War & Peace Quote by Bob Woodward

Woodward is doing two things at once: flattering the public and indicting the industry. The line “people are smart enough to sort it out” sounds generous, even democratic, but it’s also a quiet rebuke to the panic merchants who insist audiences are helplessly duped by cable theatrics. He’s staking out an old-school reporter’s faith that viewers can detect performance. Then he pivots to the sharper contrast: “food fight shows” versus “serious issue reporting.” That phrase is carefully chosen. A food fight is messy but unserious, a spectacle of childish aggression staged as entertainment. He’s not just calling pundit panels loud; he’s calling them a genre, with recognizable cues and incentives: conflict as content, volume as authority, heat replacing light.

The subtext is professional self-defense. Woodward, whose identity is welded to Watergate-era accountability reporting, is drawing a bright line between journalism as investigation and “journalism” as televised sparring. It’s also a subtle warning about what gets rewarded. If the audience can tell the difference, why does the “food fight” keep winning airtime? Because networks and platforms optimize for attention, not understanding, and because political actors learn to game that environment.

Contextually, this fits the post-90s media ecosystem: the rise of 24/7 cable, pundit-as-celebrity, and later, social media’s conflict-driven feedback loop. Woodward’s confidence in the audience is less naïve than strategic: he’s arguing that the cure isn’t more gatekeeping, but more serious work - and the will to fund, broadcast, and defend it.