governments overdo claiming threats to national security to try to suppress unfavorable articles.
In the United States, press freedom is protected under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and faces few restrictions except in matters that might threaten national security. In recent years, press freedom groups have criticized the Bush administration for what they see as too-frequent use of this exception.
Bradlee said he never would have worked at a newspaper that felt pressured to suppress news for fear of “insulting” a government official. Such insult laws, intended to insulate public officials from media criticism, have been instituted in numerous countries worldwide.
Holding back a story might be warranted, Bradlee said, in cases that involve, for example, publishing the departure time of a routine troop deployment overseas. But most people would not be interested in knowing such information anyway, Bradlee added.
One story that Bradlee did hold temporarily involved a U.S. intelligence underwater listening device code-named Ivy Bells, which during the Cold War revealed the position and movement of submarines from the Soviet Union. U.S. authorities lowered a bell-shaped device onto Soviet communication cables that ran along the floor of the ocean. For years, the device yielded vital information to the U.S. government.
The information was uncovered by Post reporter Robert Woodward, who partnered with the paper’s Carl Bernstein in breaking the Watergate scandal.
The Soviets had been so certain their submarines were not being detected that they neglected to keep their encryption safe from deciphering, said Bradlee.
Bradlee said he originally decided against running the story because to do otherwise “would have denied our country a huge and effective weapon against a common enemy.”
Eventually, his paper published the story, but only after the Ivy Bells operation was compromised by a low-level worker from the U.S. National Security Agency and then reported by a major U.S. television network. Bradlee discusses Operation Ivy Bells in his 1995 best-selling autobiography, The Good Life: Newspapering and Other Adventures.
Though retired from his executive editor duties, Bradlee’s heart still belongs to the only daily newspaper for which he ever worked. This is evident by the fact he still goes to his seventh floor office at the Post every day. Bradlee says he’s “addicted” to the Post’s fifth floor newsroom where he likes to see what stories are being worked on by the paper’s reporters and editors. Bradlee considers himself at age 86 a “stop on the tour” for the newspaper’s younger reporters, who might ask the famous newspaperman for journalistic advice.
However, Bradlee does not overstay his visits to the newsroom because he knows the reporters “have something to do. I’m very conscious of that.”
Bradlee got his start in newspapers following his service in World War II when he founded a weekly paper called the New Hampshire Sunday News, before taking reporting jobs with the Washington Post and later with Newsweek magazine.
Bradlee’s advice to aspiring reporters is to get “out of town” for a newspaper job, away from “Mom and Dad and friends,” where “you don’t have your mind made up about” home-town events. Relocating to a new area, he said, gives journalists a fresh and nonjaundiced view about news occurring in that community.
What still excites him about journalism, Bradlee said, is that “high energy pays off” for getting a good story. He proudly points to the example of the Post’s hard work over a period of 30 months in the 1970s when the paper published some 400 articles on the Watergate scandal.
See also “Celebrated Editor Ben Bradlee Says Newspapers Here to Stay.”
