It took a few days, but Jay Rosen at Press Think finally got around to riffing on Deep Throat.

Here’s my reply, for what it’s worth:

Thanks Jay. Mammoth subject.

But you seem to have totally omitted your own heroic cause in the Deep Throat context: Your battle against anonymous sources.

I would like to see a fat graph on how you square your views against anonymous sources and your acceptance of the Watergate model.

Yes, you are critical by calling it a myth - and with your comparing a fundamental belief in the role of the press in a democracy as a religion.

I consider it a secular matter worth fighting for.

Perhaps the press in New York or Washington cling to the religion. And maybe even those who never show up for church in the hinterlands and red states carry the faith somewhere deep down and hidden in a closet too. I would like to see more faithful showing up on Sunday myself. Much of what I read on Sunday in print is filler between the ads : )

But you admitted this: “Watergate, at least retrospectively, could be accepted as a triumph not only of American journalism but of the American system of a free press.”

Exactly. And it was . . . a rare example in our history.

You asked: “. . . was (Felt) Woodward’s source, or was Woodward really his agent?”

The answer is both, but who cares. That’s how truth emerges. It worked.

Then you say, about the church. “But maybe it should be crashed. Maybe what we need is not funding for a new church, but a breakaway church, or two, or three of them. (And what is Fox News Channel, but that?)”

Now this analogy I like. It happens all the time around here, in real churches. There are Hispanics worshiping in Baptist churches, and they tend to split after the group reaches a certain size, I’m told.

Maybe we should consider splitting up a few newsrooms or entire media companies and perhaps achieve a little real competition here and there. I would like to see you write more about this issue and the FCC.

Of course you are also talking about the role of bloggers as a splinter church, yet you decry the faith model.

Why not go ahead and embrace the myth and use it for good?

It works in football. Look at Bear Bryant. Of course he was a drinker and womanizer. But football players will still get back on the field in great pain to honor the man - and he’s dead.

Heck, maybe we should remake Superman again? Wasn’t that a marketing attempt to raise the public’s trust in the press back when? Personally, I’m working out more and thinking of breaking out the costume for Halloween this year. Maybe I’ll find a female reporter to rescue as a damsel in distress . . . couldn’t hurt. At least back then journalism was fun. Is it now?

“The trauma of Watergate, which brought down a president who seemed pathologically compelled to deceive, came toward the end of that extended exercise in governmental folly and deceit, Vietnam. Taken together, these two disasters, both of which shook the nation, provided a case study in how citizens should view their government: with extreme skepticism,” writes Bob Herbert on today’s New York Times op/ed page.

Now, with George W. Bush in charge, the nation is mired in yet another tragic period marked by incompetence, duplicity, bad faith and outright lies coming once again from the very top of the government. Just last month we had the disclosure of a previously secret British government memorandum that offered further confirmation that the American public and the world were spoon-fed bogus information by the Bush administration in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.

President Bush, as we know, wanted to remove Saddam Hussein through military action. With that in mind, the memo damningly explained, “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”

That’s the kind of deceit that was in play as American men and women were suiting up and marching off to combat at the president’s command. Mr. Bush wanted war, and he got it. Many thousands have died as a result. . . .

The lessons of Watergate and Vietnam are that the checks and balances embedded in the national government by the founding fathers (and which the Bush administration is trying mightily to destroy) are absolutely crucial if American-style democracy is to survive, and that a truly free and unfettered press (which the Bush administration is trying mightily to intimidate) is as important now as it’s ever been. . . .

Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, drunk with power and insufficiently restrained, took the nation on hair-raising journeys that were as unnecessary as they were destructive. Now, in the first years of the 21st century, George W. Bush is doing the same.

Congress and an aggressive press ultimately played crucial roles in bringing the truth about Vietnam and Watergate to light. A similar challenge exists today. . . .

You are right of course, Mr. Herbert, and I admire your tough point of view. The problem is, there is no courage or honor left in this Republican controlled Congress. And there is no such thing as an aggressive press left in America.

For example, your executive editor, Bill Keller, sat on a journalism panel out in California a few days ago in a show broadcast on C-SPAN. He basically sat there and took it while a British journalist from the Financial Times described how the European press is much more skeptical of government and courageous in questioning public officials, while the American press corps basically touts the official administration line and shows an incredible reluctance to ask tough questions in the face of ostracism from access to press conferences - which Mr. Keller admitted are no place for news anyway.

Your own newspaper has been soundly criticized for failing to demonstrate the “requisite skepticism” of the WMD claims by the Bush administration in the run-up to war in Iraq.

Here’s a fact for you that I’ve never written about to date. While free-lancing for the New York Times out of New Orleans prior to the war, I tried to convince the national assignment editor that the Times should allow me to do some digging to find the think tank study planning the war in Iraq prior to the attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001.

