The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Woodward Day Two -- Should The Trump Tapes Have Been Released Months Ago?

Episode Date: September 10, 2020

Plus, are Fox News hosts "suckers"? (NOT Chris Wallace on Sunday mornings, but just about everyone else).

and hello there Peter Mansbridge here with the latest episode of the bridge daily Thursday of of week 26. And the reverberations are still around following yesterday's Bob Woodward. It's not the book release. I don't think that actually happens till next week. But excerpts of the book, recordings of interviews between Woodward and Donald Trump, those all came out yesterday. And they're still on today.

You can't turn on a cable news station in the U.S. and some in Canada without hearing these clips, and they are devastating. And as a result, there's a couple of things about this story that I want to talk about today. I know this isn't COVID-19 directly, although it is indirectly, because it's the big lie that was told publicly

across the United States, and it had an impact around the world, including in Canada, when the President of the United States was calling this a hoax, making fun of the mask, saying they were going to get through this in no time at all and hardly anybody would be affected. That's what he was saying publicly, while privately, not really privately, but under the wraps of a book exclusive,

he was telling Bob Woodward, of all people, he was saying, this is a deadly virus. But I'm playing it down publicly because I don't want to cause panic. I'm playing it down, which is a nice way of saying I'm lying about it. I'm lying about it because it'll do people more good to just die of the pandemic than to find out just how deadly it is. That seems to have been the rationale. So that is still bouncing around and will for a number of days.

It's going to own the news cycle. Remember two days ago how the military issues around things Trump had said owned the news cycle? That's gone. That's history. That's last week's news. I still think it's going to have an impact. I still think it will have a big impact with military families.

But in terms of the front burner of the news cycle, it's history. It's gone. This has replaced it. And Trump, if he's anything according to his background, he'll be desperately looking for a new shiny object to throw out there to get people to look at that instead of look at the Bob Woodward book. And that's going to be hard. Bob Woodward is Bob Woodward.

And as I told you yesterday, he's been, if not the dominant journalist, certainly a dominant journalist for the last 50 years in the U.S. and beyond. His string of exclusives, his ability to get people to talk, he's known to everybody. Apparently he wasn't known to Donald Trump. Or at least Donald Trump thought, oh, I can handle him. He's just Bob Woodward. I'm Donald Trump.

I'll win him over. He'll become a Trumper. He'll end up wearing a MAGA hat. I don't think so. That's not Bob Woodward. Bob Woodward is a journalist seeking the truth, and his motto is, the truth will always come out. That was his motto when he broke Watergate stories. And that's his motto today. The truth will come out. Well, we now know the truth on that front. On the front about what Donald Trump knew and what Donald Trump believed as far back as February and what he was told as far back as January by his top national security person.

There was going to be the most devastating national security issue of his presidency. All right. Enough about Trump. All right. Enough about Trump. Let's talk about Bob Woodward for a minute. I'm a huge fan of Bob Woodward. I've interviewed him, as I said yesterday, a number of times on past books.

And he had, obviously, an impact on my career in terms of what I wanted to be. I can remember working overnights in the Winnipeg newsroom in the early 1970s. And it was the overnight radio newsroom, so I'd be writing radio copy for the morning program, and you'd always be waiting for the Bulldog edition, the early edition of the Washington Post, for stories by Woodward and Bernstein about Watergate

and what they were saying on any particular day because it was bound to be a story in that next morning's radio news. So I go back a long way with Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. However, there's a legitimate question to ask, and it is being asked by some.

It doesn't take anything away from what the main Trump story is, but this is a different story that's also kind of there. And that story is, if Donald Trump, the President of the United States, told Bob Woodward in January and February that this was a killer virus and he was deliberately downplaying it, why didn't Bob Woodward report that at the time? He does work for the Washington Post. So that's a legitimate question. The closest we've got to an answer so far is on the part of Bob Woodward.

His argument is, listen, I'm not a daily news reporter. I'm a big picture journalist who writes books. And when I got this information, then I had to go through a vetting process and talk to a lot of other people. We are, after all, dealing with a president who lies. He's a liar. And so Woodward is making the argument

or putting that argument out there that part of the reason he didn't report it at the time is that he had to check it he had to vet it he had to talk to other people okay that's one what about the Post?

what responsibility do they have? did they know that this was being said? did they as a news organization say, oh, wait a minute, this isn't, we can't hold on to this, we have to report it. Well, the Post hasn't given a full scale, at least as far as I know, and as far as happens up to the time I'm recording this podcast, I haven't heard their explanation. But here's one possible explanation for the post, and that is they didn't know about it at that time.

They had an arrangement with Bob Woodward. It's entirely possible that arrangement was, okay, we know you're working on a book, so we'll release you from whatever daily obligations you have, but we get first print when your book comes out in the advance knowledge of what's in it. And that's possible. That's certainly possible.

