If you are a great news organization, you can't have the best obtainable version of the truth if your vision and your scale is reduced to a fraction of its former self.
Interpretation
The pursuit of truth in journalism requires a broad and unobstructed perspective.
Carl Bernstein emphasizes that a reputable news organization must strive to maintain a comprehensive and expansive view in order to deliver the most accurate and complete version of the truth. If a news organization's perspective is limited or diminished, it risks compromising the quality and integrity of the information it provides, thereby failing its societal obligation.
In practice
During a panel discussion on press freedom, someone might evoke this quote to illustrate the challenges faced by media today.
The failures of the press have contributed immensely to the emergence of a talk-show nation, in which public discourse is reduced to ranting and raving and posturing. We now have a mainstream press whose news agenda is increasingly influenced by this netherworld.
The greatest felony in the news business today is to be behind, or to miss a big story. So speed and quantity substitute for thoroughness and quality, for accuracy and context.
The most important ethical issues and the most difficult ones are the human ones because a reporter has enormous power to hurt people.
The reality is that the media are probably the most powerful of all our institutions today and they, or rather we [journalists], too often are squandering our power and ignoring our obligations. The consequence of our abdication of responsibility is the ugly spectacle of idiot culture!
The pressure to compete, the fear somebody else will make the splash first, creates a frenzied environment in which a blizzard of information is presented and serious questions may not be raised.
The lowest form of popular culture - lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people's lives - has overrun real journalism.
Decidedly it will never have been given to me to finish anything, except perhaps breathing. One must not be greedy.
Show a people as one thing, only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.
Some of mankind's most terrible misdeeds have been committed under the spell of certain magic words or phrases.
One never reaches home, but wherever friendly paths intersect the whole world looks like home for a time.
We believed in God, trusted in man, and lived with the illusion that every one of us has been entrusted with a sacred spark.
I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel.
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