Watergate editor speaks at MU

By Jordan Novet

Published Feb. 5, 2008

News organizations must keep doing investigative journalism, even if it is expensive, provocative and legally dangerous, journalism veteran Harry Rosenfeld said Monday in MU’s Fisher Auditorium.

Rosenfeld was assistant managing editor for metropolitan news at The Washington Post when Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein covered the 1972 Watergate break-in and the subsequent cover-up.

Now the editor-at-large and a weekly columnist at the Times Union in Albany, N.Y., Rosenfeld came to MU after Stuart Loory, the Lee Hills Chair in Free Press Studies, asked him to, Rosenfeld said.

In the 1960s, when Loory was the Moscow bureau chief for the New York Herald-Tribune, he reported to Rosenfeld, the paper’s foreign editor. The two have kept in contact with each other ever since, Loory said.

When the Tribune folded, Rosenfeld moved to the Post. He started as a night foreign editor but was soon transferred to the metro desk.

Rosenfeld explained the development of the “two-source rule” the Post enforced in its Watergate coverage.

The rule, which Rosenfeld said “impacted journalism dramatically,” states that a claim has to be made by at least two people before it is published.

At first, Woodward and Bernstein competed intensely with each other, constantly trying to one-up each other. Because the Post wanted to keep false information from being published, the editors established the two-source rule, Rosenfeld said.

“If there were two sources to confirm a report, then its credibility, and consequently the reputation of the Post – under constant fire from the Nixon administration — were so much better buttressed,” he said. “Generally speaking, two sources are indeed better than one, three better than two, and so on.”

But if that was an endorsement of the technique, it did not come without caveats.

“Two sources have to be truly independent of each other,” Rosenfeld said. “They may not in fact be two if they have arrived from the same person or account or have been relayed by two separate routes. In the end, it is not the number of sources that count as much as their quality. One source can be right, and four sources can be wrong.”

Rosenfeld went on to say that confidential sources, the use of which has long been controversial, are “indispensable in journalism and were especially so in Watergate.”

Woodward and Bernstein, whom Rosenfeld sometimes called Woodstein, convinced people to share valuable information with them, sometimes only after their sources were granted anonymity, Rosenfeld said.

It was not always safe to do the work they did, Rosenfeld said.

“Their livelihoods were at risk,” he said.

What’s more, the safety of the other Post staffers working on the Watergate coverage may have also been in jeopardy, he said.

Not only were the reporters risking their lives, he said, but the safety of the other Post staffers who worked on the Watergate stories was also in question.

Their combined efforts paid off in 1973, when the Post was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.

Freshman journalism and Spanish major Amelia Bock said she found Rosenfeld’s address informative.

“I learned more about the Watergate scandal and how journalists can prevent future events like this from happening again,” she said.

Freshman advertising major Huaishu Lu said after the address that the story behind the Watergate stories made her realize that journalism can effect change.

“I think the pursuit of truth differentiates journalism from other types of things,” she said. “Blogs don’t really have the power of journalism.”

Lu has worked for The Maneater as a graphic designer.

In their book “All the President’s Men,” Woodward and Bernstein characterized Rosenfeld as “brash and tough at times.” But Loory said his old friend “was marvelous.”