I think he had a strange, passionate devotion to the truth and a horror at what he saw going on.
BEN BRADLEEI 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.
More Ben Bradlee Quotes
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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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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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More likely to mean the security or the personal happiness of the guy who is telling you something.
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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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As a child, one looks for compliments. As an adult, one looks for evidence of effectiveness.
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It 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.
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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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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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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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It changes your life, the pursuit of 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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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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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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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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The champagne was flowing like the Potomac in flood.
BEN BRADLEE