Why it was OK for Bob Woodward to save his Trump virus story for the book

The Twittersphere was losing its stuff this afternoon, pig-piling on Bob Woodward for saving the material from his interview with President Trump about the COVID pandemic for his book RAGE instead of reporting it in the newspaper back in February.

Christopher Bouzy, a coder I respect who put out the invaluable Bot Sentinel web site to help us identify Twitter bots, posted this today:

I was giving some significant thought to how I might address this, and then the WaPo’s media critic Erik Wemple posted a thread that addressed almost all of the issues that I was thinking about. In essence, Woodward was doing book-length journalism, not breaking-news journalism. He does a lot of interviews over an extended period of time with the goal of providing accurate, in-depth explanations, not first-to-print hot takes.

It drives me crazy that people are objecting to the fact that Woodward will be making money from the book. Well, duh! That’s how our media system works. People create journalism and get paid for it. Honestly, it’s much easier to write pandering rants for money than in-depth journalism.

It is possible for people to be concerned about good journalism and making money. One does not exclude the other.

I did appreciate what Margaret Sullivan, a media columnist for the WaPo, had to say this evening.

I appreciated reading how Woodward explained why he did what he did (Wanted to get the story right, make sure the president wasn’t lying, put things in context), and that Sullivan took a serious look at the possible consequences of Woodward’s actions.