“The function of journalism is, primarily, to uncover vital new information in the public interest and to put that information in a context so that we can use it to improve the human condition.” — Joshua Oppenheimer

I thought I had it.

When still a cub reporter at the Battle Creek Enquirer, part of my beat included covering the Native American tribe that owned the local casino.

An election for the Tribal Council was underway, and I’d learned one of the incumbent candidates, a part-time police officer, had accessed the Law Enforcement Information Network — the computer network police use to run your plates and driver’s license when they pull you over — to look up dirt on one of his political opponents.

It’s against the law to access LEIN for personal reasons.

The Michigan State Police investigated and confirmed the access and turned their reports over to the tribal prosecutor for review.

I had a copy of that State Police report and wrote up a punchy story that led with a sentence saying a tribal councilman had “illegally” accessed LEIN.

It’s a big deal to write a news story accusing someone of breaking the law before they’ve been charged. So my editors passed the story to the corporate lawyers, who insisted I change the word “illegally” to “improperly.”

Around 22 years old at the time, I was incensed. The State Police said the councilman had used LEIN for personal reasons and it said in black and white in the state statute that doing so was illegal, I argued. My editors insisted we follow the lawyer’s advice. I pushed it until one of my editors loudly told me to leave it be and sit down.

I was the victim of Woodward and Bernstein.

Like a lot of reporters before me and since, I was inspired into journalism by watching “All the President’s Men,” the 1976 film starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the dynamic duo of Washington Post reporters who’d written most of the biggest revelations of the Watergate scandal that led to Richard Nixon’s resignation.

That movie and the book on which the movie’s based have done a lot of good for journalism, but also maybe a bit of harm that can only be mitigated by journalists themselves.

Woodward and Bernstein’s Watergate work inspired a whole wave of investigatory journalism. After Watergate, newspapers large and small across the country hired investigative reporters or formed watchdog teams to do the grueling, time-consuming task of digging deep on big stories to uncover wrongs by government, corporate America, and others.

That’s a good thing. Numerous wrongs have been righted because journalists put those wrongs in the public view.

Think of the movie “Spotlight,” the 2015 film highlighting the work of Boston Globe reporters to uncover a pattern of abuse and coverup in the Catholic church, which helped lead to the ouster of numerous abusive priests and an internal church reckoning that went all the way to the Vatican.

Think of the reforms — however small — made to domestic spying programs after the Washington Post and the Guardian revealed the government broadly and routinely collected phone data from Americans.

But Woodward and Bernstein, immortalized in a movie that flows like a detective drama, also created a whole generation of journalists — like a younger me — so eager for the big scoop that they could easily drift into overzealousness and irresponsibility.

Like me with that word “illegal.”

Or like the time when I worked in Lansing and uncovered evidence that Michigan Children’s Protective Services may have misled a federal judge about whether the agency met court-ordered caseload limits. With documents and interviews in hand, I wanted to go with the story straight away, but my editor said, “So what? What’s the impact?”

She made me go back and work the story more until I also had evidence that the practice may have put kids at risk because CPS cases weren’t being worked.

If I hadn’t had cautious, deliberative editors, I might have jumped the gun on both of those stories and gone with “illegal” instead of “improper” and failed to get the big picture on the CPS story.

I learned my lessons and apply those lessons now in my role as an editor.

Overall, it’s a good thing to have aggressive investigative reporters holding powerful people to account.

But that aggression has to be tempered to make sure stories come out fair and that the scoop is really worth the damage it can cause when it’s reported.

People can lose their jobs or go to jail because of journalists’ reporting, and that great power comes with great responsibility.

Justin A. Hinkley can be reached at 989-354-3112 or jhinkley@thealpenanews.com. Follow him on Twitter @JustinHinkley.