Everybody Played The Fool
By Erin in News on Jun 1, 2005 9:00PM
Some around the Chicagoist offices today have been a little mopey today, what with the rather anti-climatic revelation that Deep Throat is none other than ...
It isn't that we hadn't heard his name bandied about before, just that we were hoping for someone a little sexier. Alas, the most famous anonymous news source is no longer anonymous, thus ending every Watergate/Journalism/Poltical geek's favorite way to pass the time.
What? Some people count sheep, we've tried to break the Deep Throat code.
We're not alone. Not by a long shot. In fact, back in April 2003 William Gaines, the Knight Chair Professor at the University of Illinois, announced that after four years of investigating, he and his students concluded that Fred Fielding, deputy counsel to former President Richard Nixon, was the elusive Deep Throat.
Today, Gaines offered an apology to Fielding, and curiously mentions the outcome as "a learning experience for all of us." Chicagoist wonders if Gaines, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winning journalist himself, is among the many who today are gnashing their teeth over the many misleading tidbits that Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein offered up in their book, All The President's Men.
Sure seems like it, but we can't say we blame Gaines. After all, Bernstein himself came out at the time against the project, telling the Cleveland Plain Dealer: "The last thing students in a journalism class should be doing is trying to find out who other reporters' sources are."
Nonetheless, Chicagoist feels a little let down itself today. If only it had been that wily minx, Diane Sawyer ...