Bob Woodward was criticized for not releasing President Trump's COVID-19 comments sooner. In an interview with AP, Woodward said he needed time to ensure that the president's remarks were accurate.
Those were the questions being posed, and, in many cases, answered, by Woodward's critics Wednesday. "How differently might Trump's supporters have acted if — this whole time — they knew that he knew COVID was a serious threat?"Jessica Huseman, a reporter for ProPublica.
"Woodward could have made that happen in February." In a brief interview with The Associated Press, Woodward said he needed time to ensure that Trump's remarks were accurate."He tells me this, and I'm thinking, 'Wow, that's interesting, but is it true?'" Woodward said."Trump says things that don't check out, right?" It's not clear which part of Trump's remarks about the deadliness of the coronavirus, or his desire to play it down, necessitated six months of fact-checking.that he didn't make any agreement with Trump to withhold his remarks until the book was published, which is often standard practice for journalists who are working on books and want their subjects to feel they can be more forthcoming than they might be for a news story that would be published the same day.Agreement or not, some critics said Woodward had a moral duty to immediately reveal what he knew: The president of the United States was willfully misleading the American public about a public health crisis. "If journalism is a public trust––a trust that has consistently eroded––and Bob Woodward is an associate editor at @washingtonpost, why did Woodward sit on this information while Americans suffered and died?"Some defended Woodward's work. David Maraniss, an investigative journalist and associate editor at The Post,that"the argument that lives might have been saved had [Woodward] reported this earlier is ahistorical." He also called the tapes of Trump's remarks"an invaluable public service." Erik Wemple, a Post media critic, said the president might never have made these remarks to Woodward if he thought they would show up hours or days after he said them. "The choice isn't between Woodward publishing this revelation in September and, say, March," he wrote onA Twitter debate over ethics in journalism — even the ethics of one of the country's most famous journalists — is likely to peter out against the more pressing concerns about the president's own behavior. Michael Socolow, a media historian and associate professor at the University of Maine, said in an email that Woodward has been using the same reportorial practices for over 40 years and that the ethics of his work"have been debated and discussed ad nauseum." "The bigger issue," he said,"is that journalists hold incredibly damaging information all the time, for all kinds of reasons." "To assume reporters always rush to publish all the valuable information they collect is to overlook a lot of the history of U.S. journalism," he said."They might hold stuff for political reasons, or to enrich themselves, or for other reasons — and we can debate the ethics of that — but they withhold stuff. That's reality."
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