On "Free Speech: Jim Lehrer and Ben Bradlee," which airs on KCET, Channel 28, Monday June 19 at 10 p.m. and Saturday June 24 at 11 p.m., Lehrer, PBS's distinguished news anchor, and Ben Bradlee, the editor at the Washington Post during the Watergate scandal (and the rare journalist whose portrayal on film won an actor an Oscar), discuss the art, business, idealism and politics of journalism.

During the special, the two -- who, Lehrer points out immediately, are old friends and have privately discussed such issues in the past -- reflect on Watergate, the Janet Cook scandal and Bradlee's friendship with John F. Kennedy (Bradlee admits most people don't believe he didn't know JFK was a womanizer, yet insists he didn't).

What they don't discuss -- and what would be most fascinating -- is Bradlee's assessment of those covering the White House today. (Perhaps because Bradlee still draws paychecks from the Post.) Certainly, we're dealing with a White House Press Corps that has proven far more timid and malleable than in the past, not to mention a White House that is far more accomplished at manipulating the press and denigrating and stigmatizing journalists who don't toe the Administration's line. (Bob Woodward, one of the journalists under Bradlee who broke the Watergate story, has come under fire, fairly or not, for having evolved into an Administration lap dog. Likewise, the Post in general has come under fire for having an ombudsman who seems particularly disinterested in pursuing certain errors the paper has made in the Administration's favor, not to mention the dopey scandal involving its hiring of a right-wing blogger who resigned within a week of his first posting after charges of plagiarism were leveled against him.) None of these issues, alas, are dealt with here.

Except obliquely, and theoretically. Speaking in general terms on dealing with politicians who lie, Bradlee offers this:

If in the process of that, say, press conference he tells something, he says something that isn't true, you've got to learn how to handle that. You can't come right out, quote the statement and then have a paragraph on your own saying, this is a lie.

MR. LEHRER: What do you do?

MR. BRADLEE: Well, you, if it's important enough, you would assign a special story to it and say, when the President said A, he flew in the face of--there are lots of little euphemisms you can use--of much of opinion, which says the opposite. And you can highlight the controversy. That seems to me to be quite an intelligent way of doing it.

Much later on, Bradlee revisits the subject:

I think a lot of people lie and I don't think that they pay any price for lying the way, it seems to me, that we did when we were young. Certainly, I did when I was a teenager. I mean, if I told a lie at my house, I got my butt whipped, not whipped, but spanked.

MR. LEHRER: Got you.

MR. BRADLEE: Physically punished. You can't do that now. And it seems to me that, lying should mildly get you in trouble and it doesn't seem to me that happens. One of the interesting things about reading all the stories currently about bigshot businessmen who are going to jail, Enron types, one common denominator is that, they didn't tell the truth.

MR. LEHRER: And it's just accepted that they lied? I mean, it's just assumed that they lied.

MR. BRADLEE: Well, it isn't by me--

MR. LEHRER: I know, but I mean--

MR. BRADLEE: --but society doesn't seem to be as outraged by it as, as they should. And it's, it's really a--it, it's one of the great, the worst of the sins, it seems to me, because you, you, you deceive people and you deceive people originally on purpose and then if you don't correct it, you deceives them, you've deceived them by, by non-feasance.

MR. LEHRER: You've said also that all presidents lie. Do you really mean that literally?

MR. BRADLEE: Yeah, I think they do. I think they do. And they lie because they don't search out the truth. They get involved in incidents that do not have a clear answer and in the process of explaining those or trying to avoid those, they say things that aren't true. Now, we don't like to call those lies, maybe because it isn't quite bold enough. It isn't quite obvious enough.

MR. LEHRER: People ask people who interview people on television all the time why they don't ask them--when they ask a question, they hear an answer back that they know is wrong, they don't lean over and say, liar. It's not what we do.

MR. BRADLEE: You'd get a lot of listeners if you do.

As Lehrer says at the top of the interview, he and Bradlee have had discourses on these topics frequently in the past. Here's guessing the ones not captured by cameras have been more illuminating.