No stone unturned?_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

No stone unturned?

Yet, elsewhere in our conversation Bernstein's verdict on Murdoch is more mixed. When we first talk about him, he says “it’s important not to be unfair to Murdoch” because “he’s the most far seeing media entrepreneur of our time”. There is qualified praise for the Wall Street Journal and the Times where “an awful lot of people in those institutions try to produce the best available version of the truth” – Bernstein’s phrase for the true journalistic undertaking – and the observation that “Murdoch put The Simpsons on air”, which appears not be a criticism because the man whose News Corporation owns Fox film and television also “showed he could understand the information consumer”.

But finally, there is this verdict: “Some of his newsrooms showed such disregard for any semblance of reasonable privacy and even the law, and this had an effect on other newsrooms on both sides of the Atlantic”.

This is characteristic of Bernstein's approach to thinking; pros and cons weighed up before conclusions drawn. Ask him if he believes the US is still in the grip of the idiot culture, and he responds by heaping praise on the New York Times – “the best English-speaking newspaper, better than it has been for years” – and says his alma mater, the Washington Post, is still “a source of some great reporting, particularly in the field of national security”.

But he is highly critical of local television news, which is “just plain qualitatively lousy”, and argues that network news has lost its way to cable news, which is in turn dominated by Fox News. Fox, he says, provides “quote news unquote” by which he means the channel plays to viewers’ “already held ideological bias” rather than trying to investigate and establish “the best available version of the truth” again. For Bernstein, though, that doesn't mean journalists should try to aim to “to give equal time to one side and the other” as an alternative to the Fox approach because the idea that there can be two equally correct points of view on a topic is “demonstrably false and indeed crazy”. In short, there are right answers.