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Washington Post newsroom GVs / Leonard Downie interview / Carl Bernstein interview; Part 1 of 4 USA: Virginia: Springfield: Washington Post: INT Leonard Downie (Editor, The Washington Post) interview SOT - (On Ben Bradlee's legacy) He's made it easy for us; he brought along a generation of people, gave us lots of opportunities to do things, make mistakes, take initiatives / along the way his newspaper has developed into an outstanding one with lots of talent / it gives us the opportunity as he leaves to lift it up from that foundation a little bit higher / that's the challenge that lies ahead - (On Bradlee being a hard act to follow) Well in part because of his personality, his personality infused the entire newsroom / I don't have that kind of personality, I'm not such a colourful person, I have to find other ways to have the kind of impact he had - (On Watergate being a help or hindrance) I think Watergate was a help both to the newspaper and to American journalism; it permanently changed the way newspapers cover large institutions, beginning with the government but continuing on to private companies and industries and charitable foundations and everything / we cover everything much more sceptically than we did before / we tend to hold these big institutions more accountable than we did before, we're not afraid to cover them in ways that will get them on our backs, and I don't think American journalism was like that before Pentagon papers and Watergate / the potential downside is that it made too many journalists feel like they're celebrities / particularly here in Washington the TV chat shows are full of journalists behaving like celebrities / I don't think that's healthy, and I try to discourage people here from doing anything more than being questioners on television / I'm not comfortable with that aspect of it, if we begin to take ourselves too seriously, we're going to forget to cover the news aggressively / but by and large I think it changed ...