LATEST UPDATE: Ben Bradlee, the last gatekeeper
ON October 28, a great man of our profession passed away at the ripe age of 93. If you haven’t heard the name Ben Bradlee before, don’t worry. A lot of today’s young journalists don’t know him too, even though he was one man every newspaper man should know. Because he is a man of history, a man who made history and a man who was dedicated to the ideals of truth, free press and courageous journalism.
For 23 years, he was the editor of the great Washington Post and under his watch the paper broke landmark stories like the Pentagon Papers on the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal that resulted in the resignation of the American President Richard Nixon who did unethical things against the Democratic Party all in the bid to win an election.
The Watergate scandal was broken by two Washington Post reporting tag team of Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. What started as a “minor burglary” or the bugging of the Democratic Party office by President Nixon led to his shameful resignation. Thanks to the courage and the commitment of the Washington Post dogged reporters in ferreting the truth.
The Watergate scandal was made into a chart-busting movie titled All the President’s Men. Watergate represented the worst of American politics. According to Wikipedia, “the term Watergate has come to encompass an array of clandestine and often illegal activities undertaken by members of the Nixon administration. Those activities included such ‘dirty tricks’ as bugging the offices of political opponents and people of whom Nixon or his officials were suspicious.
Nixon and his close aides ordered harassment of activist groups and political figures, using the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The scandal led to the discovery of multiple abuses of power by the Nixon administration, articles of impeachment and the resignation of Richard Nixon, the President of the United States, on August 9, 1974—the only resignation of a U.S. President to date.”
It was from Watergate that every scandal now had the suffix “-gate.” Which is to say that Watergate opened a floodgate of scandals upon scandals. From politics to sports to entertainment to business, the world has become enmeshed in all kinds of “Scandalgate.” Even here in Nigeria, we have all kinds of “gates”. If it is not oil subsidy gate, then it is the James Bond-like case of a politician being secretly filmed receiving dollars from a businessman. How many gates can we open or close in Nigeria? In the first place, if Watergate had happened in Nigeria, it will not be a big deal. It will not even be considered newsworthy. By Nigerian electoral standards characterized by rigging and ballot box seizing of grotesque proportion, a man like Richard Nixon should be canonized a saint.
All over the world, every newspaper is celebrating the life and times of Ben Bradlee. But here in Nigeria, Ben Bradlee is a name familiar mainly to a generation of journalists that have stopped practising. As for the young generation, Ben Bradlee is as good as a man from Afghanistan or a man from nowhere. This is not good. Our young journalists of today should be interested in global journalism and history.
That is why my twin brother and I wrote this book called 50 World Editors—Conversations with Editors Around the World On Trends and Best Practices. A book that will soon be in the market. A book that features interviews with some of the legends of our profession such as the great man Sir Harold Evans, the editor’s editor.
Unfortunately, we couldn’t feature Ben Bradlee in the book. We had planned to meet him at a conference in Vienna which he was to attend but at the last minute, he couldn’t make it. That was how we missed this man described as “the most important, glamorous, and famous newspaperman of modern times.”
Luckily, I have a copy of his autobiography titled A Good Life—Newspapering and Other Adventures. In his illustrious life, Ben Bradlee as editor of Washington Post took the paper to greater heights, won close to 20 Pulitzer Prizes and brought global respectability to the newspaper. But he always knew that one dark spot would continue to haunt him even in the grave.
As the editor of Washington Post, the paper won one Pulitzer that had to be returned because it turned out that the reporter Janet Cooke, described by Bradlee as “a beautiful black woman with dramatic flair and vitality, and an extraordinary talent for writing lady” had cooked up a fictional story about an 8-year-old drug addict. The story titled “Jimmy’s World” didn’t exist. She just imagined it in order to win a prize. She won the Pulitzer Prize for feature reporting.
Ben Bradlee once wrote: “Nothing can compare with the thrill of a good story, yours alone, slowly developing, slowly leaving its mark on history. Nothing.” “Jimmy World” was a good story but only in realms of the imagination. “Jimmygate” turned out to be Washington Post’s own Watergate. It became a cross that Washington Post and Ben Bradlee will forever carry.
He recalls in his memoir, A Good Life: “The day Cooke won the Pulitzer Prize, April 13, 1981, the story— and my world with it—began to fall apart.”
It was discovered that most claims made by Janet in the school she attended and the certificates had been falsified. Nobody bothered to check out her records.
“How come we never checked? Simply put, Janet Cooke was too good to be true, and we wanted her too bad,” Bradlee wrote in his autobiography.
