Daily Inspiration Quote by Ben Bradlee

A newsroom confession that refuses to kneel. Ben Bradlee’s line has the clipped bravado of someone who spent a career betting the institution’s credibility on calls that could get you sued, fired, or quietly destroyed in Washington. “Only one real mistake” sounds like humility until the second sentence flips the blade: “And even then we were right.” It’s not apology; it’s a defense of method. The error, he implies, was tactical or procedural - maybe a name that shouldn’t have been printed, a sourcing wrinkle, a timing judgment - while the underlying thrust of the reporting remained true.

Bradlee is writing from the moral weather of the Watergate era, when the press stopped being a stenographer for power and started acting like an adversary. That shift demanded a new kind of self-justification. You can hear the editor’s calculus: journalism is messy because reality is messy, and perfection is the alibi demanded by people who benefit from silence. By conceding a “real mistake,” he signals standards; by insisting they were “right,” he reasserts the public interest as the final metric.

The sentence pair also functions as institutional mythmaking. Great news organizations survive by narrating their own fallibility as proof of seriousness, then re-centering their authority. Bradlee’s subtext is less “trust us” than “judge us by outcomes”: did the work expose what mattered, did it move accountability forward, did it hold under pressure. It’s a credo for an editor who understood that the most consequential truths rarely arrive neatly packaged - and that power will always prefer the story be disqualified on a technicality.