Infomaniac: WeBlog

Can't get enough of Deep Throat?

Seems like there are a lot of you out there. For a lot more links to fascinating stories about how all this happened, the journalistic ethics, what will happen now (will there be a book?), the Romenesko blog from the Poynter Institute is collecting links to all the stories.
I'm fascinated by one of the links in particular. Apparently in an online chat on the Post's Website, Post reporter Dave Von Drehle discussed the feeling in the newsroom. One participant asked: "Did you get chills seeing Bob and Carl sitting at the desk together again?"

Of course, Von Drehle, who's in his 40s, I'd guess, wasn't at the Post during Watergate. He wasn't at any newspaper then. He worked at The Miami Herald before he went to the Post in the early '90s or so......So seeing Bob and Carl sitting together is a stretch. Of course, he probably saw the movie of All the President's Men, so like all of us, has a pretty good picture of what it was like. Having seen the real life, I was shocked at how real the movie was and how much it made me believe Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford 'became' Carl and Bob.

(Added later:) But I guess there is something to this Post history thing. Today Joel Achenbach, who is also too young to have been a journalist during Watergate and worked at The Herald until sometime in the '90s, says today:

We may never again see, as we saw this week, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward and Ben Bradlee converging at the Post to deal with a breaking story. Forgive the overblown language, but in our profession these men are gods. Their stories are the legends we will tell our grandchildren.

Other links include one to Nora Ephron's story on the Huffington Post. Ephron, who was married to Bernstein for several years in the '70s - '80s, says she figured out Felt was Throat (which is why her son Jacob believed it) on her own: "It has been hell, and I have dealt with the situation by telling pretty much anyone who asked me, including total strangers, who Deep Throat was. Not for nothing is indiscretion my middle name."

posted by liz at 10:38 AM