Opinion Journalist, hero

One of the leading characters of All The President’s Men is gone, and the palpable void he leaves behind shows that media has fallen from his impeccable standards. Unconditional trust is the first pillar of the press and, with the backing of publisher Katharine Graham, Ben Bradlee had woven a web of trusted reporters at The Washington Post who repaid him with implicit trust. With that institutional support, a couple of determined reporters exposed a scandal so large it brought down an American president and has become (overused) shorthand for political misconduct. In journalism, there is a Before Watergate, and After.

Bradlee, who passed away Tuesday, edited The Post for 26 years. Under his stewardship, The Post first clashed with the US government when it published the Pentagon Papers, disclosing the extent of deception and concealment in the accounts of the US involvement in the Vietnam War made public by the White House. If the Pentagon Papers reportage saw The Post emerge as a serious, world-class daily, the Nixon-era investigations cemented its reputation and enhanced Bradlee’s as an uncompromising and courageous newspaperman, whose great allegiance was to the principle of free speech.

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While Watergate made him a star, Bradlee wrought a quieter revolution elsewhere in The Post’s pages. He introduced a new sensibility to features with “Style”, a section that sought to provoke, inform and entertain readers with narratively rich stories and was eventually imitated, in the greatest form of flattery, by virtually every major newspaper. Today, in the era of star bylines and editors who are not at arm’s length from the system they are supposed to critique, the passing of Bradlee is a reminder that institutions are built out of the resilient gossamer of trust and independence, not personal ambitions and compromising connections. And that all good journalism is, by default, adversarial.