Funk Babblings

The big mystery of my lifetime is no longer a mystery -- the Washington Post has confirmed that W. Mark Felt was Woodward & Bernstein's "Deep Throat" source on the Watergate scandal. At the time, Felt was number-two at the FBI.

The 91-year-old Felt's family revealed the news to Vanity Fair, but I didn't buy into it until the Post confirmed it this afternoon; until now nobody expected the Post to revel Deep Throat's identity until after his death.

The news may be a disappointment to the University of Illinois Department of Journalism, however, since their research convinced them beyond doubt that Fred Fielding was Deep Throat. Fielding was deputy to White House Counsel John Dean in the Nixon administration; after the Post broke the story with Deep Throat's help, Dean famously testified to Congress about what he knew.

Addendum: Nixon himself thought Felt was Deep Throat, and said so on his famous Oval Office tapes. Some kid who went to summer camp with Bernstein's son did too and in 1999 had some wordplay to prove it. The Washingtonian thought it was Felt back in 1974, and continued to think so in 2002. For other pre-2005 references to Felt as a top Deep Throat candidate, see this 1992 Atlantic story, and Slate's 1999 and 2002 coverage.

Whoa. Apparently Hunter S. Thompson shot himself tonight.

I just read Fear And Loathing On The Campaign Trail '72 last year. HST was a necessary voice who made a difference. I'm not sure what else to say....

When I was listening to "On The Media" early this evening, I noticed yet another instance of something that has become a pet peeve of mine. That is people trumpeting the "power of the blogs" based on the takedown of Dan Rather and CBS news over the allegedly-forged documents about Bush skipping out on the Texas Air National Guard. By now that event seems to have seeped into the national consciousness as "Rather and CBS used forged documents" and "the [right-wing] blogs proved it". The claim was that the documents looked more like something out of Microsoft Word than out of an early-70s typewriter.

The problem is that the right-wing blogs were wrong about the whole thing.

At the time, one guy over at Daily Kos posted a six-part analysis of the documents based on high-resolution scans and actual research into the capabilities of typewriters of the time. (Go read at least part of it: part I, II, III, IV, V, VI) I had some interest in it because I have some knowledge of and interest in typography. But nobody paid attention to the actual typographical facts, and this guy finally got sick of the whole thing and wrote an outlandishly speculative (but highly plausible) article suggesting Karl Rove orchestrated the whole thing.

Now he's posted a quick review of the whole episode, with a link to a Columbia Journalism Review story about it. CJR seems to agree that the resulting conventional wisdom is simply wrong, even if nobody really knows for sure what's up with those memos.

But the whole episode accomplished a number of things. First it discredited Dan Rather and CBS news, putting them alongside Jayson Blair and the New York Times in the journalism hall of shame. This overshadowed the larger truths about Bush's Air National Guard service (and lack thereof), which are proven by other documents not in question, and managed to get rid of that story entirely. Finally, discrediting CBS cast a shadow over the other high-quality reporting they'd been doing on questionable actions by Bush and his administration.

In fact, this stupid thing may have even been enough to turn the election to Bush. If so I almost have to admire the judo of it. Almost.