Gail Russell Chaddock: Watergate-week Fallout

Gail Russell Chaddock, in the CSM (6-7-05)

The long-awaited naming of Deep Throat has become a reminder of how vital anonymous sources can be in breaking an important story - and how tough it is to do it in a way that preserves public confidence.

These are lessons that go back before Watergate, and they continue to be learned by today's crop of reporters. But rarely do they generate the buzz that Deep Throat has in the past week.

Former FBI Deputy Director Mark Felt turns out to be a more complex character than the earnest civil servant portrayed by Hal Holbrook in the film "All the President's Men" - or sketched in the book of the same title by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

Whatever his motives, Mr. Felt was a key player in a fierce bureaucratic turf war between the FBI and the Nixon White House. Moreover, at the same time he was guiding Mr. Woodward through illegalities of the Watergate affair, Felt signed off on nine illegal FBI break-ins for which he would be later convicted and pardoned.

"This city floats on a sea of leaks. It is the currency of this one-company town," says Jonathan Turley, a professor of public interest law at George Washington University Law School. "Some of the most important leaks were done with less than inspiring motives... Nevertheless, the leak was true and historic."

In this case, indeed, the information provided by Deep Throat made superstars of the two journalists who kept his name secret. Yet anonymous sourcing has as often been a peril in US journalism...

...Since Watergate, public confidence in the press has been battered by a succession of reporters who have fabricated stories, often using unnamed hoax sources.

Anonymous sourcing is so deeply ingrained in the fabric of Washington journalism that Cabinet officials and top White House aides routinely give briefings on background - a practice that news organizations occasionally protest but have done little to budge. Still, anonymously sourced quotes are down one-third since the Reagan years, according to a recent study by the Center for Media and Public Affairs. The national press uses the highest proportion of unnamed sources and the network nightly news uses the lowest.