Reportage Medialog

It must be an omen that the day we launch Reportage Medialog as a venue for critical comment on journalism and media practices is the day that one of the biggest media stories of recent memory breaks. Finally the guessing game is over and we know the identity of the most famous confidential source in journalism history: Deep Throat.

Eventhough we now know that The Washington Post’s mysterious Watergate source was Mark Felt, the FBI’s No 2 at the time, he will probably always be remembered in the popular imagination as the shadowed figure in the underground carpark fom the 1976 film All the President’s Men.

Talking about the revelation today star Wategate reporter Carl Bernstein admited that the traction of the myth even surprised him.

“When we wrote the book, we didn’t think his role would achieve such mythical dimensions. You see there that Felt/Deep Throat largely confirmed information we had already gotten from other sources.”

The other surprise was the longitude of the confidence. As Bob Woodward and Carl Berstein’s then editor Ben Bradley commented: “What would you think the odds were that this town could keep that secret for this long?”

Two aspects of the source’s role are revealed in the initial commentary by the Pulitzer Prize winning team:

“He gave us encouragement,” Bernstein said yesterday.

“And he gave Ben comfort,” Woodward added, although Bradlee knew only Felt’s status as a top FBI official. The editor did not learn Felt’s name until after The Post had won the Pulitzer Prize for its Watergate coverage and Nixon had resigned.

Knowing that aspects of the Watergate stories were coming from such a senior source was obvioulsy one of the reasons why the Post appeared so fearless in it’s reporting.

But the other thing that seems apparent - and has immediately risen to the top of punditry debate - is that Felt had a range of motives for co-operating with the Post. He had no great love of Nixon who had passed him over for the FBI Director’s job. But as the guy heading up the Watergate investigations at the FBI he was essentially manouvering to protect the investigation from being quashed by the Whitehouse. His daughter described him as a hero, and perhaps he was but the phrase that more immediately comes to my mind is: shrewd operator.