Old newsrooms under deadline: a story told by Carl Bernstein
WASHINGTON – I just read Carl Bernstein’s new memoir, “Chasing History,” on being a “kid” in the newsroom, when young President John F. Kennedy was alive. It almost broke my heart.
Bernstein brought me back to my first sight of the bustling Baltimore Sun. It was exhilarating, full of eccentrics and experts on everything from Russia – the former Moscow correspondent next to me – to every neighborhood’s characters and causes.
City desk reporting meant more than interviewing homicide detectives Saturday morning at the morgue, but I did that, too.
Baltimore is a storied city, from Edgar Allan Poe to the Cone sisters’ museum collection of Matisses to F. Scott Fitzgerald, who lived on a Bolton Hill street near Johns Hopkins doctors.
Fitzgerald’s ancestor, Francis Scott Key, wrote the national anthem poem there. Fells Point greeted multitudes of Old-World immigrants and gave English lessons and social mixers. Frederick Douglass worked on that waterfront as an enslaved young man.
In Camden Yards, snow fell once on Opening Day. Babe Ruth’s birthplace is just a pitcher’s toss away.
Real journalism was committed there. The newspaper printed pages of the city life every day. We “planted” people in the well-read obituaries, with middle initials. Baltimore seemed a small town where people stayed their whole lives.
Bernstein was 16 when he went to the Washington Evening Star, hoping to be hired as a copy boy. He fell in love, capturing the romance of journalism: “I had never heard such glorious chaos or seen such purposeful commotion.”
The soundscape was the clatter of typewriters and people shouting across the room, under deadline.
Life was one long deadline, as a Sun editor observed. I saw the end of an era and the birth of a subdued one, where people silently stared at their screens all day, missing the old banter and doing work online. Reporters weren’t as free as they used to be.
Few newspapers keep that old-fashioned feeling of an orchestra warming up before playing a piece, becoming more than the sum of its parts.
The newspaper is a civic duty and common space. Since I left mine, a staggering number went dark. A thousand or two. Some say that’s a loss for democracy. It’s also a loss of community.
We know what else is ebbing: downtown department stores, which supported newspapers with advertising. (Thanks, Amazon.) Just riding the escalator at grand Marshall Field’s, decked in Christmas magic, was fun for a boy, my father said.
Handwritten notes and stamp collections are pretty much gone.
The symphony still holds on. But the German gentleman next to me at the Kennedy Center said his first concert was Herbert von Karajan conducting the Berlin Philharmonic.
Record albums, for those who don’t know Joni Mitchell or Neil Young, were not the sum of their songs chopped up by Apple. The artist arranged songs in a certain order and designed or painted the cover to make a cultural impact. They were shared experiences.
Even the telephone was a gathering place for the sound of human voices. Now I hesitate to call even my close friends unannounced.
Zoom is virtually vanilla in a chocolate world. During Washington Post Live events, I often went and met people by chance, like the new Danish embassy attache. She invited me to visit for coffee to explain American politics.
I mean, real people in real time and place. The internet gives yet takes away. Mobile phones mentally segregate us, one by one, privatized in public places.
Back to Bernstein and his partner in Watergate, Bob Woodward, at The Washington Post. They spent all hours on the phone, knocking on doors and meeting sources in person, such as “Deep Throat.” They built trust.
“The rush was still distant, but it was streaming closer,” they wrote of uncovering the criminal conspiracy, with President Richard Nixon at the center.
Does it strike you the press corps could have uncovered the Jan. 6 conspiracy to undo the 2020 election? The House select committee is chasing witnesses and showing how it’s done.
Trump tweeted day and night. So did White House correspondents. They didn’t get out of the birdcage much.
A lot was lost in translation between Bernstein’s then and our now.
Jamie Stiehm is a nationally syndicated columnist. She may be reached at JamieStiehm.com.