Historias Contadas

Bob Woodward saltó a la fama cuando la investigación periodística que llevó adelante con su compañero del Washington Post, Carl Bernsten, terminó derivando en la renuncia de un presidente. El escándalo se conoció como Watergate y sobre él volveremos una y otra vez, no sólo porque se convirtió en un hito del periodismo sino también porque ejemplifica bien algunos temas difíciles de aprender a menos que se experimenten, en particular el de la relación con las fuentes.

Todo esto viene a cuenta porque Woodward -lejos ya de sus años de reportero del Post y devenido en autor de best sellers y referente del periodismo- dio una conferencia en el instituto Poynter. Les dejó algunos de los puntos que trató y los invito a que lean la nota sobre su visita.

“Mark Felt, who was Deep Throat, didn’t have a Facebook account. He wouldn’t have had one. The news of Watergate came from human beings who were reluctant to talk. And the information was not on the Internet. You talk to college students and they say, ‘Instead of two years before Nixon resigned, it would have happened in a week.’ And I say, ‘Why?’ And they say, ‘Because, people would have gone to the Internet and found it.’ But I say, ‘It wasn’t there. Even if there was an Internet, the information would not be available.’ 

Some of the Post staffers used to have “FAA” stickers on their computers, Woodward said. That stood for Focus, Act Aggressive. “If you’ve civil about it, and persistent, you can go to the limit with people. Don’t be rude or obtrusive.”

“You get the truth at night, the lies during the day. The perfect time to visit someone, he told students, is after 8 p.m. “They’ve eaten. And if they’re home, they probably haven’t gone to bed.”

“The key is to take sources as seriously as they take themselves and show a genuine interest in them, what they’ve written, what they’ve said, and jobs they’ve had before. There are three other keys: listening, listening, listening.”

“Journalism teaches you humility. There’s always a lot more you don’t know. There’s even more that’s not known. Carl Bernstein and I developed the best obtainable version of the truth. You have to make sure that it’s true and that it’s the best, but it’s got to be attainable. It’s not something somebody would imagine or speculate; it’s got to be empirical if it can be. I think those are the kinds of stories that matter — stories that explain things to people.”

"I think there’s too much emphasis on speed and feeding the impatience people have. … In many ways, journalism is not often enough up to the task of dealing with the dangerous and fragile nature of the world, or the community, or anything you might try to understand.”

Bonus track. La investigación del caso Watergate logró salir adelante en buena parte gracias a una de las fuentes de los periodistas, que terminó convirtiéndose en LA fuente. En ese momento se le llamó "Garganta profunda", en alusión a la película pornográfica que se había popularizado en la época (la broma cerraba). Durante décadas se especuló sobre quién sería esa fuente, un dato que no se conoció hasta el año 2005, cuando Mark Felt -en la época segundo del FBI- decidió a los 91 años contar su historia en la revista Vanity Fair. Para saber más de él, esta es la nota que escribió el Washington Post cuando se dio a conocer la identidad de Garganta Profunda: FBI's No. 2 Was 'Deep Throat'.