Students draped over the railings of open-air balconies and sat on trash containers while faculty members filtered out of their offices in the Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy Thursday night to see Bob Woodward, poised behind a bulky wooden podium, convert the Fleishman Commons into the Washington Post's newsroom during one memorable day of the Reagan administration:
It is early evening and Woodward is in the process of detailing to the paper's senior editors a story they soon discover presents an ethical quandary.
A Post reporter has learned that the head of an unnamed federal agency-who is responsible for handling billions of dollars of government money-was caught cheating during a golf tournament at an affluent country club of which he was a member. The club's officials noticed that he moved the ball from the fringe to the green, and confronted him about it. He subsequently admitted that he had cheated not only that day, but during every game in which he had ever played.
Aghast at what the government official termed his "isolated compulsion to cheat at golf," the club's representatives banished him from the resort, but informed him that he would be readmitted if he were to complete two years of psychiatric treatment.
But when the Post reporter confronted the government official-whose identity Woodward did not reveal to the audience-to get his side of the story, the official asked the Post not to run the article and threatened to resign if it did. That situation would be too embarrassing, he claimed, for both him and the president.
Was this information relevant to the public at large? Was the government official's compulsion "isolated," as he claimed, or did it represent merely the tip of the iceberg? More importantly, where were the Post editors going to draw the line between the public's right to know and the official's right to privacy?
These are just a few of the questions the Post's editors grappled with that day. And, as it turned out, the Post ultimately decided not to run the story-a decision with which Thursday night's audience overwhelmingly agreed, as indicated by a hand vote.
"Did we do our job?" Woodward pondered. "I say we did not. We made a serious mistake.... We should have bit the bullet and found a way."
Woodward, who has worked at The Washington Post for nearly three decades and now serves as an assistant managing editor, stressed that when producing a daily newspaper, one is not-and should not-be concerned primarily with relevance.
"If we have to have certitude about relevance, the newspaper would be very thin," Woodward said. "We say that we are in the information business."
And when that information pertains to a powerful government figure, Woodward said, it is incumbent upon a newspaper to reveal it. "You have to put little pieces out there to see where it leads," he added, referencing the series of Watergate stories for which he is renowned. "I look at that story as a series of little pieces hanging by a thread, and the routes of disclosure could have been cut off at any point."
Indeed, had the eventual Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist not abided by such high standards, Watergate-originally classified by many as a third-rate burglary-might have remained the clandestine affair that it was. In addition, Nixon, who was enjoying extremely high approval ratings immediately prior to the incident, may have remained in office-a scenario that, although frightening to some, underscores both the import and influence of the media.
Woodward could not deny the impact the stories had upon both him and the field of journalism. During and after his presentation, in fact, the dialogue always drifted back to the days of Nixon and Carl Bernstein, then his reporting partner at the Post.
"The profession has become a prisoner of Watergate a little bit," Woodward said, admitting that a "gotcha" mentality seems to have crept into and overwhelmed the post-Watergate world of journalism. "No one wants to pooh-pooh a story... because you don't want to be on the wrong side."
Woodward, who came to the University at the invitation of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Communications and Journalism, consistently revisited the current state of journalism and the flaws he sees therein during his 90-minute James D. Ewing Lecture on Ethics and Journalism.
Citing ABC's decision to send undercover reporters into a Food Lion grocery store to expose the food chain's former practice of selling tainted meat, Woodward said journalists-particularly those in broadcast media-often go about reporting a story in the wrong manner.
"The idea of Mike Wallace jumping out of the closet.... It's not necessary," Woodward quipped. "There are alternative ways to get that information."
Confronting the chain's owners and asking them what they saw, he said, would have led to a much more substantive-not to mention legal-story. "The best stories come," he said, "when you get people to speak their conscience."
Woodward is the author or co-author of eight books, and his byline often can be found on the front page of the Post, usually accompanying a story pertaining to the current campaign finance reform debate that has engaged the nation since last September.
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