In a volatile news week, with a gunman interrupting the venerated White House Correspondents’ dinner, Carl Bernstein was honored at Guild Hall’s Academy of the Arts dinner at the Rainbow Room. Introduced by Jann Wenner with an amusing tale about how the two met as Bernstein applied for a rock reporter job at Rolling Stone that dragged on in process, Wenner left out the punch line. Carl Bernstein, one of the famed duo of Woodward and Bernstein, synonymous with the historic episode that brought down the administration of President Richard Nixon, added the essential detail of what happened in between his application and actual journalistic legacy: Watergate.

Bernstein’s acceptance speech emphasized an important aspect of reporting on the news, in pursuit of the best obtainable version of the truth. He said: “We decide what is news. We decided that Watergate was news. We have a duty to find out what is on the table.” And we missed it. He went on: “The Supreme Court needed to follow through on January 6. But most significant is the failure to tell the basic story: what is the fitness of the president? How can we miss such a story?” At the joy filled dinner, which honored Katie Couric and Leila Straus and inducted actor Victor Garber, artist Sarah Sze, and novelist Colson Whitehead to the Academy of the Arts, the most immediate news of the gunman in Washington was not on the table, or in the clouds above Rockefeller Center, simply an unspoken presence.

A few blocks up at Lincoln Center, George Clooney accepted the Chaplin Award. The son of a journalist, Clooney denounced violence at the weekend’s dinner in Washington and the murder of protesters in Minnesota: “I cannot ignore what is going on in the world.” He and his partner Grant Heslov wrote a play, “Good Night and Good Luck,” about Edward R. Murrow taking on McCarthy, quoting, “We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.”  Forget the fun of seeing Clooney on “E.R.” or as Danny Ocean. This was a night for speaking truth to power.