As Bruce Springsteen said, they pass you by. And as this Globe and Mail story notes, what a difference 33 years, a publisher and an editor can make to a newspaper.

An excerpt:

Would The Washington Post break Watergate if it happened today?

The Post worked hard this week to spin a silk purse from a sow's ear, scampering to rebound after Vanity Fair scooped the paper by unmasking the former FBI official W. Mark Felt as Deep Throat. But even as it aggressively reminded readers of its role in originating the Watergate story with pages of nostalgic coverage and a lengthy remembrance by reporter Bob Woodward, the paper's critics argued that the Post is a wholly changed beast since its journalistic heyday in the 1970s and that it wouldn't have the intestinal fortitude to break a Watergate-like scandal today.

Its harshest critic may be the BBC journalist Greg Palast, who responded to the news about Felt this week with an essay on his website entitled, "Deep Throat Cover Blown, Washington Post Still Sucks." He declared that looking back at Watergate only demonstrates that it has been "a third of a century since The Washington Post has broken a major investigative story."

That assessment may be too severe for most of the Post's critics. "I think The Washington Post is a great newspaper, and I do think they get it right," says Harry Jaffe, the press critic at The Washingtonian weekly newspaper, who has observed the Post for more than a quarter-century. "But there's a big difference between getting it right and getting the great story."

I was talking to a journalism educator from the Washington area who said she found the paper really boring.

"It's a company town newspaper," was the exact phrase.

The Post has been credited with some of the best reporting out of Iraq. I think they have one of the world's best newspaper websites.

In terms of columnists, however, there's no one I read as religiously as my NYT faves.

In terms of Watergate today, I would think getting the U.S. into a war under extremely dubious pretences would qualify as a major administration malfunction.

But I suspect (and maybe someone who is more knowledgeable about American politics than I -- which narrows it down to a pool of millions) that with the current polarization in the U.S., a major scandal would only matter to half the populace.

With all the alternate channels of media now, it's tougher to control the agenda on a scandal.

And some historians have argued the efforts of Woodward and Bernstein were not the deciding factor in Watergate's eventual outcome -- the resignation of Richard M. Nixon as president of the United States.