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.
It's a travesty that people have forced someone who is gay to have to make their case that they deserve the same basic rights...
But by the time that I had nothing left, I myself was the lightest thing of all for fate to get rid of.
Why, I ask, isn't it possible that advertising as a whole is a fantastic fraud, presenting an image of America taken seriously by no one, least of all by the advertising men who create it?
Southern women often marry a man knowing that he is the father of many little slaves. They do not trouble themselves about it.
The capital phenomenon, the most catastrophic disaster, is uninterrupted sleeplessness, that nothingness without release.
A man is like a fraction whose numerator is what he is and whose denominator is what he thinks of himself. The larger the denominator, the smaller the fraction.
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