Bob Woodward's visit to Ohio University

After weeks of anticipation, Ohio University students and faculty welcomed journalism giant Bob Woodward to the Athens campus on Wednesday. Students crammed the aisles of Scripps lecture hall to solicit interviewing advice from the Washington Post assistant managing editor.

Faculty and residents lined up for forty minutes with one or several of his eleven books in tow, hoping for a signature and a handshake from the man who broke the Watergate scandal.
Bob Woodward signs copies of State of Denial following a talk with journalism students at Ohio University. [see more videos below]

And at the end of the day, people filled every seat in Templeton Blackburn Alumni Memorial Auditorium to hear Woodward speak about American politics and the state of journalism today.

“When you wake up in the morning, what is the first thing you worry about?” Woodward addressed a room of mostly journalism students and faculty, just before the lecture. “I’ll tell you what I wake up worrying about: the secrecy of government. I’m concerned about the difference between what a person says he is and what he really is.”

Journalists are charged with calling the public’s attention to that difference, he explained.

“We need to shine a light when democracy is dying in the dark,” Woodward said.

Those words struck a chord with senior Matt Zapotosky, editor-in-chief of the student newspaper The Post.

“I think a lot of what he spoke about is what we try to do at The Post,” Zapotosky said. “I’m glad someone was down here spreading the message that shining the light on dark areas is a good idea. I’ve been trying to spread that message, but I think that coming from Bob Woodward, people will really listen.”

Woodward described to students the information he stumbled upon one summer while working as a janitor for his father’s law firm in Wheaton, Ill. While rifling through papers on his father’s desk, Woodward said he discovered some of the darker secrets of his classmate’s families.

“If you think your janitor doesn’t know exactly what you’re doing, you’re wrong,” he said. “No one knows more about what’s going on than the janitor -- the janitor, and the taxi cab driver.”

In part, his pursuit of journalism and savvy researching techniques stemmed from that point, he said.

But journalism today has been undermined by impatience and speed, Woodward told the audience at MemAud.

“During Watergate, we typed on things called typewriters. They’re in museums, now,” he said. “We could work on a story for two weeks. Nowadays, if it looks like you have even an incremental lead, they want to know if you can have it on the Web by 10 a.m.”

Woodward spoke at OU’s campus as part of the university’s Kennedy Lecture Series. In years previous, the lecture’s pre-ceremony reception was designed as a sit-down dinner where only those seated at the guest lecturer’s table could speak with him or her. OU President Roderick McDavis decided to change that, this year.

“I thought, get rid of the dinner altogether, bring all the students into one room with him and have a Q-and-A,” McDavis said. “It’s so much better this way, having a give-and-take between the professional and a select number of students pursuing the same profession.”

The atmosphere made the Pulitzer Prize winner incredibly accessible, said junior broadcast news major Jessica Demczar, who numbered among those chosen to attend.

“I really did feel like it was more intimate,” Demczar said. “I actually got to ask him my own personal question and I felt as if he was just talking to me one-on-one when he answered.”

Tom Hodson, director of the journalism school, also presented Woodward with the Carr Van Anda Award at the lecture.

“Bob Schieffer [of CBS] has called Bob Woodward the best reporter of our time, maybe the best reporter of all time,” Hodson said. “We at the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism would have to agree.” Kirsten Brownrigg

Woodward speaks with students in Mark Tatge's Journalism Law (JOUR411) course.


Woodward visits with Terry Anderson following Woodward's visit with the media law students.