Tony Wilson Smith who's the CEO at Historic Canada good friend of mine and a former editor of Maclean's magazine journalist and author in his own right said listen there are arrangements that some newspapers make with some journalists that on a situation like this, the exclusivity goes to the journalist.

And we're not going to break that arrangement. And whether we know anything about what's in the book up until the weeks before the book's published or not, that is the arrangement. The journalist gets to make the decision. So those are all kind of possibilities as to what happened here. And I got to tell you, I mean, this is tricky because we're dealing with people's lives here. But having said that, you know, I draw back on my career, and while the example I'm going to give you is nothing as big as this one with Woodward and Trump. It is an example nevertheless.

19 years ago tomorrow was 9-11, okay? 18 years ago tomorrow was, September 11th, I produced, along with my producer, a documentary called Untold Stories, Canada on 9-11. And it was a really good documentary. It did extremely well. It was one hour on the CBC, on CBC News World, as it was called then. And it took you inside stories that hadn't been told before about what happened in Canada,

about the decisions that were made in Canada by everybody up to and including the Prime Minister of Canada at that time, Jean Chrétien. And it had exclusive interviews with some of these players. And as part of that, I had an interview with Jean Chrétien. I had to convince him, first of all, to do it because he talked about things he hadn't talked about before. And I met with him in Toronto. He was in Toronto for some event of some kind. And I met privately with him for about 15 minutes or half an hour

to ask him whether he'd take part in this. I told him what I was doing. I told him some of the people who I was talking to, including some of his own cabinet ministers. And I said, I think Canadians need to know, would like to know what happened for the prime minister on that day. Because there were a number of big decisions he was involved in, including giving the authorization to shoot down one particular airliner

that was not communicating with the tower and there were concerns about it. It turned out that it was just a technical issue. But he had to make that decision, that if it was in a position to hurt somebody, do big damage, he needed to make the decision of whether he's okay for

military jets to shoot it down. Anyway, he agreed to do the interview and we met a week or so later, which was about a month before the broadcast aired. And we talked about a number of things, including the ones I just talked to you about. But then we kind of drifted off near the end into a discussion about

why he thought 9-11 had even happened. And as a result of it happening, what approach should Western countries take? And he kind of entered the area of there are obviously very unsatisfied people in the Arab world about Western culture, Western ideas, Western issues. And, you know, just paraphrasing here very carefully, that there had to be some attempt at understanding that difference

and some attempt at trying to narrow the gap between the two cultures. That sounds today like a perfectly reasonable thing to talk about. But back then, it was not seen that way. And we knew when he said it, that this was going to cause some concerns on the part of a lot of people who didn't have that kind of thinking at that time. So a month later, when we aired the documentary, we included that clip, and all hell broke

loose. And then we got accused, and I got accused in particular. There were many different things in that documentary that other news organizations picked up and ran with because it was a good documentary that broke some news. But this issue became one of particular interest to a lot of people and discussion and debate and stories. And we got asked, hey, why didn't you, as soon as he said that,

why didn't you release that, that story? And we were, you know, pressured by different other news organizations and some journalism professors who love to, you know, crap all over journalism. Sometimes they have a point, and sometimes I don't think they do. But nevertheless, we were kind of front and center on the firing line for having not put this out as soon as it happened. Why do we hold on to it for whatever it was?

I can't remember exactly how long, but it was at least three or four weeks. Well, the answer was pretty simple. We'd made a request to interview the Prime Minister on the condition that anything he said in the interview would not be released before the date of broadcast, which was September 11th of 2002. That was our explanation. Now, eventually that explanation won the day

and people moved on to other things but this issue surrounding Bob Woodward reminds me of that situation because he is going to be asked and he's already being asked why didn't you tell us this back then? You might have saved lives by reporting that the president was lying about the seriousness of the situation if you'd reported it when he told that to you.

So I think when you see Bob Woodward, and he'll start to be trotted out in interviews by his publisher, Simon & Schuster, who, by the way, is my publisher as well, for my book coming out in November. It's not like the Trump book. But it's going to be a very good book. Extraordinary Canadians. I'm telling you, you'll want to read it.

And when it comes out, it'll be just in time for Christmas. Anyway, I digress. You will see Woodward starting, I think, 60 minutes on Sunday night as his first interview, but all next week he's going to be on everything. He'll be on MSNBC and NBC, and once he's done all the main American networks, he'll start farming them out. He'll do the BBC. He'll do Sky News, probably. He'll almost certainly do the CBC and CTV

at some point in the next week or two. Tomorrow, I get his book. It's not released, I think, until next week, but they're sending me a copy, which is nice. And I'll spend this weekend, I'm sure, reading what I haven't already seen or heard on various news broadcasts and read in newspapers already. So watch that story unfold and think about it yourself.

