All the President’s Men is a great movie. Sometimes I think about one particular line from it. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein are feeling so much pressure to get the story right, attacked by the Nixon administration and questioned inside the Washington Post, because of all the political ramifications of publishing an explosive story that could either bring down the presidency or destroy the paper’s reputation.
Here’s the scene:
Deep Throat: You’ve done worse than let Haldeman slip away. You’ve got people feeling sorry for him. I didn’t think that was possible. In a conspiracy like this, you build from the outer edges and you go step by step. If you shoot too high and miss, everybody feels more secure. You’ve put the investigation back months.
Bob Woodward: Yes, we know that. And if we’re wrong, we’re resigning. Were we wrong?
My blog posts and podcasts are by comparison very low stakes. No one is going to get fired. No one in the tech world is going to shift tactics because of what I wrote.
And yet I come back to that movie. Maybe I wrote something that people don’t like. Okay, but was I wrong? And am I doing what I believe is right even when it’s hard to articulate to folks whose gut feeling is to disagree? Often the posts that seem the most controversial are also the ones that are proven right, in time.
There are many great bloggers who are better writers than I am. But I’m not careless. If I wrote an essay for this blog, and probably edited it many times, it’s very likely something I put thought into and will stand by.
I don’t delete posts. They are a snapshot of how I was thinking about a topic. Sometimes the world moves on and the old posts are no longer relevant. Sometimes the world moves closer and the old posts are gold.
