| Topic Name: |
Could There be a Deep Throat today? |
| Message Name: |
Really getting back to the point |
| Date Posted: |
06/01/2005 |
| In Reply To: |
Okay, so now we have the missing piece of the puzzle--"Deep Throat" was, after all, a disgruntled employee who had been passed over for a job promotion and set out to get even with the Man. Does that discredit him as a news source? In my opinion, no. Drawing form personal experience, some of my best sources have been people with an axe to grind. It takes a perceptive and thoughtful reporter to separate the sour grapes from the jam. But many among the more recent crops of newsroom managers won't even go there. They spend much time with attorneys wringing their hands fretting over what's "safe" to report. A guy like Deep Throat would be instantly discredited and dismissed as waging a personal vendetta. While American journalism was once a fearless enterprise of digging up the goods and following trails of facts no matter they led, today's media world is more defined by the fast, live and slick. Production values control news values, pictures carry more weight than information, and news corporations favor stories that carry little or no risk of litigation. The result is a continuing drift toward irrelevance. Thoughts? |
| Message: |
I don't think a "Deep Throat" would work today, simply because in our climate, "Anonymous Sources" would not and should not, fly anymore. We can thank CBS for that.
The two big things that drive journalism today are Money and Policital Slant. (Hell maybe it's always been that way, we're just noticing more now.)
I don't think News Organizations are scared of litigation any more than they were in Woodward and Bernstein's day, it's just that now that there's different slants to the media, anything printed or aired that is controversial will instantly be scrutinized by another group with the opposite slant...and that group is usually salivating to bring their competition down.
With the prominence of Drudge and his army of copycats now, everyone in the information business is being very careful.
What pro-duce referred to as the "once fearless enterprise" is not gone. I believe it's still there, but it's been replaced with a whole lot of vendetta.
Nixon used to "go after the media" by using the CIA to investigate people to find out if they're communists, and threaten to arrest them. Today, anyone that the media goes after, can go after the media right back by finding out if any of the reporters had drug problems or mistresses...and then go to a rival organization who would be more than happy to publish it. And the game goes on and on.
So would Deep Throat work today? An anonymous source? No. Because most of the information world would automatically say Bullshit! A high level source? Absolutely, as several posters on this website have proven, there are tons of politically leaning reporters and information outlets out there who would love to get the dirt on someone else with an opposing ideology.
FINAL THOUGHT: For all you Bush conspiracy theorists out there: (Again, I'm no Bush lover, just one of the millions of Americans who are tired of partisan media)
I think all of your allegations are pathetic. With all the enemies that Bush has both in the media and in the political realm, if even half of what you spew is true, there'd be a dozen "Deep Throats" for you to choose from. With all the slanted hacks out there who've painted a target on Bush, where the hell is your smoking gun?
The fact that the best that anyone can come up with is a guy who used forged documents--a story that was discredited by internet geeks--says something about the foundation you're standing on.
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