CARL Bernstein and Bob Woodward in 1973 when they were working on the Watergate scandal Photograph: AP

Carl Bernstein wants me to read something first. Fortunately it's not All The President's Men – where you can remember the story, but not perhaps every last detail – but instead an article he wrote in 1992 called The Idiot Culture, which is helpfully republished on his website. It's a densely argued four-page piece, which concludes "the media are probably the most powerful of all our institutions today; and they are squandering their power and ignoring their obligation".
One hesitates to summarise though, not least because Bernstein is wary of simplification. His answers to questions are lengthy, nuanced, and he likes to emphasise the importance of "context". But he thinks the 1992 article, written before the rise of Murdoch in the US, Fox News and phone hacking, particularly relevant today, as it describes the dominance of talk-show journalism and celebrity-driven news or, as he puts it, "the spectacle and the triumph of the idiot culture".


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