Legendary reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward speak to the Tulsa World news staff before their TU presentation. MICHAEL WYKE/Tulsa World
A detail in one of the stories from Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward's visit to Tulsa stuck with me.
While investigating the Watergate burglary, they had a name that was on a check and needed to find out who the person was. Today, you would be able to get a lead on that in seconds.
In the Washington Post newsroom in the early 1970s, they needed to find a Minnesota phone book. From the way it sounded, the Post had such a thing within the building and the name was found, a phone call was made and a story saw print.
Other than a copy machine and a phone, all of the other tools in today's newsrooms didn't exist in the days of the Watergate investigation. After you listen to some old-schoolers talk about the work it took to do the job then, you come away with this thought: Technology doesn't give this generation of journalists many excuses.
Thought leaders like to throw out the fact we now live in a "knowledge economy," meaning you really can't say "I don't know" because the knowledge of the world is available with a free search and easy enough for middle school students to use. If you say "I don't know," you are really saying "I don't want to look that up within seconds."
On Tuesday night at the University of Tulsas Reynolds Center, one of the questions from the crowd to Woodward and Bernstein was about the alleged deathbed confession of Howard Hunt that revealed JFK's killers. Bernstein and Woodward hadn't heard of it. Bernstein pulled out his iPhone and jokingly asked Siri, Apple's voice-controlled search software, "Howard Hunt deathbed confession." The person in the row in front of me typed that into Google, clicked on the first result, read it and then passed the phone to his wife. Google gives all you want to know about this deathbed confession -- 54,900 results -- in .42 seconds.
If such a tip was given to the dynamic duo in 1972, they couldn't get an idea within 42 hours, much less .42 seconds if it was anything. They wouldn't have had the luxury to sit at their desk and watch an hour-long video by Jesse Ventura digging into it.
Bernstein said one of the milestones of Watergate was that the press did its job. Having read the books about it, that job was incredibly hard because they didn't have an ounce of technology to lean on to move the story from a third-rate burglary to persuading a president to resign.
We use a lot of technology to do the job of journalism today. In the coming weeks, the Tulsa World will publish some stories that wouldn't have been possible even 10 years ago thanks to tools we have in our newsroom. When you're given 16,000 emails, journalists of yesteryear would have needed months to process them. Now, we have ways to quickly scan, search and organize them before we start reading to get at the story faster and make sure not to miss something. Thanks to Google, we can easily search the complete text of 346,004,403 websites (something I found out in .17 seconds).
It took me a while this morning, but I did find a phone book in the newsroom. By the look of the stack of papers on top of it, it hasn't been used in some time. To think that was one of the main tools Woodward and Bernstein had to depend on, only then can you appreciate what they did for this country and the pressure today's journalists are under to do even more.
