Bob Woodward, Storyteller
From Margaret Sullivan in The Washington Post:
Two waves of outrage greeted the news on Wednesday of Bob Woodward’s latest White House chronicle, a book titled “Rage.”
The first was Trump’s disclosure to Woodward that he knew as early as February — even as he was dismissing the novel coronavirus publicly — that the looming pandemic was far deadlier than the flu.
The second was that Woodward, long associated with The Washington Post, didn’t reveal this to the public sooner.
… If the famous Watergate reporter knew that Trump was lying to the public about a matter of life and death, why didn’t he reveal it immediately?”
The short answer: Woodward is no longer a Metro reporter who breaks news. He no longer delivers the facts in a daily newspaper, allowing history to unfold in uncertain and often ambiguous ways (see: Watergate).
Instead, Woodward is now a non-fiction storyteller. He’s a guy who could have told us months ago that Trump was fully aware of the threat posed by the novel coronavirus. He’s a guy who had Trump on tape admitting privately what he refused to admit in public — and Woodward, of all people, knows the value of incriminating audio tape.
But Woodward is a non-fiction storyteller now. He has a narrative to construct, a story to share, and some books to sell. So that explosive bit of news he uncovered back in February? It was news that Woodward chose to keep a secret until this week.
Woodward said he believes his highest purpose isn’t to write daily stories but to give his readers the big picture — one that may have a greater effect, especially with a consequential election looming.
Woodward’s effort, he said, was to deliver in book form “the best obtainable version of the truth,” not to rush individual revelations into publication.
And always with a particular deadline in mind, so that people could read, absorb and make their judgments well before Nov. 3. “The demarcation is the election.”
The election is the “demarcation” for a guy writing a book-length story that he hopes will become a best-seller. It’s the demarcation for a guy who has moved beyond the narrative uncertainty (and frustration) of day-to-day reporting. It’s the demarcation for a guy whose sense of himself is… what’s the charitable way of saying this… wildly inflated.
The election is not the demarcation for those people at risk of dying — or who have already died — from coronavirus.
In my first post here at Towers of Babel, I wrote: “Our love of Story has become an addiction — and it’s killing us.” Now I have some hard numbers to back that up:
