Ben Bradlee Quotes (21 Quotes)

You never monkey with the truth.

The really tough thing would have been to decide to take Woodward and Bernstein off the story. They were carrying the coal for us - in that their stories were right.

I must be out of it, but I don't know any good journalists who have excused Clinton's problems.

If an investigative reporter finds out that someone has been robbing the store, that may be "gotcha" journalism, but it's also good journalism.

We were right about the slush fund. But Sloan did not testify about it to the Grand Jury.

I don't know about any publisher. But Katharine Graham and I had been working together for almost seven years and we had come to trust each other.

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

We made only one real mistake. And even then we were right.

They cut about seven minutes from that broadcast, but it was still vital to the story's momentum.

He couldn't really go to his superior, who was L. Patrick Gray, who was busy throwing documents into the Potomac River from the bridge. He couldn't go to the attorney general, who was on his way to jail himself.

The champagne was flowing like the Potomac in flood.

I give Cronkite a whole lot of credit.

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.

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.

It took us about a day and a half to find out what had gone wrong.

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

There have been as many investigative reporters on this newspaper working on Clinton's many problems as I can remember there were working on Watergate.

I never believed that Nixon could fully resurrect himself. And the proof of that was in the obits.

The media is too big a word. I think there are some reporters who have adopted a gotcha mentality, but not in the really good newspapers.

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

They certainly did. They tried to make her look like a "nut case" and they succeeded to some extent.