Across the pond

Since Barack Obama was elected the mainstream press has published many articles about the so-called ‘special relationship’ between Britain and the US.  About whether it still exists. About whether it was always more a myth than a reality.

But, for me, tonight was the test of the ‘special relationship’ in the field I know best, which is journalism.  Since 1980 I, along with many other Brit and US journalists, have been involved in the Laurence Stern Fellowship, which was, and still is, an attempt to bridge the gap between journalists, who are divided by their common language and their shared tradition.

Journalism as it is today, was founded in the US by Pullitzer and Hearst, and in the UK by Alfred Harmsworth, later Lord Northcliffe. Back in the 1890s Northcliffe, Pullitzer and Hearst, were all buddy buddy. But by the time I started working in journalism in 1955 there was a huge gulf between what was considered news between the serious newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic, let alone the tabloids, like the Daily Mail, owned by the latest Harmsworth.

In 1980, when the Laurence Stern Fellowship began, the executive editor of the Washington Post was Ben Bradlee, who later became a legand in his own lifetime, because he was the editor who backed two young reporters, Woodward and Bernstein, who revealed to the world what President Nixon was doing, with the help of Deep Throat and similar lackies.

Watergate was the exception. Young reporters do not often stumble, early in their career, on major conspiracies. The Laurence Stern Fellowship was set up before Watergate had happened. It was established because of the sudden death of Laurence Stern, then the national editor of the Washington Post. He was, as Ben Bradlee described it, struck down by ‘a goddam bee’.

Larry Stern, as it happened was an Anglophile, who had found time, while doing an onerous more than fulltime job, to befriend many Brit journalists working in Washington.

To help them understand the differences between our two nations ‘divided by a common language.’

So the Fellowship gives a young British journalist  the opportunity to work for three months in the summer for the Washington Post in Washington, and respond to the demands of the American newsroom, whose priorities are so like those of the British newsroom, that the majority do not notice the differences.

The man on trial tonight was not Barack Obama, who has to save the world from the bankers, the terrorists,  etc, etc. But the new editor of the Washington Post, Marcus Brauchli (pictured above). Who flew to London, four days before Obama, to do the easier, but still difficult task, of choosing this year’s Stern fellow.

Whose name I will not reveal tonight. Because I am an old-fashioned journalist who believes that if the public is going to trust us we, as journalists, must show we can be trustworthy.