My efforts were completely blown off by your own national desk. I still have all the e-mails about that, which I’m considering talking about in my own memoir of the news business.

This is not unusual, apparently. History shows that the New York Times showed a similar reluctance to get out in front on the coverage of the Watergate story when Woodward and Bernstein at the Washington Post were given the freedom to dig all the way up to the Nixon White House.

If the Times doesn’t have the staff writers with the requisite cajones to take on the Bush administration, perhaps y’all should consider hiring some free-lancers who have demonstrated the guts to question authority. This might be a better strategy than one of your editors, formerly with the Wall Street Journal, who is so afraid of e-mail and blogs that he is willing to entrust the reporting of a certain trial here to less experienced correspondents who are known as “buddies” with the U.S. attorney in Birmingham and who tout the Justice Department line - in spite of the fact that the Times was the only major news organization denied press credentials to cover the trial.

Where is the courage in that? Seems like there are all kinds of truth and deceit alive in this land.

“And so after all these years, Deep Throat has stepped out from behind the curtain,” writes the New York Times in an editorial today.

This light-toned commentary comes from a newspaper that got the crap beat out of it on the Watergate story. Is it interesting to compare the secret of Deep Throat to Superman’s secret identify, but was it really necessary to use the opportunity to take a pot shot at bloggers?

Although serious students of the scandal that toppled the Nixon administration always considered Mr. Felt a prime candidate, it was more fun - although deeply unrealistic - to imagine that the mysterious figure who kept stepping out from behind the shadows to feed information to the reporter Bob Woodward was a famous face like Alexander Haig or Henry Kissinger. You don’t read a mystery to find out that the answer to the central riddle is the guy who had a walk-on part on Page 143.

Mr. Woodward and his reporting partner, Carl Bernstein, said they would never tell. Now, at a time when reporters’ right to keep sources secret is under so much attack, it’s worth asking whether Deep Throat would have shared his secrets at all if he had not had confidence they would keep their promise.

Mr. Felt was perfectly placed to know all the details of the F.B.I. investigation into the Watergate burglary, as well as White House attempts to derail it. And, since he had hoped to succeed the recently deceased J. Edgar Hoover only to be passed over in favor of a Nixon loyalist from outside the agency, he had motives both high and low for wanting to get the story out. It’s perfectly logical, but given the current temper of the times, it’s likely that by tomorrow at least a few bloggers will have set about trying to prove that it wasn’t really him after all. And don’t be surprised to see some version of Swift Boat Veterans for Deep Throat.

The 91-year-old Mr. Felt and his family clearly felt it was now or never and talked to Vanity Fair magazine. Younger people who weren’t around when Richard Nixon was president may at least relate to the family’s hopes of using their long-held secret to pay for the next generation’s tuition.

Watergate aficionados will mourn the end to a 30-year cottage industry of Deep Throat speculation. It’s a little like discovering that Superman’s secret identity was, well - Clark Kent.

National Public Radio did a story on “Morning Edition” that made the case that Woodward first made contact with Felt as Deep Throat while doing a story on the assassination attempt of Alabama Gov. and presidential candidate George Wallace. The reporter and G-man apparently became “friendly” at that time, making it an important milestone in building the relationship that soon brought out the information on the Watergate.

Here’s the link to NPR’s coverage.

NPR also provides a free link to the original Vanity Fair story online.

Editor and Publisher’s Greg Mitchell tells an interesting small tale about Felt and the FBI’s notorious Cointelpro domestic spying-and-burglary program. This is interesting to me because I was also on the wrongful end of the same program during the late 1980s during the Iran-Contra investigation. Perhaps it’s a good time to FOIA the file?

The Locust Fork is interested in your comments on the Deep Throat revelation. Posting is totally open below, and you can even post anonymously. Fire away.

Not that you can find the transcript on the stupid, fat, slow MSNBC Web site, but I just heard Al Haig say on Scarborough Country that Nixon would never have been impeached if not for Teddy Kennedy’s meeting with Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace in 1972, when the so-called Boll-Weevils, conservative southern Democrats in Congress, turned against Nixon. Beyond bizzare.

I e-mailed CNN’s Paula Zahn to ask G. Gordon Liddy about his knowledge of Nixon’s involvement in the assassination attempt on Wallace depicted in this story, but as usual, no response from the CNN e-mail form.

I suspect the Deep Throat story will continue to develop on Wednesday, so check back for updates.

The Washington Post today confirmed that W. Mark Felt, a former number-two official at the FBI, was “Deep Throat,” the secretive source who provided information that helped unravel the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s and contributed to the resignation of president Richard M. Nixon, according to this story posted online this afternoon.

In-ter-est-ing!!!

Since Vanity Fair, which broke the story, is not free online, some publications, incliuding he New York Times, posted the full story as a pdf file.

More stories from the Washington Post in a special section here. The Post even has a blog about it.