JIM LEHRER: But even reporters are caught lying. For Bradlee and the Post, the reporter was Janet Cooke. She wrote a story about an eight year old heroin addict who regularly was injected by his mother's boyfriend. The story won a 1981 Pulitzer Prize. Two days later, under pressure from Post editors, Cooke confessed she had made the whole thing up, including most of her credentials. The Pulitzer was returned.

JIM LEHRER: You got bitten badly with the Janet Cooke case.

BEN BRADLEE: Tell me about it.

JIM LEHRER: Explain.

BEN BRADLEE: Well, let me-- I'll explain how it happened. JIM LEHRER: Yeah.

BEN BRADLEE: And I'll also explain why it was wrong. The bond that comes to exist between an editor and a reporter at, at any level, not just executive editor and star reporter, but at city editor and beginning reporter, that's what all that first year or two is about, establishing a relationship where the city editor, the lowly editor can trust this person, just trust them.

And they learn that by running the stories and not having them blow up in their face. The reporter learns that the editor is a stickler about some of this stuff and he's going to make him go back and back and back until he gets it on the record and good.

We arrived at that position with Janet Cooke what turned out to be too soon. We didn't know her as well as we thought we knew her. She had written for about a year and a half at the Post. No question ever asked about her stories. And when this story came up, she was--people just naturally believed her.

Her description of this, of this child was, was so vivid and the description of the child's mother and the mother's boyfriend, you know, they had names. They were described. There was an illustration to that story that I can still see today, a very haunting drawing of this child. And no-- this is the lesson I really learned-- no objection from the staff that I heard.

JIM LEHRER: Nobody had a bad smell?

BEN BRADLEE: Nobody said, hey, it stinks, a little bit of a rancid smell there. Now, it turns out that there are some people who said they had that, but--

BEN BRADLEE: Well, afterwards, yes. And I--well, you know, the question came up, what the hell were you doing while we were, you know, committing suicide. And that was an awkward question for them to answer.

JIM LEHRER: Sure, sure.

BEN BRADLEE: And so, all I know is that, once it happened, it was, it was the most serious blow to the Post['s] reputation while I was--you know, 27 years that I was editor by far. And that there was only one way to handle it, is to come so clean that it had blood over it.

JIM LEHRER: The process, the editorial process that allowed that story to get in the newspaper did you change it dramatically after that?

BEN BRADLEE: Well, we encouraged people if, you know, if you have a doubt, for God's sakes tell someone about it.

JIM LEHRER: A reporter comes in with this great story and no editor says, well, let me spot check this story. Let me just see if the--

BEN BRADLEE: Oh, I think that happens on every story.

JIM LEHRER: It does happen?

BEN BRADLEE: Oh, yes; that happens automatic.

JIM LEHRER: But did that happen before Janet Cooke?

BEN BRADLEE: Yes, it did; it did.

JIM LEHRER: It did and they still didn't find it?

BEN BRADLEE: Yeah, it was written by a rising star, which automatically gave it a certain minor acceptance. It was written about an area of town where no editors hang out, no editors live. No managing editors or, God knows, executive editors hang out there. And the reputation of the reporter was such that, nobody challenged that.

The Racial Dynamic
JIM LEHRER: Picking up on something related to this, as we were talking about and, the idea that you cited it as an example of the Janet--one of the reasons the Janet Cooke story got through the system at the Post was that, the Post editors and the Post reporters, people who were supposedly supervising her came from elite or very different backgrounds. They didn't live in those neighborhoods or whatever. Is that a problem?

BEN BRADLEE: Let's say the obvious.

JIM LEHRER: Yeah.

BEN BRADLEE: That Janet Cooke was black. The people she was writing about were black and she was writing about blacks who lived in a slum neighborhood. I don't get there often and neither do the people--I mean, that, that was a very unspoken dimension of that and I don't see why people can't speak about it.

JIM LEHRER: Do you think it's important that a newsroom of any news organization be diverse--

BEN BRADLEE: Yes.

JIM LEHRER: --in terms of gender, in terms of age, in terms of race?

BEN BRADLEE: Should do it and they can do it. It gives them access into, into communities that they don't know anything about, A. B, it gives a sensibility to situations which is totally different than yours and that's important to have.

JIM LEHRER: But are you saying that there are stories--that there isn't just one news story fits all? In other words, people read a news story through racial eyes?

BEN BRADLEE: Yes, prisms.

JIM LEHRER: Prisms, they do?

BEN BRADLEE: Sure they do. But it's not impossible for a white reporter to understand what's going on in the black community. But it's just different. It's almost like if you were dropped into a country whose language you didn't speak. It would help you if you spoke it.

JIM LEHRER: Since Cooke, there have been other high profile cases of journalistic malfeasance. Jayson Blair of the New York Times and Jack Kelley of USA Today were fired for fabricating stories. And Dan Rather's report about President Bush's National Guard service was faulted because it was based on documents which hadn't been authenticated. Rather defended the report, which "CBS News" eventually retracted it.

JIM LEHRER: Doesn't this hurt the business?

BEN BRADLEE: Sure.

JIM LEHRER: People say, oh, my God, if they're making up stories in these newspapers, what are they doing in mine?

BEN BRADLEE: Listen, listen, my nightmare was that Janet Cooke would be the second paragraph of my obit.

JIM LEHRER: You think it was that big a deal?

BEN BRADLEE: It still may be. We're not out of the woods yet on that.

JIM LEHRER: Somebody who's watching this thing now and listening to us and they're going to read their newspaper in the morning. What assurance can--what can you say to them, not to worry about?

BEN BRADLEE: I think that you ought to be able to say to yourself that this newspaper is put together by people who are dedicated to finding out the truth and dedicated to the proposition that they're not going to publish any misinformation.

JIM LEHRER: How do journalists, how do editors, how do reporters keep lies out of their newspaper or out of their news broadcast?

BEN BRADLEE: By the seat of their pants, they keep lies out. It's one thing if you know it's a lie. Then you can keep it out.

JIM LEHRER: Sure, just don't run it.

BEN BRADLEE: Just don't run it. But you have to run-- it has become socially proper and right to run what the President of the United States says. And if in the process of that, say, press conference he tells something, he says something that isn't true, you've got to learn how to handle that. You can't come right out, quote the statement and then have a paragraph on your own saying, parenthesis, this is a lie, period.

JIM LEHRER: What do you do?

BEN BRADLEE: Well, you, if it's important enough, you would assign a special story to it and say, when the President said A, he flew in the face of-- there are lots of little euphemisms you can use-- of much of opinion, which says the opposite. And you can highlight the controversy. That seems to me to be quite an intelligent way of doing it.

JIM LEHRER: Are there guidelines that you would offer to people in our line of work to follow when they have made a mistake, when something like a Janet Cooke or a Jayson Blair or a Jack Kelley case comes, how to handle that sort of thing, even, even smaller mistakes?

BEN BRADLEE: It is now standard practice to admit error and admit it as soon as possible after you, after you commit it and to, if you commit a big one, a Janet Cooke thing, that you run a special story about it and how the hell did it happen. Many papers now have ombudsmen who are charged with that and who have great independence, who can find an error that no one's complained about and write about it. I think that's a wonderful, wonderful process.

JIM LEHRER: Do you believe that the public will accept errors from their journalist organizations if they're honest mistakes and they're properly dealt with and the apology is real.

BEN BRADLEE: I absolutely believe in that. And I think that, in my history of getting things wrong, I know that to be true.