Ben Bradlee, R.I.P.

Ben Bradlee, the Washington Post executive editor who died this past week at 93, was a rarity - he was a journalist who sought the truth, no matter where it led. As the man who turned the Washington Post from a second-rate paper in a third-rate city into a national powerhouse (though Washington remains a third-rate city), Bradlee stood behind Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as they sought the truth of Watergate and helped to prove the ability of the Fourth Estate to keep public figures honest.

Bradlee's stewardship of the Post led to a generation of eager people to enter the journalism trade, becoming reporters and working diligently to get the facts out to a nation that needed to stay informed to keep our democracy thriving. But with Watergate now as distant a memory today as the Great Depression was in the 1970s, the craft of solid reporting has fallen by the wayside, thanks also to "citizen journalists" cranking out "news" blogs in their basements with no standards (the blog you are reading right now is not a news blog, nor is it written from a basement) and bloviators on cable news channels hat offer more ideologically driven opinions than facts. Real journalism is becoming a thing of the past; as newspapers close or downsize, the spectrum of news gets narrower, and media companies are increasingly owned by large corporations that control the outflow of information. Ben Bradlee was an original. He created a form of journalism that showed what the trade can be at its best, and what it may never be again. :-(