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Famed Journalist Bob Woodward Speaks In Spokane

Doug Nadvornick/SPR

One of the most influential journalists in the U.S., Bob Woodward, spoke today [Friday] in Spokane.

The Pulitzer Prize winner, who broke many of the important stories in the Watergate scandal of the 1970s, was the guest speaker at Whitworth’s Presidential Leadership Forum.

Woodward looked back to the late President Richard Nixon as a reference point for the political turmoil of today. He said the Nixon presidency was all about hate and settling political scores.

“I remember Barry Goldwater, the conservative senator from Arizona, telling me once, ‘too many lies, too many crimes,'" Woodward said.

He says lies took down Richard Nixon and essentially spelled the end of the Cold War.

"It was the former Soviet leader Gorbachev, decades after he left office, in an interview, said that the lies from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster began the unraveling of the Soviet Union," he said.

Woodward says reporters and editors, in this era of Trump’s war on the media, have to find new ways to do their jobs. He says newspaper and electronic and online media outlets have to find a way to remove the emotion from their reporting and analysis.