Nostalgia — You’re Soaking In It

Posted on June 1, 2005

Jesus Christ. The Washington Post has gone completely apeshit today with this “Deep Throat Revealed” coverage.

Something like ten stories (!) in today’s paper are Deep Throat stuff. On the front page, it practically shoves every other story off completely:

(Click image to enlarge; image from washingtonpost.com)

And the Web site! My God!

(Click image to enlarge)

Check out the headline that’s peeking out down there way below the fold: “Dutch Reject EU Constitution“. Yeah, no reason why that might be more newsworthy than a good long wallow in nostalgia.

They’ve even put up a “Deep Throat Revealed” blog, for Pete’s sake!

I know that Watergate is the story that made The Post. But come on, folks, this is unseemly. It’s been thirty years and you haven’t broken anything like it since. In fact, when war was brewing in Iraq, your reportage was so shoddy — so remiss in its failure to challenge the story that was spoon-fed to you by the Administration — that you even had to apologize to your readers:

In retrospect, said Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr., “we were so focused on trying to figure out what the administration was doing that we were not giving the same play to people who said it wouldn’t be a good idea to go to war and were questioning the administration’s rationale. Not enough of those stories were put on the front page. That was a mistake on my part.”
Across the country, “the voices raising questions about the war were lonely ones,” Downie said. “We didn’t pay enough attention to the minority.”
When national security reporter Dana Priest was addressing a group of intelligence officers recently, she said, she was peppered with questions: “Why didn’t The Post do a more aggressive job? Why didn’t The Post ask more questions? Why didn’t The Post dig harder?”

Good questions. Maybe instead of congratulating themselves for having the guts to ask the tough questions three decades ago, The Post would be better served by proving that the paper that broke Watergate can still be as relevant today as it was back then.