News-Record.com

"Deep Throat," the key source for The Washington Post's Watergate coverage and the most famous anonymous source in journalism history, has been unmasked as W. Mark Felt, a top FBI official at the time.

I was 13 when the Senate Watergate hearings, led by North Carolina's Sam Ervin, captivated the nation, and I recall my friend Randy Fullington and I watching some of the hearings on his basement TV. But I don't recall ever hearing Felt's name, then or later, even though lots of people were fingering him. (In contrast, a co-worker's husband who fancies himself a Watergate expert pronounced yesterday, "I've been saying it was Mark Felt for years." And, for all I know, he has.)

The confirmations of Watergate reporter Bob Woodward and then-Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee aside, Felt makes a plausible Deep Throat: As the FBI's No. 2 guy, he certainly had access to information, and with then-FBI Director Patrick Gray, a political appointee, destroying evidence at White House direction, Felt had a plausible motive: to protect the FBI, where he had spent a long career.

Felt himself apparently remains ambivalent about his role -- a feeling that, in my own experience, is fairly common among sincere whistleblowers -- but it's interesting to note that, 31 years after Nixon's resignation, the only people who appear to have a flat-out problem with his role are those firmly encamped at or near the right-wing lunatic fringe. Watergate-convict-turned-evangelist Chuck Colson described himself as "personally shocked" upon learning Deep Throat's identity. He added, "When any president has to worry whether the deputy director of the FBI is sneaking around in dark corridors peddling information in the middle of the night, he's in trouble," a statement that nimbly dodges the question of whether the president in question is supposed to be in trouble. Colson, who, I'll grant, has done admirable work rehabilitating convicts, still doesn't get it. He adds, "There were times when I should have blown the whistle, so I understand his feelings. But I cannot approve of his methods."

Yo, Chuck, here's a clue, no charge: When somebody else steps up to do what you know you should have and didn't, you not only are wrong to criticize him, you not only have no moral or ethical basis for even questioning him, you have an obligation to go apologize to him and beg his forgiveness for making it necessary for him to do what he did. And until you do, I don't want to hear another freakin' word out of you, particularly on the subject of who is and who is not a professional.

Former Nixon speechwriter Pat Buchanan, who would make an excellent jackboot model, called Felt a "traitor." So, um, Felt's a traitor to an administration that was a traitor to America. Ohhh-kay, Pat. Nice logic, there.

Here's the deal, folks: When you take a government job, yeah, you work for a particular supervisor, you work for a particular agency, you work for the government in general, but you REALLY work for the people. It is to them, not those in between, that you owe your highest loyalty. The Nixon admininstration was brought down, and rightly so, because a few people like Mark Felt understood that principle. Would that more government employees at all levels did so today.

UPDATE: Strange, albeit probably not that important, but as of 4:30 p.m. today, The New York Times had published nothing containing any comment from its recently retired op-ed columnist and former Nixon speechwriter, William Safire.

Via Poynter, I see that the Federal Communications Commission plans to fine three Washington-area TV stations a total of $40,000 for failing to include closed-captioning in their May 25, 2004, broadcasts about impending tornadoes. That's an average of about $13,333.33 apiece.

For perspective, the FCC fined each CBS-owned station that unwittingly broadcast a brief glimpse of singer Janet Jackson's bare breast during the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show $27,500 (for a total of $550,000) -- more than twice as much.

So Janet Jackson's breast is more than twice as dangerous as a tornado. She must be so proud.

According to an e-mail from the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences, we'll be told at 2 p.m. tomorrow the sex of a 68-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex, when a paper by Dr. Mary H. Schweitzer, Assistant Curator of Paleontology at the museum and a professor at N.C. State (and two other researchers) is officially published by Science magazine.

Me? I'll be out of the office. Y'all are on your own.

We journalists are frequently criticized/dismissed as "arrogant."

To many of us, much of the time, this is mystifying in that we honestly feel we have little or nothing to be arrogant about. (And that's often true.)

Sometimes, we come across as arrogant when we're simply being a little too open about our pride in our jobs. No one likes a braggart, even when the braggart can back it up.

But sometimes we are arrogant. And Andrewe Cline, whose Rhetorica.net blog has carved out a rich niche in the area of journalism's institutional biases, points to some examples and explains why they arise and why they are wrong, particularly in the age of citizen news media.

We teach students to be arrogant when we teach them that national is better than local.

We teach students to be arrogant when we teach them to elevate investigative reporting over solid day-to-day reporting. (I would argue that the most solid day-to-day reporting IS investigative in at least some senses.)

We teach students to be arrogant when we teach them that journalists have more First Amendment rights than [other] citizens.

We teach students to be arrogant when we fail to teach them that the public always knows more than they do.

My friend and former co-worker Giles Lambertson, currently associate editor of the Wilson Daily Times, apparently is laboring under a misimpression. In his Sunday N&R op-ed column (not online, unfortunately), he wrote:

The theory [driving newspapers', and particular the News & Record's, emphasis on local news] is that hometown people have less interest in the events occurring outside a newspaper’s circulation area than they do events closer to home.

