Nicholas F. Benton

Ah, Deep Throat

Ah, Deep Throat. At last we meet. This was one of America's most intriguing secrets, even though Carl Bernstein's kid leaked it to a buddy at a summer camp who wrote a school paper identifying W. Mark Felt and nobody paid attention. We all had our theories, but also somehow knew that none of the more popular ones quite fit.

Mr. Felt, shown on TV emerging from his modest Santa Rosa, Calif., home to confirm his self-revelation in Vanity Fair, looked sharp as a whip at 91, and revealed a wry "cat that ate the canary" smile that he's had to suppress publicly for so many years.

The whole Watergate affair, and the Washington Post's role in bringing a presidency to its knees in an entirely unprecedented way in U.S. history, launched a new era in journalism.

Rather than passively reporting what it was told, or could divine from obvious sources, journalism set out to be pro-active, to make the news. The era of the young, aggressive and deft investigative reporter was born, fueled by the highly-effective movie about Watergate, based on the Woodward and Bernstein book, "All the President's Men." Suddenly, for a youngster in post-Vietnam America, becoming a journalist was a very sexy career option.

It is ironic that the very same day the confirmation of Mr. Felt's role as the mysterious "Deep Throat" was made, CNN celebrated its 25th anniversary as America's first 24 hour, all-news network. Felt's role in Watergate changed the way journalism is done, rooting out a den of snakes in the White House, thus helping pave the way for and make possible the novel idea of a 24 hour television news station.

We are so used to the post-Watergate brand of journalism that few can remember it wasn't always that way. It's hard to fathom that most in the White House press corps knew plenty about the affairs of FDR, Eleanor Roosevelt and JFK, for example, but none were inclined to breathe a word in print.

In the 1970s a major shift occurred, one that fully taxed journalism's ability to act responsibly in the face of mounting opportunities provided it by often-politically motivated law enforcement sting operatives.

While the Fund for Investigative Journalism helped send the best and brightest of the nation's youth through journalism schools, with incentives for developing fresh and more intrusive investigative techniques, the FBI turned up the heat with covert sting operations directed against allegedly-corrupt political leaders, such as Abscam and Brilab.

These law enforcement types found journalists of the post-Watergate era eager to cash in on the "Deep Throat" approach to their jobs, eager to leak information from unnamed sources alleging corruption in high places.

As a result of this, the job of the law enforcement types was made easier. A politician, and there were many in Texas, Louisiana and Oklahoma, in particular, was brought under a cloud of suspicion by an unattributed source in a local newspaper, and thus a cover was created for more aggressive sting operations against him. With the help of journalists, the public often found a politician guilty before proven innocent.

In many of these cases, journalists were acting as toadies and dupes. But in the post-Watergate era, both editors and reporters wanted to be there first with the big scoop. They became intoxicated with the notion that their news organizations could make or break a political career.

This has created the nature of the problem that we've had to live with since, and that becomes more acute in an era of information overkill. What are the proper limits for a news organization's use of anonymous sources? How can one tell whether one is being used to a deceptive self-serving purpose or not?

Of course, unscrupulous outfits like Fox News have no problem creating public opinion with so-called news by opening many reports or starting many questions with the unsubstantiated phrase, "People say...."

But on the other side of the coin is the way in which the Bush administration has created diversions and smoke screens to obfuscate legitimate reports damaging to it. It turned the tables on Dan Rather without ever having to answer the tough questions about Bush's military service. It forced Newsweek to retract and apologize for a report about Guantanamo from an unnamed source that, in fact, subsequently turned out to be true, after all.

The genuine "Deep Throats" of the future will have to depend on courageous journalists with a deep commitment to integrity and credibility. That single term, credibility, is the only real check against excess or outright treachery we have in the profession today.

Nicholas F. Benton may be emailed here.