EDITORIAL: Bob Woodward’s Complicity for Ego and Gain

EDITORIAL: Bob Woodward’s Complicity for Ego and Gain

There will be plenty of criticism of President Donald Trump’s decision early on not to alert the American people to the severity of the potential impact of the coronavirus. An interview by Bob Woodward with Trump unveiled that the President knew in February that the disease was deadly, aerosolized, and potentially catastrophic.

There has been -- and will be -- much debate about the President’s decision.

This editorial, however, is about the journalist who sat on this information for more than 6 months.

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Just like Trump’s decision, Woodward’s failure to make public the President’s warnings, which were made during a scheduled on-the-record interview which was taped with the White House’s approval, appears to be driven simply by Woodward's own ego and desire to sell books.

Woodward had a moral obligation to come forward. This interview was not “off the record.” 

Former Rhode Island Director of Health Dr. Michael Fine said on Thursday on GoLocal LIVE, “We are seeing in Woodward's choices the monetization of information. It kind of gets back to what I was saying before we as a culture are putting our incomes and our economic situation before our moral choices.”

“You know what Woodward did is probably no different from some things that happened at the CDC and other places, but that doesn't justify any of this -- there's nothing that justifies 200,000 deaths now and probably 300,000 by the year's end when we could have had it different,” said Fine.

Woodward had critical information at a time when many in government were fumbling and bumbling their decision-making in response to the deadly virus.

In Rhode Island in early March, Governor Gina Raimondo and Dr. Nicole Alexander Scott were telling Rhode Islanders not to wear masks. Many of the country's top elected officials did not have critical information.  

Woodward had the information.

David Sirota, the author of the national political newsletter TMI writes, "[Woodward] was informed of the crime taking place. And yet rather than immediately using his platform -- possibly the biggest media platform in the entire world -- to sound an alarm, Woodward instead followed a code of omerta that aided and abetted the wrongdoing.”

“Yet, he [Woodward] concealed that tape as the perpetrator kept telling people to go about their business, kept trying to reopen the economy, and kept endangering millions of lives. And now that the information is out, we have to watch the grotesque spectacle of the Washington Post reporting on it as a standard matter-of-fact news story only about Trump -- rather than also as a monumental scandal at their own newspaper, which apparently allowed their own associate editor to conceal information of national import for months," writes Sirota 

"This is one of the biggest scandals in the modern history of journalism. It calls into question the most basic code of reporting -- the question about whom the reporter serves,” added Sirota.

Voters will decide the fate of Trump and Joe Biden in less than two months.

Woodward decided to choose his own brand and book sales over warning Americans and the world and that decision has proven to be deadly.

It is an embarrassment for journalism, a deadly embarrassment.