Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein said the media is "in a hot house, cold civil war atmosphere," wondering if he or his The Washington Post colleague Bob Woodward might have been fired for a rare and potentially inevitable mistake reporting Watergate.
"You know, we made a huge mistake in Watergate, Bob Woodward and I, in which we said the principal assistant of the president of the United States had been implicated in grand jury testimony – in fact, he had not been implicated in grand jury testimony," Bernstein told CNN's "Reliable Sources." "Today, I wonder if we would have been fired for that mistake instead of continuing on the story."
Bernstein's remarks come amid a weekend President Donald Trump tweeted a call for a Post reporter to be fired over getting a Florida rally crowd size "wrong."
"Look, reporters, journalists make mistakes," Bernstein told CNN's host Brian Stelter. "Our record as journalists in covering this Trump story and the Russian story is pretty good – especially compared to the record of Donald Trump and his serial lying; there's no other historical word that describes it.
". . . We are in a hot house, cold civil war atmosphere, and attacking the press is the basic element that too many demagogues in our culture have used to whip up this cold civil war and especially to appeal to the base of the president of the United States."