Trump Disgraces America Every Day

[donquixote99]

Originally Posted by NipperDog

Please tell me if I'm missing something here.

Shouldn't Bob Woodward have gone public back in early February when Trump disclosed to him that the virus was an airborne one? I think in order to save tens of thousands of lives, he should have said to himself, to hell with the book I'm writing, time to go public with this info. He had the proof on tape, why the hell did he just sit on it until his book came out in September?

First, you're missing that the point is brought up as a PR counterpunch, to throw some blame at the messenger and thus lessen the impact of the message. As such, it deserves to be regarded as dishonest noise, and ignored. Save the pondering of hard points of journalistic ethics for a graduate seminar at Columbia.

But to take a whack at the issue, let's look at the alternatives. So, Woodward could have spilled the recording early. Well, how early? On Feb 8th? At that point, the public hardly knows anything about CV-19, and certainly doesn't know what Trump is going to do and not do in the coming months, and how it would all work out. So its impact on the public is sort of dubious, not to be judged by its impact now, given all we now know and have been through. Woodward, in particular, doesn't know just what the future holds, or what effect his disclosure would possibly have on it. So both the need and the effect of disclosure are obscure. Balance all that against the loss of blowing of his relationship with Trump and his opportunity to gather more disclosures that could be of immense value for the record. And further, there's the loss of the opportunity to control and complete his journalistic book--again, arguably, a very valuable contribution. Bottom line, it's not like Woodward could have gone public and obviously saved the nation from CV-19, and it's not like there were not definite downsides. It's a lot more complicated than that.