The right honorable author of the groundbreaking, invaluable new book titled “Rage” exemplifies what some of us see as an unfortunate trend in the way journalism is being practiced today.
This is not to knock Bob Woodward’s enterprising reporting, which as always is impeccable. My concern is with the trifling way he and other high-profile journalists-turned-book authors treat the public’s right to know, including our right to be informed in real time when lives and the common good are stake.
Woodward tells us he conducted 18 on-the-record interviews with the President dating from last December. In February Trump described the virus as “deadly stuff” in a taped conversation with him and acknowledged that it is borne through the air. A month later, on March 19, he confided to Woodward, “I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down because I don’t want to create a panic.”
Only now, with nearly 200,000 Americans dead because of the virus and the President’s lies and inaction, are we learning any of this. Woodward is a citizen as well as a journalist. Is a citizen ever justified in leaving his fellow Americans at the mercy of a president who is patently putting them all at mortal risk?
I do not for a moment believe that Woodward delayed publishing his astounding new revelations for monetary reasons, simply to ensure his book’s profitability. And I am willing to acknowledge that by bundling his revelations into a single explosive volume, he had a better shot at getting our attention than if he had parceled them out piecemeal two or three months ago as individual news stories.
But I do not buy Woodward’s explanation that he sat on these revelations through all the surrounding chaos because he needed to corroborate the truth of Trump’s private alarms.
Questioned about this by The Washington Post, Woodward said: “the biggest problem I had, which is always a problem with Trump, is I didn’t know if it was true.”
If I understand this remark correctly, Woodward wants us to believe he held back because he was unsure Trump’s bleak personal view of the covid threat was rooted in fact.
To put it politely, this has the squish of bullpucky.
In a recent interview with Post media critic Eric Wemple, Woodward suggested that an early reveal of Trump’s private pessimism would have been superfluous in practical terms since the rapid escalation of covid cases was already demonstrating how wrong the President’s upbeat public patter was. According to Wemple, when he asked Woodward if exposing Trump’s private dolor in real time might have saved lives, the journalist replied, “No. How?” – and argued that by the time he got into the real nitty gritty with Trump “confirmed cases were taking off.”
Far from bolstering Woodward’s rationale for staying mum, these remarks undercut it. The fact that “confirmed cases were taking off,” certainly by March, gave Woodward all the corroboration he needed that Trump’s private concerns were indeed factually based.
It also gave him all he needed for a blockbuster news story then and there, one demonstrating the total disconnect between Trump’s private and public assessments of the crisis. Documenting a scoundrel’s inconsistencies is a time-honored way of catching him (or her) out and is especially justified when a time bomb is ticking. Woodward could have delivered the goods last spring just by rolling dueling tapes back to back – Trump’s recorded private pessimism on the one hand, his public blather about the nothingness of the threat on the other.
This technique, pioneered by Edward R. Murrow and reprised so effectively by Tim Russert on Meet the Press, would have nailed Trump for his hypocrisy before we topped the Vietnam-war death count. It would have shown how cynical he was in urging followers to keep on worshipping him at mask-less rallies which he knew were potential super-spreader events.
It might have shamed red-state governors into embracing mask mandates and social distancing rules and persuaded live-free-or-die Trumpkins that the real hoax was the President himself – the public poseur addicted to spouting lies about the severity of the crisis and the private self-justifier who tried to convince Woodward the lies were mere contrivances to keep everybody calm.
The contradiction between Trump’s private alarms and public hucksterism was imminently newsworthy any way you cut it. And anyone with Woodward’s reporting skills could have used it to put us all on red alert – before the virus ignited new hotspots in cool zones across the country.
But Woodward kept his counsel.
In case you’ve forgotten, this is not the way he and Carl Bernstein covered Watergate. Every time they stumbled on a credible fragment of information that bore on Nixon’s honesty or opened a new line of inquiry, they published it, allowing the public to decide its broader worth.
What changed Woodward?
For one thing, by his own account, he long ago soured on the minibite ethos of newly aborning social media outlets and their cable cousins.
“The impatience and speed of the internet and the whole internet mentality is crippling to journalists,” he told a student audience in Chicago a year ago. “I think it’s crippling to people who read or listen to journalists because the expectation is: Give me the summary. Give me the one sentence. Give me the headline. And as we all know, sometimes the headlines are wrong.”
Also, the very essence of Woodward’s brilliance as an investigative journalist – a label he deplores – is his obsession for crossing every “t.”
“The key is to surround the problem and find everyone who might know something about it,” he told the students in Chicago. “You never have enough. You’re never done.”
Given this perspective, it is small wonder that he began supplementing his daily newsroom grind with “book writing” more than thirty years ago. Lately he has given up all pretense to being just another member of The Washington Post staff so he can focus full time on long-form journalism.
The switch has paid off for him and us, yielding a total of eighteen non-fiction bestsellers that illumine some of the darkest corners in our political universe.
But “book writing” imposes constraints all its own. Publishing houses dislike having authors scoop themselves and smudge the bottom line by dribbling out juicy tidbits before the official pub date. Media critic Wemple reminds us that Woodward has been repeatedly criticized for his willingness “to sit on revelations gathered for book projects” over the years.
Journalists are not the only offenders, of course. Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton withheld his insider wisdom from the public and Congress in deference to a lucrative book contract. Anyone with the public interest in mind should insist on writing into his or her book deal a codicil that allows for early release of any newsworthy gem.
Since Woodward had direct access to the President over the past six months, something he lacked during research for his previous Trump book, he faced an added incentive not to go public before he was done. It was the overpowering imperative to stay cozy with the President to keep the interviews coming. Had he broken faith with Trump and gone to print in March or April, the access would have evaporated in an instant.
Maintaining access while honoring the public’s right to know is a challenge for any reporter, and especially one of Woodward’s ilk who thrives on elusive, exclusive sources. Ironically, the way he addressed that challenge this time puts him in step with those who practice the brand of journalism that drove him to book writing in the first place, the mavens of social media and cable news. In the frenzied competition of the twenty-four-hour news cycle where everybody is scrambling to fill dead air or put eyes on the moment, producers and anchors often cut key interviewees unforgiveable slack simply to keep them on the booking list.
Woodward’s self-appointed task of keeping Trump talking required him to play along to get along, postponing a reckoning until he had his reportorial plate filled to the brim, even at risk of giving Trump a three- or four-month pass on his carnage and mendacity.
The book Woodward has wrought from this devil’s bargain may well contribute to the demolition of Donald Trump at the ballot box, and for that, many of us will be thankful.
But at what a price.