Truth is out there, Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein says

Chatting with Greencastle resident and DePauw University graduate Eric Wolfe, Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein autographs a copy of "All the President's Men" as DPU English professor Lili Wright awaits her turn following Bernstein's Ubben Lecture Wednesday night at Meharry Hall in DePauw's historic East College building.

The truth is out there.

That's not some "X-Files" myth, but the longstanding belief of an American journalist whose very name has become synonymous with digging out the truth and dispensing it in a way that has helped alter the way both politics and journalism exist in this country.

Carl Bernstein, half of the legendary Woodward and Bernstein Washington Post collaboration that uncovered the Watergate scandal and brought down the Richard M. Nixon White House, visited DePauw University Wednesday night to deliver an Ubben Lecture in Meharry Hall of historic East College.

The title of his scheduled lecture posed the question: "Is journalism dead?"

Bernstein didn't waste a second in pronouncing judgment.

"The answer is no," the 68-year-old Bernstein asserted at the outset of his remarks. "Journalism is not dead."

But his cherished profession is reflective of the culture we live in today, he said, claiming it "troubled beyond trouble" because the "cultural warfare we've experienced has taken a terrible toll."

"Our country is becoming a place where there is not enough interest in the truth," Bernstein said.

As he and fellow reporter Bob Woodward doggedly followed the Watergate trail from the June 17, 1972 break-in at Democrat headquarters in the Watergate office complex in Washington, D.C., they subscribed to a proven journalistic theory, Bernstein said.

They pursued "the best attainable version of the truth."

And by using common sense, simple methodology, asking questions and knocking on doors -- "there was nothing glamorous about it," Bernstein admitted -- they uncovered a "terrible campaign of political espionage and sabotage led by a criminal president of the United States who broke the law continuously like no other president."

Today, he said, the way people process such truth or information obtained as the "best available version of the truth" in an effort to make informed decisions is not the same as it was during the 2-1/2 years Woodward and Bernstein were reporting and writing 400 stories about Watergate.

"There's less and less interest," he said, "in the hard civic duty of processing information in the institutional way."

Instead, too many Americans today are choosing to look to the Internet or cable news programs for "ideological ammunition" that reinforces their own thinking rather than opening their minds to larger truths, different viewpoints and informative reporting.

Unfortunately all too often, Bernstein said, that results in "the common good becoming the last consideration along with truth, accuracy and context."

Along with that, he said, Washington has "become a capital of dysfunction where so few are capable of problem-solving."

"The missing ingredient," the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist noted, "too often is the common good.

"Today," he continued, "Washington exists largely in a partisan cocoon" where sadly our leaders are subjected to issues of "ideology over problem-solving."

With the cultural warfare intensified, Bernstein said he has "never seen tension itself so overwhelm the common good."

"I wish I were more optimistic (about Washington, D.C.)," Bernstein offered, "but in going across the country, it's hard not to be optimistic.

"If only they (the American people) will do more work to process information and make themselves available to the best attainable version of the truth," he added.

The job of the journalist is as it has always been, he said.

"Our job in the press," Bernstein suggested, "is not to be prosecutorial but to get the information and put it out there. And what people do with it is up to them" from digesting it carefully to make informed decisions to "chewing it up like ideological cud."

Reporting, Bernstein criticized, is not in-depth enough today. Too often, he suggested, the "message managers are delivering our agenda because we report on what they say."

He noted that one of the lessons learned from the lengthy Watergate scandel came from former Attorney General John Mitchell, a man who would ultimately threaten Woodward and Bernstein with retribution over their pursuit of the Watergate story.

"That same John Mitchell said one time, and I wrote it down, 'Watch what we do and not what we say.'"

Unfortunately, the press today is "back to watching what they say and not what they do," Bernstein reasoned.

While the efforts of Woodward and Bernstein have helped reshape America, its political scene and the face of journalism, Bernstein admitted that in retrospect the duo were not always right.

He recalled the day Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon, proclaiming in the process, "our long national nightmare is finally over."

"Originally we thought that was a terrible act, an awful act," Bernstein said. "Woodward likes to tell the story of me calling him up and saying, 'Have you heard the news?'"

Woodward had not, and Bernstein framed the report vaguely yet in perfect clarity for how he and Woodward were feeling: "The son of a bitch just pardoned the son of a bitch," Bernstein recalled telling his reporting partner.

Today, however, he feels differently.

"We were wrong," Bernstein said of their response to the pardon of Nixon.

"It was a great act. It saved the country. Gerald Ford was willing to sacrifice his own presidency for the good of the country, the common good and the national interest."

Now that's the truth.