THERE is a point in their Watergate investigation when Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein need to know if a member of president Richard Nixon's White House team borrowed a certain book from the Library of Congress.
It's important, trust me. Bernstein phones the librarian and at first receives co-operation, then it looks as though someone senior has intervened and she clams up.
The point about this is that it could never happen here at all. In the UK, finding out via an official channel what a Keir Starmer staffer was reading would be nigh on impossible.
I became a journalist because I regarded Woodward and Bernstein as heroes. I still do. They brought down the most powerful person in the world without firing a shot.
It was later, when I was mounting investigations and chasing wrongdoing that I realised how, compared with the US, ours is a much more closed society.
We like to suppose it's not, that the liberal UK is readily open. It's not. American reporters are able to access far more detail easily and legally than their UK counterparts.
Woodward and Bernstein were of course from the Washington Post. Their historic reporting gave the paper its reputation, one it retains as an organisation that famously speaks truth to power.
WaPo now has a British publisher and chief executive in Sir Will Lewis, an ex-editor and investigative reporter in London. Lewis's appointment has provoked a bitter culture clash with the existing staff.
In the US, journalistic ethics occupy the highest of pedestals. Arguably, they can, since theirs is a nation that affords greater transparency. So, paying for information is prohibited.
There, discovering if someone has a criminal record is legal and obtainable.
Here, it is illegal and punishable.
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