You never monkey with the truth.
BEN BRADLEEYou never monkey with the truth.
BEN BRADLEEEverybody who talks to a newspaper has a motive. That’s just a given. And good reporters always, repeat always, probe to find out what that motive is.
BEN BRADLEEIt is my experience that most claims of national security are part of a campaign to avoid telling the truth.
BEN BRADLEEI never believed that Nixon could fully resurrect himself. And the proof of that was in the obits.
BEN BRADLEEIt changes your life, the pursuit of truth, if you know that you have tried to find the truth and gone past the first apparent truth towards the real truth. It’s very, it’s very exciting.
BEN BRADLEEThe first rough draft of history.
BEN BRADLEEMaybe some of today’s papers have too many ‘feel-good’ features, but there is a lot of good news out there.
BEN BRADLEETo hell with news! I’m no longer interested in news. I’m interested in causes. We don’t print the truth. We don’t pretend to print the truth. We print what people tell us. It’s up to the public to decide what’s true.
BEN BRADLEENothing’s riding on this, except the First Amendment to the Constitution, freedom of the press and maybe the future of the country. Not that any of that matters, but if you guys f-k up again, I’m gonna get mad.
BEN BRADLEEGenerals who can write always make me nervous.
BEN BRADLEEIf an investigative reporter finds out that someone has been robbing the store, that may be ‘gotcha’ journalism, but it’s also good journalism.
BEN BRADLEEIn the perfect world every source could be identified, but like the man said, “It’s not a perfect world.”
BEN BRADLEEThere is nothing like daily journalism! Best damn job in the world!
BEN BRADLEEHire people smarter than you are and encourage them to bloom.
BEN BRADLEEIt’s very hard to stand up to the government which is saying that publication will threaten national security. People don’t seem to realize that reporters and editors know something about national security and care deeply about it.
BEN BRADLEENational security is a really big problem for journalists, because no journalist worth his salt wants to endanger the national security, but the law talks about anyone who endangers the security of the United States is going to go to jail.
BEN BRADLEE