Following the events brought on by the seemingly minor Watergate Hotel break-in in 1972, the theatrical version of All the President’s Men is an up close look at Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s quest to expose one of the biggest political scandals of a lifetime. Though the investigative reporters rely heavily on anonymous sources to begin uncovering information, it’s their tireless vetting of sources that eventually allows them to ethically and correctly publish multiple damning reports of illegal espionage and cover-ups that eventually led to President Nixon’s resignation.  An allegation as large as a Presidential scandal isn’t something that can just grace the front page of the Washington Post with a few quotes from the anonymous Deep Throat – it took months of hard work to independently verify the paper trail that connected the Watergate burglars all the way to the top.

Verifying sources isn’t something that’s particularly new or creative in journalism; it’s a process as old as the profession itself. In journalism, few things matters more than reputation – one mistake can do significant damage to the outlet in question, while multiple incorrectly published or exaggerated stories can irrevocably taint the public perception of a news organization for years. Just ask The New Republic or The New York Times how trusting fabricating journalists Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair, respectively, worked out for them. It took both papers years to recover and recover the good faith their consumers had placed in them for decades. If a news organization doesn’t have the trust of the public, what do they have?

Particularly in instances where investigative journalism implicates the American government as being connected to misdoings, we’ve seen distinguished papers seek out multiple sources before publishing their information. While one source might be the initial tip that gets the snowball effect rolling, you would never see a distinguished, respectable paper take the story to the front page with just one person’s voice. In first uncovering and reporting on the National Security Agency’s illegal surveillance on citizens in 2005, New York Times reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau interviewed “nearly a dozen current and former officials,” to corroborate a story that detailed a serious infringement of privacy rights committed by the American government. While it might be natural to wish to rush and publish breaking information as gripping as government cover-ups, no news agency would publish with only one on-record source. At times, the reliance on multiple corroborators can hurt a news agency – there’s a reason Edward Snowden chose to take his leaks to The Guardian rather than the famously thorough Times, but the good of journalistic integrity outweighs the risk of missing out on the big story.

From the beginning, The Washington Post would have been correct in publishing the Watergate scandal using only Deep Throat’s roundabout confirmations and Woodward’s intuitive investigative reporting, but would have been laughed at by the government and distrusted by the public with virtually no sources. Instead, Woodward and Bernstein worked for half a year to find peripheral players who would flesh out the story and give it factual and connected content, such as state attorney investigator Martin Dardis and CREEP treasurer Hugh W. Sloan, Jr. In the end, their refusal to rely on only anonymous sources gained them great respect with their executive editor Ben Bradlee, who is portrayed in the film as being initially unwilling to publish their story. Instead of rushing to get their information out in front of the public as quickly as possible and risk potential backlash of an incorrect fact or egregious error, Woodward and Bernstein took their time to interview different sources that could all contribute their own piece of the puzzle, before finally and largely exposing the Nixon Presidency as a sham. If reporters in this day and age were faced with the same information regarding Obama or any of his cabinet, you’d have to expect they’d take the same amount of time to vet and verify their sources, too.