Read on Twitter
I'm angry.
On March 19—when journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner Bob Woodward got a tape he had a moral obligation to share with America—we had only 3,351 COVID-19 cases and only 50 COVID-19 deaths.
Now we have 6,540,385 COVID-19 cases and 194,863 deaths.
*Fuck* Bob Woodward. https://twitter.com/ZerlinaMaxwell/status/1303774363179724800
On March 19—when journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner Bob Woodward got a tape he had a moral obligation to share with America—we had only 3,351 COVID-19 cases and only 50 COVID-19 deaths.
Now we have 6,540,385 COVID-19 cases and 194,863 deaths.
*Fuck* Bob Woodward. https://twitter.com/ZerlinaMaxwell/status/1303774363179724800
I'm an author who published a book on COVID-19 containing far more accurate and detailed info on the virus than Woodward, so I'll naturally be seen as jealous. No—it's that I *teach* journalism and ethics to university students and can't now unteach what Woodward has taught them.
What my students have been taught is that journalists don't owe moral obligations to their country in a time of crisis; they owe a duty to the publishers they publish with at great corporate/personal enrichment. They've been taught that winning an award guards you from criticism.
I wish that other journalists with large platforms—who *didn't* publish a book that could be seen as competing with Woodward's—were out here today decrying what Woodward did and the celebration he's receiving for having done it. But I'm hearing crickets, so I'm here doing it now.
Either what Trump told Woodward isn't news and won't change anything—in which case I don't know why media reports on it or why anyone cares about it—or it's major news that could alter the pandemic narrative and should've been revealed when only 50 Americans had died of COVID-19.
But what we as journalists and those who teach journalism *can't* do is *simultaneously* say this is major news that changes everything *and* celebrate Woodward for keeping this tape under his hat as (checking my math) 194,813 more Americans died of a virus Trump was downplaying.
I lost my dad unexpectedly during this pandemic—in late April. It was a month after Woodward got his tape. We didn't lose my dad to COVID-19, but we lost him under circumstances made unimaginably more painful by the fact we couldn't be with him in the hospital or grieve properly.
Americans have had their lives turned upside down by this pandemic and this presidency. And so many of us have changed our lives completely to try to do the right thing in a national emergency. Too many journalists are playing their old game, just as they always have. It's wrong.
I know many of you sense the same: that you're amending your life to react to a national emergency in a way too few media professionals are. I want you to know you're not wrong: obligations—moral and professional—aren't being met.
I'd never teach a student to do as Woodward did.
I'd never teach a student to do as Woodward did.
Access journalism during a burgeoning fascist dictatorship isn't journalism—it's capitulation, collaboration, and enabling. Woodward hid Trump's secret for 6 months. And media keeps covering Trump in ways that enable him because those forms of coverage get attention. It's wrong.
I did what I could do during this crisis. What I had the skills to do. It wasn't what I wanted to do. Others, millions of others, did the same: took on tasks they weren't comfortable with because we're in an emergency. Meanwhile, some changed *nothing* about how they do business.
Celebrate whomever you want, read whatever you want, believe in whatever professional norms or risk-reward matrices in our nation's most critical professions as you like. I will speak the truth here—as I know it—because in an emergency like this one integrity is all we have. /end
