| But one might argue that Woodward didn’t, either. After all, what’s been newly revealed here? That Trump has downplayed the pandemic is clear: We’ve seen his statements about how it wouldn’t be as bad as previous health crises, we’ve heard him talk about how the virus will go away on its own, and we’ve watched him bumble through briefings, wholly unprepared. We know he knew better, because he had Dr. Anthony Fauci on hand, advising him of the seriousness of the coronavirus; that Trump ignored him was clearly intentional and political. We also watched as the recent Republican National Convention used the past tense to describe the pandemic. And we have some pretty clear ideas why Trump behaves this way: Facing the matter head-on requires him to do things he hates doing, like working and taking responsibility, and he refuses to accept and will not engage with anything that doesn’t promise self-enrichment or ego-stroking. The pandemic makes him look weak, and for that reason its strength must never be acknowledged. The common thread is that these, like all the necessary stories about Trump, have already been written. They’ve been sitting in our collective journalistic morgue.
So when we consider the Woodward controversy, we need to understand that what’s gone wrong here isn’t that someone sat on something we needed to know: It’s that we already possessed this knowledge and it still didn’t matter. There are a myriad of reasons why the work of many years of reporting on Trump failed to meaningfully create consequences for his inaction, incompetence, and corruption. There are too many reporters who think this is all just a lark; there is the tendency of the media to try to normalize Trump for the sake of their own psyche; there is a gutlessness at national news organizations that hurts the public interest; and there are the perils of objectivity, where Trump’s sins must be cast against the sins of his opponents, regardless of their lesser seriousness or nonexistence, for the sake of “fairness.”
There is also the possibility that many of us journalists simply don’t matter, or not as much as Woodward, anyway. His reconstitution of already available facts was electrically charged because he’s a mega-elite member of the media and Washington society—a Great Man of journalism in This Town. It means more when he confirms what we already know: that Trump is an asshole. But we should recall that Woodward wrote several books about George W. Bush’s ruinous wars, and they didn’t have consequences for Bush or inspire somber reflection about those ruinous wars. They just led to new books about Barack Obama’s stewardship of those same wars.
The Woodward news cycle likely will have burned itself out by this time next week, and the spectacle of all this media navel-gazing will be its legacy. But that doesn’t mean this controversy was pointless. Could Bob Woodward have saved lives if he’d published his scoop in March? Quite possibly. But the bigger problem we have to confront is why the collected works of hundreds of reporters, pointing to similar conclusions, similarly failed to save these lives.
–Jason Linkins, deputy editor | 