The Solomon Scandals A Washington newspaper novel by David Rothman

Deep Throat is dead—and so are the old rules of investigative journalism

Mark Felt, aka Deep Throat, the whistle­blower in the FBI who blew open much of the Water­gate scan­dal for the Wash­ing­ton Post, is dead.

Leonard Downie, a Post staffer at the time, writes how much inves­tiga­tive report­ing has changed since then—for exam­ple, tech­no­log­i­cally. Imag­ine stay­ing in touch with a source who totes a pre­paid cell phone reg­is­tered in another name. And how about e-mail? Damn­ing mess­ges can often be repli­cated in a flash. Less help­fully, as I noted ear­lier, and as Downie him­self observes, news­room bud­get cuts could jeop­ar­dize inves­ti­ga­tions. The rise of com­pe­ti­tion from the Web, for both read­ers and adver­tis­ers, is one rea­son for the staff reduc­tions at large dailies like the Post.

No mat­ter what the tech of the day, how­ever, bureau­cratic stu­pid­ity can some­times work to the advan­tage of inves­tiga­tive reporters. In the Stu­pid­ity Depart­ment, I have my own favorite story from another era. When I was sniff­ing around at the Gen­eral Ser­vices Admin­is­tra­tion for smelly leases of office space to the feds, the GSA didn’t do the smart thing and give me copies of the high­lights of the leases. Instead it forced me to camp out in an office there. I was in the same place day after day. As a result, my own Deep Throats knew where to find me. Thanks, GSA. I just won­der how much is elec­tronic now: I doubt I’d have been as suc­cess­ful with­out the forced camp-out.

Note: Downie has his own D.C. news­pa­per novel appear­ing in Jan­u­ary 2009, and I wish him luck with it.

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