“At a time when we were struggling to meet our commitment to increase the quantity and quality of minority and female journalists on the paper, Janet Cooke had “can’t miss” written all over her. What the hell were we waiting for? Grab her before the New York Times does, or Newsweek, or television. And she was hired.
“Janet Cooke hit the ground running at the Post, with fifty-two bylines in her first eight months on the staff… She told one friend she wanted a Pulitzer Prize in three years, and a job on the National staff in three to five years. She soon lost herself in an assignment to look into a new kind of heroin, circulating in the city, so strong it was ulcerate the skin.
“She brought back 145 pages of handwritten notes taken during this assignment. Aplin-Brownlee thought they were good enough to show to Milton Coleman, and Coleman though them good enough to bring Cooke in for a talk about how they should be “storified”—made into a story. It was during this conversation that she first mentioned reports of an eight-year-old addict. Coleman stopped her short: ‘That’s the story. Go after it. It’s a front page story.’
“Three weeks later Cooke told Coleman she had found the eight-year-old addict, had even talked to his mother. Coleman told Cooke she could promise the boy’s mother confidentiality first, then anonymity. With that, Coleman felt no need to know the woman’s name, at least not then.”
But the moment of truth came and an angry Bradlee had to confront Janet Cooke. In the heat of his anger, Bradlee even told Janet she was lying, “just like Richard Nixon.”
Eventually, she had to confess that “There is no Jimmy, and no family.” Of course, the Pulitzer Prize was returned and Bradlee even wanted to resign but the publisher stood by him and refused to accept his resignation.
In an obituary on Benjamin Bradlee, the Guardian in UK had this to say:
“As the brilliant editor who steered the Washington Post’s history-making exposure of the Watergate presidential scandal, Ben Bradlee, who has died aged 93, became the most lauded and influential American journalist of his era. Yet long after his departure from the job, he still worried about the one big blunder of his career.
In 2006, Bradlee brooded publicly in a long television interview about his dread that one name might appear “in the second paragraph of my obituary … and it still may”. The name: Janet Cooke, a Post reporter who brought the worst disgrace upon the newspaper in its history – and Bradlee’s 26 years as editor – over her 1981 Pulitzer prizewinning article about a black male heroin addict, aged eight. She had invented the entire story.”.
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ON October 28, a great man of our profession passed away at the ripe age of 93. If you haven’t heard the name Ben Bradlee before, don’t worry. A lot of today’s young journalists don’t know him too, even though he was one man every newspaper man should know. Because he is a man of history, a man who made history and a man who was dedicated to the ideals of truth, free press and courageous journalism.
For 23 years, he was the editor of the great Washington Post and under his watch the paper broke landmark stories like the Pentagon Papers on the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal that resulted in the resignation of the American President Richard Nixon who did unethical things against the Democratic Party all in the bid to win an election.
The Watergate scandal was broken by two Washington Post reporting tag team of Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. What started as a “minor burglary” or the bugging of the Democratic Party office by President Nixon led to his shameful resignation. Thanks to the courage and the commitment of the Washington Post dogged reporters in ferreting the truth.
The Watergate scandal was made into a chart-busting movie titled All the President’s Men. Watergate represented the worst of American politics. According to Wikipedia, “the term Watergate has come to encompass an array of clandestine and often illegal activities undertaken by members of the Nixon administration. Those activities included such ‘dirty tricks’ as bugging the offices of political opponents and people of whom Nixon or his officials were suspicious.
Nixon and his close aides ordered harassment of activist groups and political figures, using the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The scandal led to the discovery of multiple abuses of power by the Nixon administration, articles of impeachment and the resignation of Richard Nixon, the President of the United States, on August 9, 1974—the only resignation of a U.S. President to date.”
It was from Watergate that every scandal now had the suffix “-gate.” Which is to say that Watergate opened a floodgate of scandals upon scandals. From politics to sports to entertainment to business, the world has become enmeshed in all kinds of “Scandalgate.” Even here in Nigeria, we have all kinds of “gates”. If it is not oil subsidy gate, then it is the James Bond-like case of a politician being secretly filmed receiving dollars from a businessman. How many gates can we open or close in Nigeria? In the first place, if Watergate had happened in Nigeria, it will not be a big deal. It will not even be considered newsworthy. By Nigerian electoral standards characterized by rigging and ballot box seizing of grotesque proportion, a man like Richard Nixon should be canonized a saint.
