Maybe some of today’s papers have too many ‘feel-good’ features, but there is a lot of good news out there.
BEN BRADLEEThe champagne was flowing like the Potomac in flood.
More Ben Bradlee Quotes
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To 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.
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As a child, one looks for compliments. As an adult, one looks for evidence of effectiveness.
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National 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.
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If an investigative reporter finds out that someone has been robbing the store, that may be ‘gotcha’ journalism, but it’s also good journalism.
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Sure, some journalists use anonymous sources just because they’re lazy, and I think editors ought to insist on more precise identification even if they remain anonymous.
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Our best today; better tomorrow.
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Hire people smarter than you are and encourage them to bloom.
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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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You never monkey with the truth.
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There will always be leaks; in Washington, everywhere.
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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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I never believed that Nixon could fully resurrect himself. And the proof of that was in the obits.
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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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More likely to mean the security or the personal happiness of the guy who is telling you something.
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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.
BEN BRADLEE