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.
DUEL, n. A formal ceremony preliminary to reconciliation of two enemies. Great skill is necessary to its satisfactory observance; if awkwardly performed . . . deplorable consequences sometimes ensue. A long time ago a man lost his life.
A tree may always be known by its fruit, and a true Christian may always be discovered by their habits, tastes & affections.
It's outrageous to line your pockets off the misery of the poor; It's outrageous, the crimes some human beings must endure.
To a longer and worse life, a shorter and better is by all means to be preferred.
It meant nothing to him any longer, only a faint tinge of sadness--and somewhere within him, a drop of pain moving briefly and vanishing, like a raindrop on the glass of a window, its course in the shape of a question mark.
Perhaps you have noticed that even in the very lightest breeze you can hear the voice of the cottonwood tree; this we understand is its prayer to the Great Spirit, for not only men, but all things and all beings pray to Him continually in differing ways.
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