FEBRUARY 13, 2013
http://www.depauw.edu/news-media/latest-news/details/29451/
Journalism panel discussion: What: Carl Bernstein, Lance Morrow and Josh Friedman discussing "Is Journalism Dead?"
When: 6 p.m. Jan. 20
Where: Carey Center for Global Good, 63 Huyck Road, Rensselaerville
Info.: $5 a person. Limited seating. Call 797-5100 to reserve a seat.
RENSSELAERVILLE — Carl Bernstein and Lance Morrow were barely out of their teens in 1963 when they worked as dictation typists alongside each other in the noisy, crowded newsroom of the defunct Washington Star on Virginia Avenue Southeast.
They came from dissimilar backgrounds, thrown together into a heady stew of clattering typewriters, crackling police radios, plumes of cigarette smoke and brilliant eccentrics. Barks of "Copy!" cut through the cacophony, and tension rose with the approaching deadline.
Morrow, of Philadelphia, had just graduated from Harvard with a degree in English literature. He was the son of Hugh Morrow, a former Philadelphia Inquirer reporter and Saturday Evening Post editor who left to become a speechwriter and aide to Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller in Albany.
Bernstein was a townie, a son of radical-leftist parents whose activities in the nation's capital during the McCarthy era were tracked by the FBI and got them blacklisted. Carl started at the Star as a copyboy at 16, dropped out of the University of Maryland to work full time at the paper and yearned to become a reporter.
They pounded out stories on manual Royals as reporters called in dispatches from the field. They earned $44.25 a week for their toil and felt like they had just hit the lottery.
Morrow was soon promoted to cub reporter, but Bernstein was passed over because he did not have a college degree. Their paths soon diverged, but they remained close buddies over 50 years as both built major-league careers in journalism.
Bernstein was half of the celebrated Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting team with Bob Woodward that broke the Watergate scandal and forced President Richard M. Nixon to resign. Morrow became an award-winning senior writer for Time and spent 44 years at the magazine. He held down the prime real estate of the magazine's back page for many years with erudite, evocative essays.
The aging veterans of the ink-on-trees trade — Morrow is 73 and Bernstein is 68 — will take the stage Sunday at the Carey Center for Global Good in Rensselaerville (formerly the Rensselaerville Institute) for a panel discussion and to kick around a provocative question: "Is Journalism Dead?"
"I obviously don't think journalism is dead," Bernstein said by phone from his apartment in Manhattan's SoHo neighborhood. He's currently writing a memoir about his time at the Washington Star and developing a dramatic TV series about the dysfunctional Congress with director Steven Bochco for Turner.
"I think there's plenty of great reporting on all kinds of platforms," said Bernstein, who reads widely in print and on the Web but does not use Twitter or Facebook or engage in social media. "I think it's a mistake to look at the general state of reporting in 1960 or 1975 or 1990 in too nostalgic a fashion. Really great reporting organizations have always been the exception, not the rule."
Bernstein's favorite definition of the job of journalism has always been this: "To obtain the best available version of the truth."
"My view is that obviously journalism is not dead, but it is changing form radically," Morrow said by phone from his home in Spencertown, Columbia County, where he has been working for the past six years on a biography of Time founder and magazine magnate Henry Luce.
"We are in the midst of an enormous transformation. How does journalism fare in this transformation? Are journalists necessary anymore? What will their role and function be in an environment dominated by social media?" Morrow asked. "Some have talked of this as being a post-truth era. My own feeling is that the values of journalism need to be very strongly reasserted because the dangers of social media are enormous."
Bernstein and Morrow will be joined by Josh Friedman, 71, who lives in Rensselaerville and is director of international programs at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Friedman has two Pulitzers to his credit, for Three Mile Island nuclear crisis coverage at the Philadelphia Inquirer and for reporting on famine in Ethiopia for Newsday.
"Saying journalism is dead is like saying God is dead," Friedman said. "Any time you have people together in a society, there is some form of storytelling and journalism going on. The journalism of my generation is dying because I was there in the golden age of newspapers. I work with graduate journalism students now who don't know how it used to be, and they're busy navigating, searching, exploring and trying to find a new formula and a way to do serious journalism."
For Bernstein and Morrow, none of the journalism prizes, book deals, movie portrayals or resulting fame they later achieved could compare to that shining moment they shared in the crucible of the Star newsroom. They rubbed shoulders with journalistic giants, indoctrinated at a formative age with an undying zeal for uncovering the best available version of the truth.
"I took David Broder's dictation from Dallas," Bernstein recalled. "And we had Haynes Johnson, Mary McGrory, Mary Lou Werner. They were an incredibly talented group of people who had more fun doing what they loved than any group of people I've met since."
Morrow remembered Bernstein in those days as "precociously aggressive, very talented and driven." He added, "A lot of people are exasperated by Carl, and they find him difficult. I don't. We respect each other, and I regard him like a brother."
Shunned at the Star, Bernstein's break came when he followed his mentor, Star city editor Sid Epstein, in 1965 to New Jersey and the Elizabeth Daily Journal. Epstein was the editor and made the college dropout a full-time reporter and turned Bernstein loose. He covered breaking news, wrote a column, crafted feature stories and did investigative projects that won awards. The Washington Post snapped him up in 1966.
"I was the only reporter without a college degree since World War II to be hired at the Post," Bernstein said. He never went back to complete his college degree and does not regret that. "The best thing I ever did was to take typing with the girls in high school. I could type 90 words a minute and got hired at the Star when I was 16. It's all I ever wanted to do."
Attribution: By Paul Grondahl - Timesunion.com
Read more: http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Journalism-s-future-as-told-by-the-greats-4190860.php#ixzz2I449IjCV
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