Politics & Power Quote by Bob Woodward

Woodward’s sentence is a quiet flex disguised as a professional warning. “Practice reporting” frames journalism as a discipline, almost a craft guild: you earn your instincts over time, and one of them is self-preservation. The key move is “distance” from “True Believers,” a phrase that turns ideology into temperament. He’s not just talking about partisans; he’s talking about people for whom politics functions like faith, where facts are either trophies or threats.

The subtext is that proximity corrupts. Not always through bribery or blatant bias, but through something softer: belonging. “True Believers” offer community, certainty, and moral permission to stop asking annoying questions. Woodward’s ideal reporter resists that gravitational pull, keeping enough separation to make betrayal possible - betrayal, here, meaning the willingness to publish what your “side” doesn’t want said.

The rhetorical rhythm matters. He names “conservatives or liberals” and then “Democrats or Republicans,” doubling the categories to show how easily we swap ideas for teams. It’s also a preemptive rebuttal to the modern demand that every journalist declare allegiance. Woodward’s posture is old-school institutional: the reporter as observer, not participant, suspicious of movements and memes alike.

Contextually, it reads like a veteran’s response to an era of hot takes, activist media, and algorithmic outrage. He’s defending a slower ethic - not neutrality as indifference, but detachment as a working tool for getting closer to reality.