Woodward Cautions Young Journos

Last night at the Press Club, professional journalists gathered to induct three reporters–the Post’s Bob Woodward, CNN’s Candy Crowley, and the Baltimore Sun’s Lyle Denniston–into the DC SPJ chapter’s hall of fame.

Woodward in his remarks offered a cautionary tale to the young journalists present: Always check and doublecheck your facts. The famed investigative reporter illustrated his lesson with a story from his early days at the Post when fellow Metro writer Carl Bernstein referred to Woodward as the “rat turd reporter.”

Woodward had developed a source at the D.C. health department who would pass on word of restaurants who failed their inspections, and one day the source called to say that the Mayflower Coffee Shop had just received the lowest score he’d ever seen.

With the documents in hand, Woodward prepared a story about the low standards of the prestigious Mayflower Hotel and crossed his fingers it would make A1. He filed the story and the city editor came over to ask “Did you go over there?”

Woodward replied, “I have all the documents.”

The city editor told him that the hotel was four blocks away and to get his ass over there. When at the hotel, he discovered lo and behold the Mayflower doesn’t have a coffee shop. The Mayflower coffee shop, it turned out, was in the Hilton hotel a block away from the Post.

A sheepish Woodward returned to the Post and asked casually whether he could have his story back to make some minor changes from the scene.

Also at the dinner, Washingtonian’s Michael Patrick Carney won the $500 Robert D.G. Lewis Watchdog Award for the best investigative story in a Washington newspaper or magazine last year. His article, “Taken for a Ride,” an investigation of the District’s lax regulation of local taxicabs, was published in December’s issue.

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