A tip o' the hat to Alan Bass who posted this link to CAJ-L: Deep Throat of Watergate fame might be dying.
Here's an excerpt of an op-ed piece by Watergate participant John Dean (Disgraced President Richard Nixon's White House counsel) from the L.A. Times:
Should We Jail Deep Throats ...
By John W. Dean
John W. Dean is a former White House counsel and author, most recently, of Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush.
I have little doubt that one of my former Nixon White House colleagues is history's best-known anonymous source — Deep Throat. But I'll be damned if I can figure out exactly which one.
We'll all know one day very soon, however. Bob Woodward, a reporter on the team that covered the Watergate story, has advised his executive editor at the Washington Post that Throat is ill. And Ben Bradlee, former executive editor of the Post and one of the few people to whom Woodward confided his source's identity, has publicly acknowledged that he has written Throat's obituary.
When that posthumous profile reveals the secret name, it will be flash powder on the long-simmering debate about reporters' use of anonymous sources — an issue much in the news lately because my former law school classmate, Thomas F. Hogan, now the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, has been holding journalists in contempt of court for refusing to reveal their sources to a grand jury investigating the leak of the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame.
I'm caught in the middle on this discussion. As a columnist, occasional freelancer and author of six nonfiction books, I use unidentified sources myself. In fact, I just used one. The source who informed me that Woodward leaked the news of Throat's illness to the executive editor of the Post gave me that information either on "deep background" or "off the record" (I never could get the distinction of those rules straightened out). So I apologize to my source if this information was never meant to be public, but it is a tidbit too hot to keep sitting on.
We'll all know one day very soon, however. Bob Woodward, a reporter on the team that covered the Watergate story, has advised his executive editor at the Washington Post that Throat is ill. And Ben Bradlee, former executive editor of the Post and one of the few people to whom Woodward confided his source's identity, has publicly acknowledged that he has written Throat's obituary.
When that posthumous profile reveals the secret name, it will be flash powder on the long-simmering debate about reporters' use of anonymous sources — an issue much in the news lately because my former law school classmate, Thomas F. Hogan, now the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, has been holding journalists in contempt of court for refusing to reveal their sources to a grand jury investigating the leak of the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame.
I'm caught in the middle on this discussion. As a columnist, occasional freelancer and author of six nonfiction books, I use unidentified sources myself. In fact, I just used one. The source who informed me that Woodward leaked the news of Throat's illness to the executive editor of the Post gave me that information either on "deep background" or "off the record" (I never could get the distinction of those rules straightened out). So I apologize to my source if this information was never meant to be public, but it is a tidbit too hot to keep sitting on.
But then there was a counter-argument:
... or Protect Secret Sources?
By Kelli L. Sager
Kelli L. Sager is a partner in the law firm of Davis Wright Tremaine. Her clients include the Los Angeles Times. The opinions expressed here are her own.
Not since the Watergate era has the media's use of confidential sources been so heatedly debated as it is today. Unfortunately, several recent decisions by judges outside California suggest the lessons of that era have been forgotten. Chief among them is the reminder of how an independent press can and must serve as a check on government power.
In 1973, the Washington Post, relying on information obtained from a confidential source, exposed criminal conduct by people at government's highest levels, resulting in the resignation of the president. It is less widely known that Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were subpoenaed that year by individuals demanding they identify "Deep Throat" and produce all the information they had gathered about the break-in at the Watergate Hotel.
Woodward and Bernstein refused, citing the need to protect their confidential source. A federal district judge agreed.
In the three decades since Watergate, countless investigative reporters have confidentially received information that led to stories on government corruption, corporate misconduct and other wrongdoing that the public needed to and was entitled to know. It is no coincidence that during this period, virtually every state and most federal courts recognized some form of protection for reporters' confidential-source information; some states, like California, even made the protections part of their constitutions.
This confluence makes sense. People who know about illegal or improper actions, particularly by the rich and powerful, often have good reasons not to come forward. If these individuals cannot be assured by reporters that their identities will remain confidential, they will not speak out — and vital information will not be publicly revealed.
The public interest served by protecting these kinds of communications often seems lost in the recent spate of prosecutions and civil suits over government "leaks." The fallacy frequently espoused by prosecutors (and self-interested plaintiffs' lawyers) is that society's most compelling interest is to prosecute people who break the law. Under this theory, journalists should be forced to reveal the identity of confidential sources any time a source violates the law by revealing information to a reporter.
In 1973, the Washington Post, relying on information obtained from a confidential source, exposed criminal conduct by people at government's highest levels, resulting in the resignation of the president. It is less widely known that Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were subpoenaed that year by individuals demanding they identify "Deep Throat" and produce all the information they had gathered about the break-in at the Watergate Hotel.
Woodward and Bernstein refused, citing the need to protect their confidential source. A federal district judge agreed.
In the three decades since Watergate, countless investigative reporters have confidentially received information that led to stories on government corruption, corporate misconduct and other wrongdoing that the public needed to and was entitled to know. It is no coincidence that during this period, virtually every state and most federal courts recognized some form of protection for reporters' confidential-source information; some states, like California, even made the protections part of their constitutions.
This confluence makes sense. People who know about illegal or improper actions, particularly by the rich and powerful, often have good reasons not to come forward. If these individuals cannot be assured by reporters that their identities will remain confidential, they will not speak out — and vital information will not be publicly revealed.
The public interest served by protecting these kinds of communications often seems lost in the recent spate of prosecutions and civil suits over government "leaks." The fallacy frequently espoused by prosecutors (and self-interested plaintiffs' lawyers) is that society's most compelling interest is to prosecute people who break the law. Under this theory, journalists should be forced to reveal the identity of confidential sources any time a source violates the law by revealing information to a reporter.