Ben Bradlee, the man all newspaperfolk secretly want to be, on the state of contemporary newspapers: “And the newspapers that are left are far better than they were. Jesus Christ, if you looked at the Washington Post in the ’60s, the design was terrible, they were terrible to read and the level of writing and reporting was nowhere near as good, either.”
I always say this when some nonthinker starts going off about how much better newspapers used to be. Go back and look at some of the tripe that landed on doorsteps decades ago — it’s not pretty.
Interesting, though, that the Bradlee interview is with the San Francisco Chronicle — since Bradlee is forever linked to perhaps the biggest diss ever meted out to an American newspaper. In All the President’s Men — the classic movie version of how Bradlee’s Washington Post broke Watergate — the Bradlee character (played by Jason Robards) is being pitched an idea for a new newspaper feature. The idea: A column for people who were too drunk to notice what the weather was like yesterday.
Bradlee responds dismissively: “Send it out to the San Francisco Chronicle — they need it.”
As a Chron guy wrote not long ago: “[T]he San Francisco Chronicle never really deserved as bad a reputation as it’s had. A lot of people date that reputation to a specific line that Ben Bradlee uttered in ‘All the President’s Men’…It’s so dismissive that ever since then I think it’s tarred our reputation. Every national media story about the Chronicle mentions that little anecdote. It’s sort of our claim to fame.”
As in here, for instance.