With just over a month to go before the end of one of the fiercest presidential races in history, attacks on the Trump administration, already plagued by scandals and betrayed by some of its own former officials, have not yet come to a close. Some of the most recent bombshells that have once again rocked the battle-weary White House are contained in Rage, an expose written by legendary investigative journalist Bob Woodward and published by Simon & Schuster. However, while the book raised a furor against the president for exposing his highly controversial actions, the author himself has also come under fire for keeping multiple newsworthy revelations to himself until the book’s publication.

From its release on Sept. 15 of this year, Rage was a wild success, topping bestseller lists and selling more than 600,000 copies during its first week. Over the book’s course, Woodward covers topics ranging from national security and the Mueller investigation from the accounts of former Secretary of Defense James Mattis, former Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, and former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in the first half, before transitioning into COVID-19 and content from Woodward’s 18 interviews with Trump. 

While Rage, like all Trump tell-alls, included countless shocking details about the president’s actions, nothing else in the book has garnered as much media attention as Trump’s private comments about the coronavirus. Despite the pandemic having cost the lives of more than 200,000 Americans and the well-being of millions more, he recently claimed that he deserved an A+ for his handling of the coronavirus. However, the image of Trump behind closed doors, as detailed by Woodward, marks a stark contrast to the bravado and self-confidence exuded by the president in public.

“It goes through the air…It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flus,” Trump told Woodward on February 7. 20 days later, Trump proclaimed that the virus would eventually disappear “like a miracle” in a White House Cabinet Room reception.

In a public briefing in July, Trump declared that “young people are almost immune to this disease,” yet 3 months earlier, on March 19, he had told Woodward that “it’s not just old people… young people, too, plenty of young people.” Even more disturbingly, it was on this same day that he admitted to the journalist that he “wanted to always play it down because [he] d[id]n’t want to create a panic.”

Trump wasn’t the only one who was criticized when recordings of the interviews were publicized along with the book. After the book was published, Woodward also received backlash for not immediately releasing valuable information that could’ve helped the public. The CDC had only reported 15 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the U.S. when Trump first told Woodward that he knew the virus was deadly and airborne. Upon the book’s publication in September, the death toll had soared to nearly 200,000.

While it’s uncertain exactly what impact Trump’s private statements, if revealed earlier to the public, would have had, critics still believe that Trump’s statements in the interview could’ve prevented the pandemic from becoming so severe. “There’s that classic J-school ethics class problem,” professor at the School of Journalism Bill Grueskin remarked, “What if a source tells you about a nuclear attack in 24 hours, off the record — what are you going to do? I don’t think there’s that much of a question. You try to save a million people.”

The publication of Rage also fits into a dangerous pattern that’s been observed in other Trump tell-alls; blockbuster books exposing the president all hold the promise of revealing scandalous tidbits about the president’s outlandish misdeeds, while sometimes keeping valuable information under wraps until publication. Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, which sold over 192,000 copies, for example, offered insight into what Trump’s inner circle really thought of him, and former national security advisor John Bolton’s The Room Where It Happened included contradictory information to Trump’s account of the Ukraine scandal, selling more than 650,000 copies. While the public has enthusiastically latched onto their accounts of the White House, many have also raised questions about why they didn’t come forward earlier. 

“They’re cashing in on their experience in the White House without actually helping the American people,” freelance journalist Maris Kreizman stated, “ignoring official methods of reporting such abuses while they’re currently happening.”

A contributing factor to this troubling trend is the difference between regular journalism and journalistic book publications. Journalists for most media companies must follow a strict code of ethics to ensure accuracy and timeliness, but the same guidelines don’t apply for authors submitting manuscripts to publishers. Typically, the manuscripts are edited and refined to editorial standards, and a lawyer for the publisher will sometimes check for anything libelous, but that’s about it. Most other ethical decisions, such as fact-checking, plagiarism, or timeliness are left to the author to decide. Because of this, authors like Woodward, Wolff, and Bolton are given the freedom to keep sensitive information to themselves until publication. 

However, while critics say Woodward should’ve immediately come forward with Trump’s interviews earlier, many others argue that it was within his own right to keep it to himself, especially because he was planning on publishing it in a book. Aside from the relatively lax code of ethics for book publishing, another difference that separates regular journalism from book publications is that publications are slower and are planned out over a longer time frame to allow for more thorough and accurate content, which is what Woodward originally intended to do. 

After receiving backlash for Rage’s publication, he mentioned that one of the reasons he chose not to disclose Trump admitting that the coronavirus could spread through air earlier was because he wasn’t sure if this claim was completely true at the time, and it wasn’t until May that he confirmed it. According to his statements to Margaret Sullivan at the Washington Post, he chose not to reveal it then either because he wanted to give readers the most complete version of the story. 

Another reason Woodward might’ve chosen to keep the story under wraps until the book was published could be that he didn’t think that the information would have had as much impact as it did if it had been published back in February or March rather than a few months before Election Day. With other topics like Trump’s impeachment and the killing of Ahmaud Arbery headlining the news, Trump’s private statements about the coronavirus would’ve probably been swept under the rug as just some “fake news” or ignored entirely.

Additionally, it’s possible that Woodward chose to include the information in his book rather than reporting it immediately for the sake of maintaining his connections with the president and continuing his high-level reporting. Although Woodward has said that he never promised to keep the interviews with Trump confidential until publication, the president likely wouldn’t have been so compliant with later interviews if he publicized something so damning early on.

Anyhow, despite the criticism he’s received, Woodward still believes that he’s fulfilled his duty as a journalist. “I’ve done this almost for 50 years, and I think I have a public health responsibility, like any citizen does — or maybe a journalist has more of a responsibility,” he told NPR, “If at any point I had thought there’s something to tell the American people that they don’t know, I would do it.”

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