What should he have done? What should the Washington Post have done? I'd love to hear your opinion on that. So don't be shy. The Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com. The Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com. Now, there's something else I'd like to say about this. And here it is.

All of the news commentary, And here it is. All of the news commentary, almost all of it that I've read and seen, in the last 24 hours has been hugely negative towards Trump. That he lied. That he lied to the Canadian people. He lied to the American people, well, and to the Canadian people as well, I guess, who were listening, about the seriousness of the pandemic back in January and February when he'd been fully briefed and had entire sessions with public health officials

explaining to him the seriousness of the situation. But he went out and said, it's a hoax, among other things. So anyway, most of the coverage has been negative. Where has it not been negative? Well, it's not been negative on Fox News. Right now, Fox News, as we know, is a very right-wing television cable operation,

especially in the evenings when they have their opinion journalists doing shows, you know, the Hannity's and that crowd. So last night, they were doing handstands, trying to figure out a way to not make this look bad on Trump. They took him to task for sitting down with Bob Woodward, and that doesn't surprise me. Because most of us, I think you heard me last night saying, what the hell was he doing

sitting down with Bob Woodward? Bob Woodward's a great journalist. He makes people talk. He gets them to talk. He's very deceptive. If you listen to those interviews, it's not like he's grilling him, but he's talking to them in a way that gets him to talk. Which tells you something about the art of the interview, right? Accountability interviews are important, and they're part of what we do as journalists. But Woodward proves there's another way of going about getting information. And he sure gets it. He sure draws the information out.

So Fox went after him for that, for sitting down with Bob Woodward. But they didn't go on the attack about the issue, about the great lie. Now, here's what I think about that. For the last six months, through this whole COVID-19 story,

Donald Trump has been available at the occasional news conference in the White House, which, being a sham, doesn't answer any of the questions, just rambles on, spewing his untruths by the yard. Mixing my metaphors here, but you know what I mean. He doesn't grant interviews to, or rarely grants interviews to major news organizations like the Washington Post, the New York Times, NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, MSNBC. Occasionally he talks to them, rarely over six months. Where is his place of choice to talk?

Fox. How often is he on Fox? Lots. He's either there directly in a face-to-face interview, or he just gets on the phone from the White House and calls in to different shows and talks. Talks and talks and talks.

Call in the pandemic a hoax. It'll be gone in a couple of days. There's only been three people who've been sick by it. All those things that he has said over time back then when he knew differently to Fox. And Fox, very proud of the fact they have access to the president.

Some of their hosts clearly are extremely influential with some of the things that Trump says and does and acts out in policy. But how stupid does Fox feel today that they were had continuously for months on end by the President of the United States going on their network and lying, night after night after night, in interviews, phone chats, you name it, with their people. You know, one of the words from last week was sucker. Well, how do they feel? Do they feel like suckers now after the way this thing

has unfolded and after what we found out as a result of Bob Woodward's book and his on the record, on tape, you can hear his voice, interviews with Donald Trump. Well, if they don't feel like suckers, they should. And we'll have to wonder, and we'll have to see, what they've learned from this experience. Probably nothing. But you never know. you never know you never know they gotta feel burned

okay sorry bit of a rant today bit of a rant on what has been a huge issue for the last 24 hours. Meanwhile, while that's a huge issue, the pandemic continues. It rages on. And in our country, the numbers have gone up slightly. And some governments have made the decision to pull back a little bit on some of the lifting of restrictions.

You saw it in BC. You see Ontario decided to pause for four weeks to see how things are going to play out, especially with school reopenings. And you're hearing stories from coast to coast to coast from parents and teachers and students about what back to school is like. Tomorrow is the weekend special. Tomorrow's Friday.

And I'm more than happy to receive some more ideas and thoughts and questions and comments from you at themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com. themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com. So send them along. Send them along especially if either you have thoughts on the two things I talked about tonight or if you have thoughts, perhaps more importantly,

about this school experience this week. I'd love to hear it. I'd love to hear from a student. It doesn't have to be long. A paragraph. Just what it's been like this week. I'd like to hear from a parent what it's been like this week. I'd like to hear from a parent what it's been like this week. I'd like to hear from a teacher.

Those three groups, they're all heroes to me this week, all with different challenges facing them. I'm sure it has not been easy this week for anybody. So try to get me an email before noon tomorrow, if you can. And I'll definitely feature it on the podcast for the weekend special. All right.

This has been a treat. I hope you've enjoyed it. The Bridge Daily for Thursday of week 26. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks so much for listening, and you know what? We'll be back in 24 hours.