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1. black
2. grey
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You never monkey with the truth.

Ben Bradlee

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  Maybe some of today’s papers have too many ‘feel-good’ features, but there is a lot of good news out there.

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  I think he had a strange, passionate devotion to the truth and a horror at what he saw going on.

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  It’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.

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  Those [Watergate] tapes are going to take me to my grave with a huge smile on my face.

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  The history of American politics is littered with bodies of people who took so pure a position that they had no clout at all.

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  Hire people smarter than you are and encourage them to bloom.

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  I don’t want to disappoint too many people, but the number of interesting political, historical conversations we had, you could stick in your ear, it wasn’t that many. We talked about friends, family and of course girls.

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• 

  Everybody 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.

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  In the perfect world every source could be identified, but like the man said, “It’s not a perfect world.”

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  The Nixon administration really put a lot of pressure on CBS not to run the second broadcast.

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• 

  I do worry about how newspapers respond to falling circulation figures. I’m not sure that the answer is for newspapers to try to cater to whatever seems to be the fad of the day.

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• 

  As long as a journalist tells the truth, in conscience and fairness, it is not his job to worry about consequences. The truth is never as dangerous as a lie in the long run. I truly believe the truth sets men free.

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• 

  More likely to mean the security or the personal happiness of the guy who is telling you something.

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  It is my experience that most claims of national security are part of a campaign to avoid telling the truth.

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• 

  Nothing’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.

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  The biggest difference between Kennedy and Nixon, as far as the press is concerned, is simply this: Jack Kennedy really liked newspaper people and he really enjoyed sparring with journalists.

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