I can't speak for the industry, but that's not the theory here at the N&R. The theory is that people have less interest in getting news of those events in their printed N&R because 1) we don't have any staff devoted to getting it and 2) by the time the paper lands on the doorstep every morning, much of that news, arriving as it does via our wire services, is 18 to 24 hours old. Put another way, they can get that news via the Internet from many of the same sources the N&R relies on, and more besides, and they can get it much sooner from the Internet than from us.

We have to use our resources as efficiently as possible to give readers what they need and want, and sometimes the cost of doing those things we must do, or that only we can do, is not to do things other outlets can do better and/or faster. If that means linking to a competitor sometimes, so be it. The point is to be the place where you can find stuff, not to be the place that provides it all. Nobody has that much money.

I didn't realize this, but apparently June is National Safety Month.

Pardon me, but I've got some scissors that need running with.

More Americans think Rush Limbaugh is a journalist than think Bob Woodward is.

Now, don't get me wrong. Woodward's been living off Watergate for 30 years, even as he has gotten sucked farther and farther into the out-of-touch and just-plain-ignorant vortex of permanent DC media. Much as I appreciate his Watergate coverage, for most of the time since then he has been way too inside-baseball for the good of his readers.

But Rush? Is a documented liar who doesn't even claim the title of journalist for himself. Although, to be fair, I should point out that he's also a drug addict.

Looks like I'm gonna need bigger scissors. Although I suppose it's possible that my head will just explode on its own.

UPDATE: Oops. Violated my own First Rule of Reporting on Polls: Always read the methodology. From Jerome Armstrong at MyDD:

Limbaugh's name ID is at 82% in this poll, while Woodward's is at 47%, entirely accounting for the similarity this poll supposedly finds. By a two to one margin, people who know who Rush Limbaugh is do not think he is a journalist. Also, by nearly a two to one margin, people who know who Bob Woodward is think he is a journalist.

So we haven't moved completely into an alternate universe. Whew.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: As commenter Kerry Sipe points out below, it's Bill O'Reilly, not Rush Limbaugh, who has better "journalist" numbers than Bob Woodward. In my haste I put Rush in O'Reilly's place. Maybe it's just time for my own little Emily Litella moment.

A memorable quote, pulled from an otherwise unmemorable thumbsucker post by Lance Mannion about men bloggers v. women bloggers, wonks v. writers and oh who cares ...

[Blogger] Atrios is never one to write the op-ed writer's version of "If I may be so bold as to interrupt for a moment" when "[Expletive] that [expletive]!" will do the trick. But [bloggers] [Matthew] Yglesias, [Kevin] Drum and Josh Marshall write as if the writer they most admire is [LA Times editorial-page editor] Michael Kinsley, who is, whatever you think of his style, and I think it's a little on the precious side, no Mark Twain.

Twain wrote with a pen warmed up in Hell. Kinsley writes as if with a keyboard that's been kept in a temperature-controlled room in a cloister, dusted off daily by nuns, and then handed to him when he calls for it, in a polite whisper of course, by the youngest and most innocent novice wearing white gloves. ...

A front line of bloggers all writing like Michael Kinsley is not going to set the world on fire.

"Dusted off daily by nuns." Hee.

But really. I write with a stultifying editorial voice here because I have to. (Well, posts about running with scissors aside.) But that doesn't mean YOU have to. Light it up. Sure, use facts and logic and all, but for cryin' out loud, don't write like us -- we're hemorrhaging readers, remember? Besides, if blogging ain't fun, then what's the point?

(And can you freakin' imagine Mark Twain as a blogger?)

UPDATE: Missing link restored, thanks to Anna in comments below.

FURTHER UPDATE: Lance responds to point out, correctly, that I forgot to warn you about the nudity on his site. If you lost your job because you stumbled onto his NSFW photo of the Australian women's soccer team just as the boss was peering over your shoulder, I apologize.

Reporters are criticized, often accurately, for being obnoxious pains in the rear end. But, as this transcript shows, sometimes it's because they've been provoked by a, well, less-than-fully-forthcoming government official, in which case this approach on the reporter's part is no more or less than doing the job correctly.

Totally unsolicited public-relations hint: If what you mean is "no comment," then say "no comment." Seriously. Both journalists and the public will appreciate the time you're saving them and the fact that you're not actively trying to insult their intelligence, even if they won't be satisfied with the answer.

*Theme of the headline was my idea, but kudos to my podmate Dick Barron for coming up with a version that scans correctly.

During my recent, extended absence from the office, I fell behind on a lot of things. I'm caught up on almost all of them, but one big one on which I'm still way behind is YourNews.

At this point, I've edited and posted everything submitted through June 1. But that still leaves a backlog of about 15 pieces at this point. If you're one of those unfortunate authors, please bear with me; I hope to finish catching up within the next few days.

As digital video equipment gets smaller, cheaper and more common, committing your own videography in the service of journalism gets easier and easier. The British Broadcasting Co. is all in favor of that and has posted a course online in how to shoot better video. So trip on over there and get yourself some edumacation. We can't all be this good, but we've got to start somewhere.

I received an invitation this week from Anonymoses to join Carolina Blog Consultants. Some well-known local bloggers already have signed on. I'm flattered to be asked and certainly could use more money, but (and I tried to e-mail 'Moses this privately but couldn't find an address for him) I have to decline: It would be hard to create a more direct conflict of interest with my full-time gig.

That said, whatever helpful tips I come across on blogging and related subjects, I pass on here for free. So at least some good comes out of this.