Generals who can write always make me nervous.
BEN BRADLEEIn the perfect world every source could be identified, but like the man said, “It’s not a perfect world.”
More Ben Bradlee Quotes
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Hire people smarter than you are and encourage them to bloom.
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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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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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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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I never believed that Nixon could fully resurrect himself. And the proof of that was in the obits.
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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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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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So, here you are, especially in the Pentagon. Some guy tells you something. He says that’s a national security matter. Well, you’re supposed to tremble and get scared and it never, almost never means the security of the national government.
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You never monkey with the truth.
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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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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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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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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.
BEN BRADLEE