All over the world, every newspaper is celebrating the life and times of Ben Bradlee. But here in Nigeria, Ben Bradlee is a name familiar mainly to a generation of journalists that have stopped practising. As for the young generation, Ben Bradlee is as good as a man from Afghanistan or a man from nowhere. This is not good. Our young journalists of today should be interested in global journalism and history.
That is why my twin brother and I wrote this book called 50 World Editors—Conversations with Editors Around the World On Trends and Best Practices. A book that will soon be in the market. A book that features interviews with some of the legends of our profession such as the great man Sir Harold Evans, the editor’s editor.
Unfortunately, we couldn’t feature Ben Bradlee in the book. We had planned to meet him at a conference in Vienna which he was to attend but at the last minute, he couldn’t make it. That was how we missed this man described as “the most important, glamorous, and famous newspaperman of modern times.”
Luckily, I have a copy of his autobiography titled A Good Life—Newspapering and Other Adventures. In his illustrious life, Ben Bradlee as editor of Washington Post took the paper to greater heights, won close to 20 Pulitzer Prizes and brought global respectability to the newspaper. But he always knew that one dark spot would continue to haunt him even in the grave.
As the editor of Washington Post, the paper won one Pulitzer that had to be returned because it turned out that the reporter Janet Cooke, described by Bradlee as “a beautiful black woman with dramatic flair and vitality, and an extraordinary talent for writing lady” had cooked up a fictional story about an 8-year-old drug addict. The story titled “Jimmy’s World” didn’t exist. She just imagined it in order to win a prize. She won the Pulitzer Prize for feature reporting.
Ben Bradlee once wrote: “Nothing can compare with the thrill of a good story, yours alone, slowly developing, slowly leaving its mark on history. Nothing.” “Jimmy World” was a good story but only in realms of the imagination. “Jimmygate” turned out to be Washington Post’s own Watergate. It became a cross that Washington Post and Ben Bradlee will forever carry.
He recalls in his memoir, A Good Life: “The day Cooke won the Pulitzer Prize, April 13, 1981, the story— and my world with it—began to fall apart.”
It was discovered that most claims made by Janet in the school she attended and the certificates had been falsified. Nobody bothered to check out her records.
“How come we never checked? Simply put, Janet Cooke was too good to be true, and we wanted her too bad,” Bradlee wrote in his autobiography.
“At a time when we were struggling to meet our commitment to increase the quantity and quality of minority and female journalists on the paper, Janet Cooke had “can’t miss” written all over her. What the hell were we waiting for? Grab her before the New York Times does, or Newsweek, or television. And she was hired.
“Janet Cooke hit the ground running at the Post, with fifty-two bylines in her first eight months on the staff… She told one friend she wanted a Pulitzer Prize in three years, and a job on the National staff in three to five years. She soon lost herself in an assignment to look into a new kind of heroin, circulating in the city, so strong it was ulcerate the skin.
“She brought back 145 pages of handwritten notes taken during this assignment. Aplin-Brownlee thought they were good enough to show to Milton Coleman, and Coleman though them good enough to bring Cooke in for a talk about how they should be “storified”—made into a story. It was during this conversation that she first mentioned reports of an eight-year-old addict. Coleman stopped her short: ‘That’s the story. Go after it. It’s a front page story.’
“Three weeks later Cooke told Coleman she had found the eight-year-old addict, had even talked to his mother. Coleman told Cooke she could promise the boy’s mother confidentiality first, then anonymity. With that, Coleman felt no need to know the woman’s name, at least not then.”
But the moment of truth came and an angry Bradlee had to confront Janet Cooke. In the heat of his anger, Bradlee even told Janet she was lying, “just like Richard Nixon.”
Eventually, she had to confess that “There is no Jimmy, and no family.” Of course, the Pulitzer Prize was returned and Bradlee even wanted to resign but the publisher stood by him and refused to accept his resignation.
In an obituary on Benjamin Bradlee, the Guardian in UK had this to say:
“As the brilliant editor who steered the Washington Post’s history-making exposure of the Watergate presidential scandal, Ben Bradlee, who has died aged 93, became the most lauded and influential American journalist of his era. Yet long after his departure from the job, he still worried about the one big blunder of his career.
In 2006, Bradlee brooded publicly in a long television interview about his dread that one name might appear “in the second paragraph of my obituary … and it still may”. The name: Janet Cooke, a Post reporter who brought the worst disgrace upon the newspaper in its history – and Bradlee’s 26 years as editor – over her 1981 Pulitzer prizewinning article about a black male heroin addict, aged eight. She had invented the entire story.”.
Thanks for Reading The LATEST UPDATE: Ben Bradlee, the last gatekeeper
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