EARLIER THIS SPRING the journalistic world celebrated the most famous of all anonymous sources, Deep Throat. More than three decades after he inadvertently began the Age of Anonymous Sourcing, Mark Felt became the toast of media circles when he acknowledged his role in Watergate, the scandal that broke the presidency and gave birth to the modern era of investigative journalism.
The media, stung by recent debacles like the Killian memos at CBS and the ignominious departure of Eason Jordan, toasted Felt as a true American hero. Newsweek had just turned an anonymously-sourced and ultimately false story about Koran abuse at Guantanamo Bay into wild Muslim riots that killed 17 people, but reporters suddenly remembered how anonymous sources could help bring out truth and justice and hold the powerful accountable. Kurt Anderson informed us that “Journalism exists to get us closer to all sorts of truth, and anonymous sources are essential to the endeavor. Even now, they provide more social benefit than they extract in moral costs.” Woodward himself told the Wall Street Journal that, fearing a “secret government,” he thinks the press doesn’t make enough use of anonymous sources.
