Washington Post two-source verification rule

The Washington Post two-source verification rule was an emerging safeguard against publishing an unconfirmed criminal allegation as established fact. During the Watergate investigation, it led the paper to distinguish between evidence that money had supported political intelligence-gathering and the more specific claim that withdrawals had financed the Watergate bugging. The rule did not eliminate uncertainty; it determined how much of that uncertainty the newspaper could responsibly turn into a published accusation.

Scope and Development

The rule took shape in the course of reporting on the secret fund. Deep Throat had stated explicitly that withdrawals from the fund financed the Watergate bugging, but The Bookkeeper, who suspected that connection, could not confirm it. Reporters discussed the problem with editor Barry Sussman and Harry Rosenfeld. They chose the more cautious description that the money financed widespread “intelligence-gathering activities against the Democrats,” rather than print the specific allegation about the bugging.

The standard was described as an unwritten rule that was gradually evolving: when a charge concerned conduct likely to be considered criminal, the paper would not use the specific allegation unless two sources confirmed it. Its scope was therefore narrower than a blanket requirement that every detail in every story receive two-source confirmation. It governed the publication of a consequential, potentially criminal claim when the available reporting did not independently establish that claim.

Evidence and Its Limits

The reporters’ dealings with FBI interview reports illustrate why a second source had to do more than repeat a circulating allegation. An FBI agent told Carl Bernstein that some people thought the reporters had access to the Bureau’s Form 302 reports, which recorded agents’ interviews with witnesses. The agent would not say how substantial the allegations were. Bernstein understood that the reports were raw, unevaluated material: a 302 could contain facts, fourth-hand information, personal suspicions, or grievances. Treating one as the sole basis for a story was unthinkable.

The agent’s indirect confirmation that the FBI had received information about Robert Odle, Robert Mardian, Fred LaRue, and the general destruction of records established only that the Bureau had encountered the same raw information as the reporters. It did not independently verify that information. The distinction is central to the rule: the presence of an allegation in an official file did not, by itself, turn it into a confirmed fact fit for publication.

Publication and Public Reception

Caution in phrasing could not ensure that other news organizations would take a story up. After reports about the secret fund appeared, The New York Times did not mention them the next morning, the television networks carried neither story, and most newspapers did not publish them. A Republican Senate leader dismissed Watergate as a matter of interest to a senator and the media rather than the average voter. The Washington Post’s verification standard governed what its reporters would assert, not whether the wider press or public would accept the significance of the reporting.

The contrast became sharper as coverage expanded. A later 65-paragraph Washington Post story about a nationwide operation placed the involvement of at least 50 undercover Nixon operatives in its 19th paragraph, while devoting much of the remaining article to Donald Segretti’s travels, job approaches, conversations, and background. Distributed over the Washington Post–Los Angeles Times News Service wire, the story was used by more than half of its 220 domestic subscribers, with several papers placing it on page one. The New York Times then contacted people approached by Segretti and published its own account. These developments show the distinction between a paper’s evidentiary threshold for a particular allegation and the broader movement of a story through competing newsrooms.

Credibility Under Political Pressure

As allegations moved closer to the Oval Office, the struggle was over both evidence and who could be trusted to describe it. The White House attacked newspapers publishing claims of political espionage and disruption without explicitly addressing the allegations. One account of the administration’s strategy identified two assumptions: that the public viewed the alleged conspiracy as distant from the Oval Office, and that many people distrusted the Eastern press as politically prejudiced. A White House aide likewise suggested that this distrust made the administration less concerned about press coverage.

The paper’s insistence on corroboration gave its reporting a boundary against which those attacks could be measured, but did not prevent the administration from contesting its credibility or other outlets from giving early stories little attention. On April 30, after Watergate developments had made earlier denunciations harder to sustain, Ronald Ziegler publicly apologized to The Washington Post, Bob Woodward, and Carl Bernstein, acknowledging that the White House had been wrong in its comments. The episode underscores what the rule could—and could not—do: it could restrain the paper from making an allegation stronger than its corroboration allowed, but neither settle the political dispute nor control the eventual public response.