Daily Inspiration Quote by Ben Bradlee

Calling it "gotcha" is the first trick here: Bradlee takes a term usually spat out by the powerful when the press makes them look bad and flips it into a defense of the basic job description. The line is built like a shrug with teeth. Yes, it may feel like a trap being sprung, he concedes, but only because someone was already setting a trap for the public. The reporter just walks in with a flashlight.

The store-robbery example is doing deliberate work. It's not "complex policy disagreements" or "he said, she said" scandal fog; it's a clean moral scenario with an obvious victim. Bradlee is arguing that accountability journalism isn't rude, partisan theater - it's the civic equivalent of catching a thief mid-act. The subtext is aimed at a recurring complaint: that the press should be "responsible", meaning deferential, or that hard questions are unfair because they embarrass officials. Bradlee punctures that by implying the embarrassment is the point when wrongdoing is real.

Context matters: Bradlee, as the Washington Post's executive editor during Watergate, helped define modern investigative reporting as a muscular check on power, not a stenography service. His sentence quietly rebukes the nostalgia for a press that "plays nice". It also sketches an ethic: intent isn't to humiliate, but to reveal. If exposure feels like a "gotcha", that's often because secrecy was doing the real work.