NIXON RESIGNED:

Another similarity is that the Post and The Guardian each made errors during the course of their investigations. No, that's not shocking. Errors are a byproduct of producing journalism. That maxim is even more true when it comes to complicated, difficult stories that stretch over months and years and work to reveal information that powerful forces seek to keep hidden.

When the stakes are this high, and the story goes on this long, you will get some things wrong. It's almost about making the right mistakes. Put another way, it's about avoiding the ones that can damage people and your credibility, or that arise as a result of carelessness or confirmation bias.

This reality was articulated by Philip Meyer in his book, The Vanishing Newspaper. He wrote that mistakes can sometimes--sometimes--be a valuable part of the process:

A newspaper with a zero level of factual errors is a newspaper that is missing deadline, taking too few risks, or both. The public, despite the alarms raised [in studies by the industry], does not expect newspapers to be perfect. Neither do most of the sources quoted in the paper. The problem is finding the right balance between speed and accuracy, between being comprehensive and being merely interesting.

To date, The Guardian has published at least seven corrections related to its phone hacking reporting. Its sister paper, The Observer, issued at least two. (These numbers are based on Nexis searches.)

During their Watergate reporting, Woodward and Bernstein committed two critical mistakes. The latter almost completely derailed their work. Their first mistake came on October 6, 1973 when they wrongly accused three men of receiving information resulting from illegal wiretaps placed in Democratic Party headquarters prior to the famous burglary.

Then, a story on October 25 of that same year almost booted the pair off the Watergate beat. It was by comparison a less egregious error: the duo had misattributed information. But that misattribution undermined their revelation that President Nixon's chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, had controlled a large slush fund for the re-election committee. Here's how I described the error in my 2007 book:

The story said that the proof of Haldeman's involvement had come from grand jury testimony by Hugh Sloan... Their error was that Sloan, though he had confirmed the fact privately, had not told the grand jury that Haldeman controlled the fund. The Post's story was true, but this single error, which didn't change the fact of Haldeman's involvement, threatened to unravel all the good work they and their editors had done.

Though less damaging than the first error, it ended up being far more costly. It gave the president's press secretary the opening he needed to go after the Post and get the rest of the media to press the paper for answers.

"I don't respect the type of shabby journalism that is being practiced by the Washington Post," Ron Ziegler told reporters.

"It kind of underlined the whole thing and the fragility of where we were," Post executive editor Ben Bradlee said later. "It was hard to win and easy to lose."

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