Veteran investigative journalist Carl Bernstein defended the use of anonymous sources as Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic, faces pressure to reveal the identities of those people who gave voice to his report about President Trump denigrating fallen U.S. soldiers and wounded veterans.

Joining a conversation Goldberg was having with CNN chief media correspondent Brian Stelter on his Sunday show, Reliable Sources, Bernstein explained how his reporting on the Watergate scandal for the Washington Post alongside Bob Woodward in the 1970s was heavily dependent on unnamed sources.

"We have to recognize that almost everything we know about the truth about Donald Trump and his presidency comes from reporting, great reporting, by news organizations including the Atlantic, CNN, Washington Post, the New York Times, and that reporting is almost uniformly based on anonymous sourcing in part because that’s the only way we can get to the truth," Bernstein said.

"The people who are on the scene who know Donald Trump, who are participants in his presidency, and are telling us the truth about this man, his actions, and his real words as in this case. The same thing happened in Watergate. We used anonymous sourcing at the Washington Post — Deep Throat — almost all 200 of our stories about Watergate were based on anonymous sourcing. That’s the only way to do this. And we must continue in the press to do our reporting day by day by day because that’s how we know who this president — what this presidency really is. The fake news is the president’s news. We’re doing the real reporting."

Woodward and Bernstein's reporting shed light on the Watergate scandal that led to President Richard Nixon's resignation in 1974. Woodward famously protected his source "Deep Throat" for 30 years until former FBI Deputy Director William Mark Felt confirmed it was him in 2005.

Trump has forcefully denied the Atlantic's report, which, two months ahead of Election Day, said the president called dead U.S. soldiers "losers" and dead Marines "suckers," rejected a visit to a World War I memorial in France in 2018 because he was worried about what the weather would do to his hair, and asked staff planning for a military parade to keep wounded veterans away. Current and former Trump administration officials have also pushed back on the report as other news outlets, including Fox News, have corroborated parts of it. Meanwhile there has been heavy pressure on Goldberg to reveal the identities of his sources.

While Goldberg said on Friday his sources don't want to go on the record because they "don’t want to be inundated with angry tweets and all the rest," he added on Sunday that he is "in conversation with a large number of people, as are other reporters." He also said he would "fully expect more reporting to come out about this, and more confirmation and new pieces of information in the coming days and weeks."

He did not elaborate, but what is known is that there will be more books about Trump coming out in the weeks leading up to the election, including a sequel to Woodward's 2018 book Fear, called Rage, which Trump has already branded "fake" even though he was interviewed several times for it.

Bernstein demurred when asked if he knew anything about the book due for release on Sept. 15, which has already been revealed to include details about 25 letters between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

"I’m not going to say what I know. Obviously Bob and I, you know, we're very close. We talk but we’re also very careful not to overlap in our reporting. Mine for CNN, him for what he’s doing. At the same time I think that we can expect that once again, Bob Woodward has gone to the real sources and that those sources, some of whom I’m going to assume are going to be anonymous, perhaps most, but the record will be there just as it has been in all of his books. And we are going to once again learn about the reality of this president and this presidency. Just as we did in part from this story that Jeffrey has reported," Bernstein said.

He also stressed the importance of the fact that, like in his Watergate reporting with Woodward, Goldberg got multiple sources for his story.

"This is not about one anonymous source. Look what we did in Watergate. We insisted that we have second sources, third sources, that’s the way you do it. And then let’s look at the real record of Donald Trump. Donald Trump is the big lie. He is the big lie. His presidency is the big lie. Those 20,000 catalog smaller lies add up to the reality of the lie. And how do we fight against the lie? We simply report the truth wherever it takes us. That’s what we’ve been doing. The reason the American people know what the reality of this president and presidency is and have the basis to make their own decisions, like him or not like him, is because of the great reporting. And almost all of it, the crucial stuff, has been based on anonymous sources.